Pre-World War I glass negatives

The depth and quality of them is amazing given their age. Super stuff, well spotted Steve.

Andy
 
This is the sort of stuff that will never happen in 100 years time thanks to digital storage, Can you imagine even finding a floppy disk in a drawer now and opening it up to look at the contents? Good luck finding a floppy drive on 90%+ of modern computers - not to mention if a computer from today can even read some of the more obscure file formats properly
 
As it happens, I don't have many of my photos on floppy disks!

IMHO with a modicum of care, photos today have as good a chance of survival as ever. The main issues are things like what happens to your online accounts when you die ("digital will"). Most photos now attract far more contextual information ("metadata") than they ever did in analogue form, and get reproduced in many more places. Sure, if you're not a little bit careful they will get lost. We tend to look at these survivors and say "wow, digital stuff will never last as long as analogue". We forget that 99% of the photos ever taken are lost and gone for ever, in fires, in wars, on rubbish tips, just thrown away as they were uncatalogued and/or nobody cared.

Sorry, I could rant on this all night. Digital preservation was my thing. And this is a FC forum.
 
Just to add: when I worked at Edinburgh Uni, there were thousands of glass astronomy negatives in store at the observatory. They took up a lot of space, and there was insufficient money to digitise them all (expensive to do properly; you need to capture accurate metadata on time, instrument (and its calibration) and coordinates. IIRC there was an ongoing battle about whether they could be thrown out, releasing valuable space, or kept. I don't know what the outcome was in the end.
 
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