Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: In perpetuity

In perpetuity

December 19, 2005 • Categories: Digital asset management

I mentioned Cathy Marshall's interesting talk about the persistence of our digital belongings. So much more of our experience now leaves digital traces: will these traces be available to rekindle those experiences in the future?

Help is at hand!

I now notice that Flickr offers "Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images" as part of its pro package.

This is a strong promise! It is strange to see the offer of 'permanence' from a service provider like this. I did not look in the small print, to see whether this is qualified in any way. 'Permanent' lasts a long time ;-)

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1 comments so far

Posted by John Kirriemuir on December 20, 2005

Their general conditions exempt them from just about anything. "Permanence" in this case probably means "So long as we, or Yahoo who have just bought us, don't turn off Flickr".

A truly permanent store for pictures is an issue I'm being faced with at the moment. I'm the maintainer of the community website for our island, and the largest section has a growing number of digital images (of varying quality):
http://www.isleofberneray.com/gallery/
...as well as a number of high quality "wallpapers":
http://www.isleofberneray.com/wallpaper/

Making backups on CD/DVD is increasingly a laborious, repetitive and error-prone task*. An online service that offered:
1. secure storage for an absolutely guaranteed minimum period of, say, ten years
2. automatic conversion to image formats that emerge within that decade
...would be something we would look at seriously.