Digital files vs. Prints

heirloom
An heirloom is something passed down in a family for generations. Your grandma's prized necklace could be an heirloom.
If you know that an heir is a young​er person in a family who will inherit things when relatives die, you have a clue to the meaning of heirloom. An heirloom is a special thing that's handed down, sometimes through a will, but often just from person to person. A portrait of an ancestor could be an heirloom. Many families pass down heirloom jewelry. If you hear someone say, "This belonged to my great-great-grandfather" they're probably talking about an heirloom.

Barnes Family 1965
Passed down from my grandmother who passed away in 2000, to my mother who now has in hanging in the living room. Which will eventually be passed down to me.

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It is true that nowadays technology rules the world. Undoubtedly, human interaction has been influenced through introduction of new technological devices.  People communicate through computers, such as social media and text messages.  Sadly that's where digital's come in to play, no  one knows the meaning of heirloom.

Imagine…
Let’s say you go through the process & expense of hiring a photographer and end up purchasing the disc of images.  Then you figure you’ll “get to it later” and don’t bother printing up those photos for yourself.  That disc then stays in the drawer for a period of time.  Perhaps these images are of your newborn baby girl at 7 days old but now she’s almost 13 years old!.  You want to create something really special for her 13th birthday so you finally take that disc of images out of that drawer and put it in the CD tray of your computer to get them printed. In the CD goes as you wait…and wait.  No images found.  Hmmm…  You hit eject on your tired old computer and pop out that CD tray.  You then make sure the CD is inserted properly, close the cd drawer and again…waiting…waiting.   POOF your images are gone!  They are nonexistent.  This particular CD-R from your daughter’s newborn session doesn’t even show any data on it!  You go through the explore process to see what files are on that disc to find out there are none.  There is no data on this disc!!  Now you freak out.  You compose yourself long enough to remember the photography studio that took these particular images and you call the photographer to order another disc to deliver to your home ASAP.  When you finally find and call the number it is no longer a business number.   Then you go online to find that photographer only to find that they are now out of business nowhere to be found!  You have no way of getting a hold of that photographer.  You once had all these amazing images of your daughter (never backed up, never saved as prints) but now you can’t even access them!  You went to this photographer for the first two years of your daughter’s life, frazzled and more than a bit freaked out you start pulling CD-ROM out for each and every session from those two years and poof!  one after the other the images on each of those CDs has somehow disappeared!  It’s the photographer’s fault!  It’s a defective disk!  The photographer is a scam artist!  A thousand thoughts whirl in your head when the sad reality is:
THAT DISC WAS NEVER MEANT FOR LONG TERM STORAGE
Sounds implausible?  It isn’t.  It’s actually a well known fact that CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs are not meant as a long term storage solution.  Neither are USB keys or hard drives, no electronic storage system is infallible, that’s the truth.​

What will you pass on to your children and their children after that..............an empty CD...or a beautiful portrait?