The archives of Web-friendly JPEGs and stream-of-consciousness blogs won't make history Nikon stopped making film cameras. This hit me right where I live because, in a life prior to my stint at InfoWorld, I was a photographer. I had my own darkroom where I made black-and-white and color prints, as well as slides from the images I captured. None of the film cameras I own ever had to be reviewed online for their s The archives of Web-friendly JPEGs and stream-of-consciousness blogs won’t make historyI’m no less technically skilled a photographer now when I shoot digital, but one in three of my film photographs evoke memories and tell stories. Now I’m lucky if one in 30 digital images does the same thing. Most of the pictures scattered across disks and discs say little more than “I was holding a camera when this happened.” Nothing makes for a good picture like being within five shots of the end of your last roll of film. Nothing makes for a DVD or a Web gallery full of throwaway snapshots like a 4 GB memory card.Think about the reason you used to take a picture. Ostensibly, it was something you wanted to look back on, something you’d always remember, but that you knew you’d want to feel. As I see it, the idea of a photograph is to evoke emotional memories for those who were present, and to stoke the curiosity and imaginations of those who thought they had little interest in times, places, and people removed from their current experience. If that’s too deep a subject to ponder, then consider the technical issues. What brand of CD or DVD-ROM will keep your images intact for 100 years? Who will even have an optical disc reader a century from now? Your CDs, DVDs, and nonvolatile memory cards will get mixed in with the thousands of other media that you’ll accumulate in your lifetime. They’ll get mixed in with Quicken and ripped DVDs of TV shows. If you’re diligent, you’ll set the pictures apart from the rest by jotting “pix” with an indelible marker across the front of the disc. But one scratch or the slightest bend can wipe out a year of your history. The Web-friendly images and daily brain dumps on your MySpace page have no archival value, and Google Image Search is as likely to be a going concern in 2107 as fashion from 1907 is now. As I write this, I realize that it’s as temporary as a pixel.If you were going through your great grandmother’s possessions and came across a cache of 250,000 photographs that required some special machine to view them, how likely is it that you’d bother to sort through them all looking for the 200 or so that were the real keepers?A child rummaging through your old stuff in the attic can hold a negative up to a light and run to you to ask, “What kind of car is this, and who are these people standing next to it?” They can uncover a drugstore photofinishing envelope full of images with notes scribbled on the back and be taken back in time. Star ratings and metadata will be less useful a century from now than those back-of-the-print notes. I don’t doubt that these musings will be written off as nostalgia. But some things don’t make the analog-to-digital leap so well. We end up measuring the quality of the history we’re documenting in megapixels, samples per second, and linkbacks. We’re overwhelming our analog memories (the ones we carry in our skulls) with junk that our brains, left to themselves, would toss in the trash along with our nightly dreams. There’s nothing wrong with digitized everything, per se. We can undoubtedly come up with ways to make it last. But for our sake and the sake of those who might want to know something about us after we’re gone, perhaps we should take pictures as if we’re on our last roll of film, and write like we’re using our last sheet of paper. Anything we commit to digital posterity in that frame of mind is worth archiving. Technology Industry