Kodachrome - The End of an Era

[JE3146]

Originally Posted by M1903A1

Several years ago I attended a program on archiving photographs, and an interesting point brought up was that we may see a lot of future images, in digital form, lost--either because the storage media doesn't hold up, or the means to pull them up and display them may no longer be available. (Which is already happening now with printed media, as programs like Wordstar and WordPerfect disappear into the mists of time and floppy disks atrophy.)

In the world of cloud networks, digital redundancy, online backups and people throwing hard drives in safe deposit boxes.

Honestly I trust storing digital photos more than I do actual photos for the sheer reason I can reprint photos from 1 of 6 redundant sources. It'd take a 2012(the movie) to eliminate some people's photos.

Now for the average person who doesn't backup, then yes. 100% agree. By now though people should know better.

As for legacy formats, there will always be a way to open a format unless it was incredibly niche and long since outdated. I'm a bit puzzled why you would reference Wordstar and WordPerfect in a discussion with photos, especially since Corel released a new version of WordPerfect in 2010.. as for Wordstar... RIP ...

But with programs like Photoshop that can save an image in almost any format possible, one can preserve the legacy of a photo almost indefinitely assuming future programs allow for similar actions.