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Producing the Web site of a lifetime

Summer is over and it’s time to deal with all the snaps vegetating in your digital camera or cameraphone. It is a fair bet that despite the weather, more photos were taken this summer than in any previous one, as a result of the explosive growth in digital cameras.

Hundreds of companies are falling over themselves to host your photos for nothing. There are three categories: Web sites offering many gigabytes of free storage, a raft of places dedicated to photos and videos, plus a new generation offering to archive your entire life online — if they are still there in 50 years.

In terms of numbers, photo-hosting is turning into a three-horse race with Yahoo’s Flickr, Google’s Picasa and Photobucket in the lead, each with around 40 million regular visitors, with ImageShack trailing in fourth place, ComScore figures indicate.

I am a Flickr fan and will stay for the moment because of its great community, but I have to admit the improvements Google will soon release for Picasa — a startup it bought a few years ago — are extremely impressive. There is a host of new features, but the scene stealer is image recognition. I uploaded 80 photos from the iPhoto collection on my Mac — Windows has even more features — to Picasa through the Export function. They all contained faces. Picasa scanned the images and presented them in groups of faces with similar patterns including many plucked from the background of a photo, ready for me to add a name or e-mail address. So in years to come, all the snaps of Granny Bertha could be culled from obscurity by a single search made by grandchildren.

But that assumes your host site will still be there in the next century — and even if it is, computers or formats may have changed so much that they will be inaccessible.

This issue, which the British Library’s Digital Lives project is addressing, is vital because numerous Web sites are in the pipeline, offering to become an archive or diary of your entire life. This offers the prospect of our lives being revisited 100 years hence not just by our descendants, but by historians who could have access to a cornucopia of information about the way we live today.

Some sites are UK-based, such as thetimesofmylife.org, soon to be launched in the Cabinet Rooms by that personification of nostalgia, Dame Vera Lynn. This is not your typical Silicon Valley startup. It has been devised by Mark Hickman, who until a month ago worked in a paint shop. It is not available for pre-launch testing but will provide a timeline diary, in which you can put up photos, video, text, etc of your entire life day by day, including interviews with relatives. It sounds like a more practical version of the sophisticated Oxford start-up miomi.com, which attracted a blaze of publicity when venture capitalists swarmed around it, but now just carries the message: “Service is currently unavailable.”

These UK start-ups face competition from the likes of dandelife.com and wiseline.com, which chronicles your life in one long “life graph” and can be embedded in Facebook or wherever.

The proliferation of lifetime diaries makes longevity a big issue. But there are some simple steps you can take to ensure your place in history. First, save all your files with a unique tag, such as john-smithwxyz so that someone could access them in theory 50 years down the line with a single search term. Second, save images in multiple formats, such as jpeg and tiff, in case one becomes obsolete. Third, create backups on the web — via the huge storage that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc offer for nothing — on your hard disk and/or an external storage facility, such as a hard drive, that plugs into your computer’s USB port.

Above all, there is surely an opportunity for a trusted independent archive, maybe an offshoot of the British Library, that would secure all our data and still be there decades from now for our families or historians to delve into. That discussion has barely started.
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