I am looking at a handful of older still life photographs shot on 4x5 transparency film and scanned several years ago on the Kodak Pro Photo CD system. These were excellent scans for their time at a bargain price, and although not of particularly high resolution they hold up well even by today's standards. I had an unpleasant surprise, however, when I discovered that Photoshop CS3 couldn't open the files. A quick Google search turned up this thread by Andrew Rodney indicating the Kodak has stopped updating the software required to read the files. At the moment you can still use the old Photoshop plugin (found in the 'Goodies' folder on the install DVD), but it requires starting Photoshop in 'rosetta mode' on an Intel Mac. This slows Photoshop down considerably. Also, I imagine it won't be long before Apple stops supporting rosetta mode at which time the scans on my photo CDs will be one more bone in the digital graveyard of unsupported formats. If, like me, you have a bunch of old Photo CDs hanging around, now might be a good time to transfer the files to a format with a longer life expectancy.

Digital files have the potential to be archival—nothing degrades, colors don't fade, they are immune from mildew and can be endlessly copied—but the pace with which formats and media change makes them considerably less stable than film. With little intervention on my part, the 4x5 transparency of the above image will sit in my file cabinet and be viewable long after any media holding this scan. Today, most snapshots and family photos are coming from digital point and shoot cameras and many people will not be willing or able to perform the extra work required to see that these images are properly backed up and stored on media and in formats readable by the technology of the day. These days many people back their images up to CD-R disks put them in a box and forget about them, but a day will come when computers no longer have DVD or CD drives and it will become increasingly difficult to rescue old images. Consider what you would do today if you found an floppy disk with important files on it; it was only a few years ago that the floppy enjoyed a ubiquitous existence. The days of a shoebox full of slides or prints is gone and I suspect we are creating a dark age of family photos and people in a generation or two will have precious few photographs of their childhood and ancestors.

I can't blame a company like Kodak for not supporting technology that is becoming obsolete, but I do wonder why, when they choose to stop supporting a proprietary format or driver, they don't release it into the public domain so people with the ability and desire can update the software or start an open source project? It would increase the life span of older formats and decrease the ill will that people have toward manufactures who leave a trail of orphaned formats and equipment.