Preservation
An image with no physical fallback
Photography is born-digital when the image never existed in physical form: no negative, no plate, no transparency. The file is the original.
The difference from a digitised collection is decisive. A badly scanned negative can be rescanned. A corrupted file cannot be reconstituted: there is nothing behind it. The entire burden of preservation rests on managing the file itself.
Three risks specific to it
Format obsolescence. A negative can be held up to the light. A file requires software that can decode it. Proprietary RAW formats are the weak point: closed formats tied to one manufacturer, with no guarantee of readability in thirty years if that manufacturer is gone.
Silent corruption. A flipped bit makes no noise. The preview renders, the file opens, and a region is dead. Without a checksum recorded on entry, you will never learn about it in time.
Loss of context. A negative in an annotated sleeve carries its context with it. A file whose metadata lives in a separate database loses all meaning the day that database becomes unreadable. It’s the most common loss, and the most final.
What the strategy must cover
- A preservation format alongside the capture format: keep the original RAW, and produce a derivative in an open, documented format (uncompressed DNG, TIFF) for the images that matter.
- Checksums computed on entry and re-checked — the only defence against silent corruption.
- Metadata written into the files or their sidecars, not solely into a catalog.
- An inventory exportable in the clear, readable without the software that produced it.
The question that settles it
For every archiving decision, one useful question: if my cataloging software vanished tomorrow, what would still be understandable on this disk?
If the answer is “files and nothing else”, the collection is backed up but not archived.
In practice
- Keep the original capture file, unrewritten.
- Produce an open-format derivative for high-value images.
- Record a checksum on entry and re-check it in campaigns.
- Write essential metadata into the files or sidecars.
- Once a year, test whether your inventory is readable outside your tool.
Obscura Flow is local-first, keeps originals untouched, computes checksums at import, merges XMP sidecars instead of overwriting them, and exports a flat inventory — so a born-digital collection doesn’t depend on a single software chain.