Nobody cares about your photography.
We all seem to forget that nobody cares about our personal photographic images. If you want them to survive the years it is your responsibility. You cannot abdicate this to corporations.
We’ve seen it happen with Flickr and other sites, perhaps when they’ve been sold, and the terms and conditions change, or you lose your pictures, or lose ownership of your pictures, or at best end up sharing them. You cannot rely on these services for storage. Keeping your photos needs to be part of structured plan.
Here is the story that prompted this blog post, it should be worth watching. It’s about inactive users finding their pictures training AI.
https://petapixel.com/2024/12/13/photobucket-sued-for-licensing-billions-of-users-images-to-train-ai/
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What is the idea for storage of digital photos (or any digital file you want preserved)?
Peter Krough of The DAM Book fame taught us the 3,2,1 rule:
3 copies of every file
in 2 different formats
1 in separate location
What this means is a digital file doesn’t exist unless there are 3 versions of it. 2 of these need to be on different kinds of storage media, for example one in the cloud, one on your external hard drive, or one printed. And 1 needs to be in a separate location, e.g. an off site back up.
It’s debatable whether the cloud back up counts as the off site back up, and the debate pivots on the quality of the cloud service. What does their contract say about reliability? What are you paying for the service? There are cloud backup services that are incredibly professional, and there are others that are ‘freebies’.
Even with a strong contract in-place, there will be no replacing lost photographs.
Take this seriously people, this is not like the old days when you find a box of photos in the attic.
In our digital world a picture is a grain of sand on a beach!
