This week we are dedicating all our blog posts to preservation issues in honor of Preservation Week.
Our workshop on Tuesday focused on caring for photographs; our posts will discuss aspects of care we did not have time to cover in person.
Cell phone photos
Today's Preservation Week blog post is all about preserving the digital photos you take with that camera that is always in your hand, pocket, or bag. Yes, I am talking about your cell phone.
According to a Pew Research Center study published in June of 2013, 91% of adults in the United States own a cell phone. Fifty-six percent of American adults own a smart phone, leaving 35% of American adults with a "dumb phone". But these days it's hard to find a cell phone – of any kind – that isn't also a camera phone.
In the ramp-up to Preservation Week I found myself asking, "How on earth does one do digital image preservation when almost 91% of us walk around with a camera in our pockets every single day?" Well, hopefully this blog post provides some answers.
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The first thing to consider when it comes to your cell phone photos is where on your cell phone your gallery or album is stored. Can you find it? Can you get to it? If not, go back to your user guide, or take to Google to see if you can figure it out. You can't preserve what you can’t find.
The second thing to consider is where else those photos might be automatically sent. Some phone software automatically connects your phone's image gallery with a cloud storage service, a social media account, or automatically syncs to your work or home desktop. If this is the case, great! You've got an automatic backup of your images. If not, you might want to consider regularly moving the images you really truly care about to your computer every once in a while so as not to lose them if your phone dies or is stolen. (You might need special equipment to do this, like a specific data cable or a microSD card.) Either way, being aware of where else our pictures may be being sent is a good step towards data security.
The next thing to consider is which of your mobile photos you actually want to keep. In the library and archival world we call this "appraisal and weeding". Not every photo is a winner, and not every photo is important to keep in perpetuity. Maybe you have photos you sent to someone for a laugh, or to clarify that this was the item they really wanted you to pick up. Are these photos you really want to keep forever? You can be as picky or permissive as you want, but automatically keeping everything without thoughtfully considering your pictures' value is not recommended. Once you've decided what you don't want to keep (or, conversely, you've decided what you definitely do want to keep), delete the images you don't want and move the images you do want to a more secure device. And by "more secure", I mean a device that is less likely to be accidentally flushed down a toilet, left in a restaurant, or purloined from your pocket, bag, or locker.
Once you have copies of your cell phone photos on another device or storage service, you should add them to your digital file backup routines. As with all digital files, copies stored on other devices or storage media and in other physical locations keep files safe. You can learn more about personal digital archiving from the Library of Congress's website on personal digital archiving.
--Sari