As of this writing the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off again in Las Vegas. Among thousands of new products that usually get introduced at this show there will plenty of new devices that can capture digital images, videos, and other media, all of which promise to trump last year's models by offering yet higher resolution, faster processing, and better ways of sharing. It is almost hard to believe that not so long ago a 
camera could last an entire generation. During my childhood, I can recall my dad only ever having one camera for taking pictures and one for movies. Now, years later, I love when I come across those old images from a distant past. These faded memories give us an insight into how people lived and can provide valuable information about our ancestors that may have never been passed on verbally. Will our great, great, grandchildren be able to look at our digital photos, e-mail messages, and social media dialogues in the same way in some distant future? Just in the last decade so much has changed in how we generate and store information. Yes, we generate a lot more content than our ancestors ever did, but will any of it survive? My parents averaged about one film roll per month (24 or 36 images). On our most recent family vacation we came back with over 1800 images and two hours of video… Unlike my parents' lone photo camera and lone movie camera, I am counting 8 devices in our household that are capable of capturing digital stills, video, and audio files; and that count doesn't include last year's discarded lower pixel models.
So what is the problem? A typical household has multiple devices that can capture digital artifacts about our lives. These files are stored across a variety of computers, hard drives, media cards, and optical disks. How do typical consumers manage their files both for their own enjoyment while also preserving them for the future? I hope I am not a representative of the "typical consumer" when it comes to digital media, as I have spent way too much time, brain cells, and perhaps, money, setting up the system I have at home. And I find my system to be barely adequate. This is what has led me to dig deeper to learn more about our digital media habits.
From my own perspective it does take a bit of time to maintain all the media generated in our household. It is still probably less time than we spent in the old days taking our film into 
get it processed; and then if we were disciplined, putting pictures into albums. Then again, today, I believe the average household deals with perhaps 10 to 20 times the amount of content that we did in the old analog world. I estimate that I spend a few hours each month collecting images from all the different sources (cellphones, video cameras, digital SLRs, etc.) and saving and organizing them to a central location. At home I have a Windows Home Server as my central file storage for all the content generated by everybody in our household. This content can be consumed from a variety of devices in our home. Most of the time we watch the content through a Windows Media Center computer which is connected to a TV in our family room. However, it can also be accessed through the web, streaming on portable devices such as iPads and iPhones, and streamed through an XBox or a Western Digital TV box (although we rarely do that). On a somewhat regular basis I back up all these files to an external hard drive sitting on a computer in my guest-house (the theory being that in case of fire, only one building will burn down--Yikes.). I know this system works today and gives me easy access to every image, video, or song stored on our server.
In many ways, digital media has some great advantages over traditional media. Making copies and sharing is a snap. I can get a new hard drive today for under $100.00 and make a backup copy of every digital photo and video I have in less than an hour. I can then put this in a safety deposit box and it will be there for future generations. Right? Maybe? I already have files from my college days (late 1980s) that I don't believe I could easily access. They are stored on a backup tape for which I no longer have the tape drive, computer, or operating system. Many were generated in now defunct applications (First Publisher or Harvard Graphics, anyone?). Will our ancestors a hundred years from now be able to open a JPG file stored on a hard drive from 2012? Video file formats are even worse as they tend to change with every generation of camera. Print photos and film, however faded, are still guaranteed to be visible a hundred years from now.
Over the past week I conducted a survey about our media habits. As of this writing, I have collected about 30 responses which, if my intro to statistics class serves me right, should be enough to have statistical significance. The responses overall provide confidence that we are taking measures to organize and preserve our digital media.
The response to the first question indicates that the average household has 6 devices that can capture digital media. This does not come as a surprise given how digital cameras continue to become more and more powerful each year and now, even the most basic cellphones include one.
The next question asks about how we are storing our images. Assuming that we may use more than one method, multiple answers are allowed.
Storing images on a computer is clearly the most common method, followed by the web.
For those storing the pictures on a computer, are we storing all of our photos in one central location or spreading them across different computers, user profiles, and disk drives?
It seems that a slight majority store their images in one central location.
Are we using some type of software to automate the file management or do we manage the files by manually copying them?
