TIFF when to use ?

[arith]

I used a couple of TIFF's today, I was doing a bit of printing and came across a couple of three year old images that were processed badly so I either had to find the RAW and start again or as in these cases find the TIFF's which are already sorted for white balance ect.

Then I can print 16 bit and the prints always seem to look sharper than printing 8 bit, but it could be my imagination.

[LocalHero1953]

Thirty years ago I was storing data on punched paper tape, 5 1/4 inch floppies and micro audio cassettes. 15-20 years ago I was using 3 1/2 inch floppies. When I sold my business in 1997 I archived my records on heavy duty digital cassette tapes. I have a device that might be able to read the latter still, but the former are all lost. The future is closer than you think! How should we store stuff not just for our children, but for our own later lives?

[Simon Garrett]

Thirty years ago I was storing data on punched paper tape, 5 1/4 inch floppies and micro audio cassettes. 15-20 years ago I was using 3 1/2 inch floppies. When I sold my business in 1997 I archived my records on heavy duty digital cassette tapes. I have a device that might be able to read the latter still, but the former are all lost. The future is closer than you think! How should we store stuff not just for our children, but for our own later lives?

Long term archival storage is a real problem. I'm associated with a museum where we have printed material going back hundreds of years, and photographs from 150 years. All usable, although some decaying. But we've got electronic archives 30 years old that I can't read, and quotes to transcribe are very expensive. We've some material copied to microfiche, and the microfiche readers are no longer available, and again transcribing to digital is going to be expensive.

The problem is not whether it's techinically possible to read current formats in the future, but whether it's practically possible, given limited resources.

The only two electronic formats likely to be reasonably long-lived (but for how long?) are tiff and jpeg.

Curiously, I asked Nikon whether they would guarantee to provide support for Nikon raw indefinitely, and their advice for archival was to convert to tiff, even though that's Adobe-owned.

[GrahamS]

The future is closer than you think! How should we store stuff not just for our children, but for our own later lives?

In archival quality print form. Which means, at the present time, silver gelatine black & white. Sorry, but that's how it is.

[LocalHero1953]

Which means, at the present time, silver gelatine black & white

A bit tough if your shots are in colour. But I agree with the principle.

[Colin Southern]

I seems to me that - in a digital world - the mediums are constantly changing. Perhaps the "trick" is to move the data from one medium to another whilst the two technologies are in a period of overlap.

[revi]

I seems to me that - in a digital world - the mediums are constantly changing. Perhaps the "trick" is to move the data from one medium to another whilst the two technologies are in a period of overlap.

That seems indeed the best solution. It could be "a bit" time-consuming for a large institutional collection, and could get expensive if there's several formats appearing with a new technology (cf. Betamax).