[eyewoo]

Currently, the majority of my illustration work is digital. I haven't started looking around, but it seems to me that the digital code for any image could be printed out in some alpha/numeric form that could be read with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software at anytime in the future and re-imaged digitally or by printing, or by whatever astonishing digital visual devices will be available in the future. I'd sure be interested in being pointed in a direction to search for such software, if it already exists. If it does not exist, someone should code a Photoshop plug-in.

Perhaps Postscript already is such a tool... Not sure??? Need direction...
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HonePie.com
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[sometimes]

I think it's rather strange that they haven't come up with something good bye now. They should make something in layers only visible in the images code, like a frozen layer in a jpg or whatever.
sry got no more info...

did you meet up with balistic?

[eyewoo]

[Tzan]

It might be very easy to print out hexadecimal code for an image.
But you might not really want to.


Assuming 1 byte =2 hex characters
1 meg = 1,048,576 bytes x2 = 2,097,152 characters

90 char per line
x60 lines per page = 5400 characters per page

2,097,152 / 5400 = 388 pages per meg

5 meg image = 1940 pages

So I would expect that nobody has done this.
Getting the text thru OCR into a plain text file is probably easy too. Then you just need the a simple program to put that into a proper file. It doesnt seem that hard, but the number of pages seems like nobody would want to.

I save everything onto CF cards daily. Well only just the stuff I changed, using Grand Backup, which I think you are using too.

I rescued some old AtariST images from the ST disks and have them now in .png format on my PC

[Affected]

Personally, I just have an external drive that I use for nothing else than backups. If I was really worried about losing my data, I guess I'd have two of them, one off-site. The likelihood of two backups and your work drive failing in the interval between backups seems pretty low to me. Of course, if you're looking to just dump a load of images onto some medium and never look at it again until years later, I don't know how well a HD will keep if left unused somewhere. Mostly, AFAIK, HDs fail during usage, though.

[balistic]

[eyewoo]

[eyewoo]

[sometimes]

Holy shit I really need to read the posts better before making a statement, sorry I must have been coming off as rambling above, shit. thought you meant archiving as in postmarking, oh well now at least I am in the same page as you guys.
ok nothing to see here guys, move along.

[watmough]

I actually had 2 drives fail recently and lost everything, so it definitely happens.
i'm really starting to think that digital has very, very low survival in the long term......time to break out the paint.

[balistic]

I've somehow never had a hard drive fail on me that I didn't up and kill with my own clumsiness.

If you keep your work on three hard drives, with at least one of them off-site, you're pretty damned secure.

When one of them fails you know about it, since you're accessing them regularly, unlike optical media which exists in a quantum eigenstate of readable/unreadable until you attempt to access it and collapse the waveform
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brian.prince|light.comp.paint

[eyewoo]

Perhaps a good archival storage method for selected digital works would be transference to color negatives and good storage of same...?
_________________
HonePie.com
tumblr blog
digtal art

[sometimes]

Why not use external harddrives? they come pretty cheap nowadays so that way you could have two of them with the same material, after 2 years to be on the safe side u could replace them...
Is it really worth saving everything?
I haven't saved a piece I have made from before back when I used to be frequent in this place, some of them still exist on those imageshack and shit but I don't save anything by myself.

...then again I suck compared to you guys lol

[eyewoo]

[Tzan]

I wonder how long 35mm film lasts?
I know its made out of better stuff these days.

Back in the 80s Polariod had some hardware that could plug into a computer and you could get your digital image onto instant 35mm slide film. Not entirely instant, but not wet.

Looking at their site today I see nothing like that. Plenty of photo printers but not to film.

[sometimes]

eyewoo, lol yea I suck definetely, what planet you prefer?

[eyewoo]

[Affected]

I guess you could go old school and print each channel from your images separately on large-format B/W film. "Just" have to find a projector or similar that's good enough for the job.

Edit:
did a little googling, found this:
https://www.gammatech.com/html/recordingmed.shtml

I'm sure there are other companies that will print to film as well, but I found that first. Seems they charge 20 dollars for a 4x5 film print and 80 for an 8x10.There's a resolution chart at the bottom of the page indicating they'll do up to 16K, which is probably enough, if they can deliver good results. They'll print colour as well, of course, but B/W would age better, I think?

[eyewoo]

Thanks Affected... link looks very interesting...
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HonePie.com
tumblr blog
digtal art

[Tzan]

Oh nice. I could get my chest x-rays scanned to digital for $12.50