Treasure Those Printed Images

Apple recently announced some of their laptops will no longer have CD drives.  There is debate about their thought process. It could be that they’re attempting to drive more consumers into relying on “Cloud” technology to store and access their images, documents, and data, or it could be that they see the end of the road is nearing for CD/DVD technology. Either way, what is evident is that as technology evolves, the way we store and access our data will be affected.

To demonstrate the point, let’s look at the music industry. It began with albums, 78 speed, then 33, then 45’s. The 70’s brought us 8 track systems, followed by cassettes, then CDs, then mp3 players. With each evolution of the delivery system, the previous vehicle our music was stored on became obsolete.

There have been evolutions in the film industry as well – 16mm, 8mm, Betamax, VHS, DVD, BlueRay, and nowadays many movies are simply downloaded and watched on TV via systems such as Netflix.

Now look at computers. When computers became “personal,” the data was moved around and stored on 8 inch floppy disks. That was followed by 5 ¼ inch floppys, then 3 ½ inch diskettes, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, and thumb drives or flash drives. 

And now it appears the computer industry wants to us to rely completely on some mythical, magical “cloud” in the sky technology and relinquish “hard” control of our data and images to them.

Think about that for a second. If CD/DVD drive technology is rendered obsolete, what will become of your photographs? You know, the ones you actually took the time to backup onto something tangible besides an external hard drive? And what about the ones delivered to you by that hip new photographer whose business model is built upon “shoot and burn” delivery of CDs instead of actual photographs?

Traditional portrait studios specialize in framed Wall Portraits and gift sized prints you can share with friends and family. Conversely, many of the newcomers to the industry forego any steps that might require them to have a working knowledge of professional printing, and simply deliver their finished product on CD – thus, “shoot and burn.”

Are they doing their clients a disservice, particularly in the field of family portrait and wedding photography? Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain… if you value your images, you’ll take that CD to a lab and have prints made now – while you still can! Wet labs (labs that print from film negatives) have, for the most part, dried up, meaning it is getting more and more difficult and certainly more expensive to take a negative to a lab for prints. The same could very well happen with your CDs and DVDs.

With facebook becoming the new “family album,” I fear that, should the day come when some unforeseen catastrophic event crashes facebook, an entire generation of images will be lost – for good. And if all your most valuable treasured memories are stored on a vehicle that can no longer be accessed, how will your great, great grandchildren know where they got their beautiful blue eyes?