For those who mentioned that they have the process automated, several solutions are listed, including Picasa, iPhoto/iCloud, and DropBox. Still, the majority say that they manually manage the process of copying files between different devices and computers/cloud storage.
What else do we do with our files? Do we organize them by file folders, tag faces, events, or add descriptions and notes?
Do we backup our files on a regular basis to a secondary location?
A lot of us put our images on the web. Do we use the web as a backup source for all of our media or do we use it to just share selected images?
How much time do we typically spend organizing our digital files?
There are several conclusions to draw from the survey results. Most people still store their files in a central location, they do it mostly manually by copying files, and they do have a backup system in place. This is obviously encouraging if we believe it is important to have a system in place to access files from a central location and also if we believe it is important to preserve our files for the future.
Putting images on the web is something most people only do with a subset of their files and not all of them. I wonder, though, if the current number of images that we share online still exceeds the overall number of images taken in the past, say in our parent's generation? My point here is that if everything else disappears, will the images we upload online survive for future generations; and if so, will this be sufficient to preserve whatever memory we want to preserve? My guess is that the answer to this is yes, even if this image may be a bit of a glorified version of reality. In other words, what we share online usually only represents our favorite moments, and we don't share the majority of other photos which may be a better representation of our daily life.
Lastly, the respondents on average spend about an hour per month organizing their files. I believe my parents spent more time than that getting films processed and prints made, and then organizing them in photo albums. In my case, having my own darkroom in my teenage years certainly made this process even more time consuming. On top of that, our images back then were incredibly hard to share. Just this week I attended an event with one of my children. The picture I took with my iPhone was up on Facebook for my wife to see long before we even came home.
Perhaps the biggest problem we are facing today and why the majority of us are still manually copying files back and forth between many devices is the lack of standards between our many different devices, computers, and operating systems. If I was the only person in my household and I captured all of my photos and videos with one device and stored them all on one computer, life would be pretty simple. With an iPhone, a Mac, iPhoto, and iCloud, it would be a snap to automate the entire process. That, however, is a lot of "ifs" and I suspect the majority of us do not fall into that category. Over the years I have used a lot of different software both on PC and Mac attempting to automate the organization of my digital media including, but not limited to, Adobe Photoshop, Picasa, and iPhoto. iPhoto is a very elegant solution when it comes to tagging and organizing your photos but have you ever attempted to find where iPhoto copies your files? If you are content putting all your files on your personal computer this may be fine, but if your photo and video collection far exceeds that of a typical hard drive, this is not a viable option. I find it almost comical how desperately Apple engineers are attempting to hide the image files from the end user. Here is an example of where a recent photo I took ended up on my MacBook Pro:
Why not use a more user-friendly path like this instead?
Do they really believe the average end-users can't be trusted to manage their own files? The results of this survey indicate to me that the typical consumer is more sophisticated than that.
For reasons such as these, I keep returning to manually copying and pasting files back and forth. I have searched pretty far and wide for the ultimate content management solution and haven't found one yet. Perhaps there is a budding entrepreneur out there who can take on the challenge of creating a cross-platform, cross-device solution that gives us the best of local storage and cloud storage? In our RiteTrack platform we have come pretty far with this. Problem for us, of course, is that RiteTrack is designed for client management in the social service realm and usually includes sensitive information not intended for sharing.
Ultimately, I believe the answer is in the cloud so to speak. As storage costs get cheaper and cheaper each year, I have no doubts that renting terabytes of cloud storage will become as inexpensive as renting a safety deposit box. Using this same analogy, we can deposit our entire collection of photos, videos, and other important files into this cloud safety deposit box. Perhaps there will even be an optional service that can upgrade files for future compatibility while retaining the original file formats. As we get older, our children get access to these files, but rather than going into our "deposit box" they just get a complete copy of our files (or those we decide to share) into their own cloud storage. I believe, like most technical problems, this is a good problem that will solve itself as processing power, bandwidth, and storage continues to get cheaper and more powerful. Meanwhile, the survey tells me that we have this problem under control. If you would like to take this survey yourself and give your own opinion, please click here. I would love to hear your feedback and comments.