When King John signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, copies were made and distributed throughout the land so that all could be made aware of the new legal order. Nearly 800 years later four of those original paper copies are still in existence.
Most families have photo albums of past generations around the place and it’s not uncommon to have photos dating back maybe a hundred years. Photos exist right back to the first Daguerreotype photographs taken in the 1830s.
In a digital world you need to store your images. This is probably the biggest single unsolved issue in digital photography. Unlike film though, a lot of people never actually print any of their images and keep them on computers or storage drives that only they know about.
One day when you are gone and someone is sorting through your things and they hold up that hard drive of your life’s work in photography, will they know what it is or the password to access it or will they be even able to plug it in to any computer that exists at the time.
Everyone knows what a photo album looks like and even if they didn’t, they could work it out in 10 seconds. Other than being lost through fire or a bitter relationship, an album could last forever. Your digital photography legacy however could become landfill.
MORAL 1. Print or make photo books of some of your best work.