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22
Having finished scanning 40 year old film I can assure you that you need to think longer term than 10 years, in fact at least 40 years.
To know whether there is an answer one must understand the problem. These things can happen:
proprietary software makers stop supporting old formats, very possible after 40 years.
proprietary operating systems stop ...
16
The short answer is: save it as a TIFF.
PSD may once have been considered the more "native"/modern Photoshop format, but no
longer.
Jeff Schewe (the Photoshop Guru's Guru) advised way back in August 2007 on the Luminous Landscape forums that choosing TIFF over PSD was his strong recommendation. I quote:
Look, I'll make it REAL simple...
TIFF = ...
8
Adobe's Digital Negative format is an attempt to create a free open "universal" format explicitly to solve the issue of long term digital archiving. It is used natively by some cameras but not yet by the big two (Nikon/Canon). It is however easy to convert from Nikon/Canon Raw to DNG. It make take a little more time to see if DNG will gain traction in the ...
7
There are a number of important details missing from your question:
What resolution do you require?
Color or black and white?
Does the scanner have to be able to handle a mix of sizes simultaneously, or can you sort them ahead of time so that all the photos in a given stack are the same? (Sheet feeders typically work best when the sheets are about the same ...
6
TIFF is more widely supported. Many programs don't deal with PSD because the format is very complicated. TIFF on the other hand is like a "standard" image format along with JPEG and PNG.
Both TIFF and PSD can preserver layers information. Both of them can handle 16 and 32 bit image. However PSD can contain much more than that. Since it is the native ...
6
I wouldn't hope for much; CR2 files are already compressed, so losslessy compressing the file further would entail decompressing the existing data then using a marginally more efficient algorithm. The corresponding expander would than have to decompress your version of the file and recreate the CR2 using the original compression (and byte alignment, etc.). ...
5
The file format is basically irrelevant
What's much more important is the physical medium. Look at seven inch floppies, three inch, qic, sun scsi, pata, ... All these and more have gone and it will be more and more difficult to get drives, and even if you have drives, the interconnects for them.
You will need to periodically update the physical media, then ...
4
While file formats may become obsolete it is not going to happen in one moment. After new format is introduced software will continue to support old one for some years - so you will have plenty of time to convert all your photos.
Also in worst case you can always install old software (and if software no longer works on your system you can use virtual ...
4
Let me answer your direct question first:
The document imaging folks have been doing this for ages. They typically are used for huge image scanning projects, like the US Census form processing. I've never seen one for photos, but that is really just a difference in pixel density -- everything else would be the same.
These are insanely expensive to buy, and ...
3
Step 1 - Move the files to the new location. It's important to a) Ensure they no longer exist at the original location, and be preserve their organization (ie. folder structure) on the destination.
Step 2 - Start Lightroom. Be sure you are in Library view.
If you've moved entire folders...
Step 3 - At the left, under Folders, navigate to the top-level ...
3
If you're working with original art, always take the most conservative approach. Right now, that means no pressure-sensitive adhesives -- there are none that have been demonstrated to be conservationally safe and reversible over time. The standard is still rag paper and wheat-starch paste. Stamp hinges are probably the best low-moisture method for affixing ...
3
Yes, Brother actually makes a line of acid-free label tape.
Also, if you are planning on doing this on a large scale, you might be interested in a PC-connected label maker.
3
The easy way: Use LR to move them.
Add the NAS folder to the folder list
Open the local folder in the library view
drag the images from the local folder to the NAS folder.
Note that this will lose the undo stack!
The better way: move them in the OS, then tell LR where you moved them to.
Quit LR
Do the move as you did, best to move the entire folder
...
2
To be honest, I think this is a non-issue and the RAW formats will be supported a long time in to the future. Canon/Nikon RAW formats may be proprietary but there are many programs that can read and convert them into other formats, and I think there always will due to the shear number of files as @Ken stated. I think I would be more concerned whether the ...
1
Wait, are you saying your images are already digital but only in the wrong resolution? In that case you should really skip the printing-to-rescan part and directly use e.g. ImageMagick's convert which can easily batch-convert all images to your desired resolution.
Assuming you're using Linux and all images reside in a directory original (including ...
1
TIFF is far more timeless. In 10 (or 40 or 100) years it's just as likely software would be able to read your Nikon RAW file as a DNG file, so to expend the effort in conversion makes little sense to me as any conversion to a more homogenized format risks losing some data from the original file.
Conversion into 16-bit TIFF files is your best option, to ...
1
Lightroom editing is non-destructable, meaning that it does not touch the RAW image itself. Instead it records your edits as actions, and only performs them at time of export, and only does them on the exported image.
Lightroom keeps these 'edits' in the Lightroom database, which presumably is located on your primary computer (this should be backed up as ...
1
To quickly answer your question, you can easily copy the image(s) you want to edit back to its original location or you can click on the question mark on the "ghosted" images and tell Lightroom where to find them and none of your edits will be lost.
I would like to also point out that NAS is not a good backup solution, here is a good post on AVForums about ...
1
This is a good question, unfortunately I do not know a good answer. My guess is that you are safe as long as Nikon exists and as long as they do not force you to buy a new camera or software ;-)
However, since NEF, Nikons RAW file format, is proprietary and Nikon's software does not offer DNG export - as far as I know - you will not have a 1:1 copy of the ...
1
As long as open source software exists which can read it now, you'll be fine.
If your files can be read by open source RAW software such as dcraw (or software that depends on it, like ufraw of RawTherapee), then you can breathe easily. As open source, it can never be withdrawn by its vendor, and its source code is always available to others to build into ...
1
I wouldn't worry about it for several reasons.
The history of computing shows an extremely strong tendency for backwards compatibility and the status quo. x86, a 33 year old computing architecture, has actually gained market share over time in personal computing despite many superior competitors. As long as this is the case, old software and operating ...
1
One photo file format with good longevity prospects is PNG. PNG files can store images with 16-bit-per-channel color depth and lossless compression. Unlike the raw formats, PNG is an open standard, implemented by freely available software libraries and supported even by very basic editors like Windows Paint. Unlike TIFF, PNG is a relatively simple format ...
1
The only constant in life is change, so planning for that change is very important. I have some negatives I inherited from my grandparents that are over 60 years old (circa 1948-1949). These negatives are on a non-standard film (by today's standards), larger than 35mm but not quite medium format--127 format. My scanner can still read the format, although ...
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