Memories should be on paper

Some time ago I had a discussion with a few photographers about the fact that raw-files are proprietary. These photographers always convert their camera raw files to DNG for that reason. “What if your grandchildren find a CD with your raw images in the attic one day?”, they asked me. “Because the files are proprietary, they may not be able to view them, because they may not have software that can read them!”. That really made me laugh. Not because I don’t have children and so I won’t have grandchildren, but because of the naivity of this reasoning. “If my grandchildren find a CD, they will think it’s a frisbee”, I replied. “And even if they know what it is because they’ve seen one in a museum, they won’t have the hardware to read a CD anyway”. At the same time computers will be so powerful, that it will take nanoseconds to ‘reverse engineer’ any unknown raw file. The file format won’t be the problem, the medium will be.

If you really want to be remembered through your images, then maybe you should print them on archival quality paper…