A new life for photo prints?

One of the topics that frequently come up in photographic forums is ensuring that your photos survive in an accessible form. Computer crash, house fire, account owner's death, cloud-based company going out of business. There are many ways you, your relatives or your friends could lose access to the photos you'd want them to have.

A number of solutions are mentioned every time:

• print, print, print;
• backup, backup, backup;
• store multiple copies in many places;
• give your family the credentials to your cloud account.

Each of the above has its pros and cons so you should probably apply more than one solution at the same time. Of all the options prints are the best and the worst at the same time:

• they can be viewed directly without power or special devices;
• they are analog and thus copies will be degraded.

Here's a thought:

What if prints could double as digital backups?

Just think of it. Every time you order a print, some kind of NFC tag with the full copy of the original image file is embedded in the paper. Every time you give a print to your friend or relative they also get the file they can print again, read into their smartphone, etc.

You essentially get:

• an analog, easy to view hardcopy,
• an easy to retrieve copy of the image file,
• a way for others to order more prints without asking you for the file; these new prints could even be bigger and have more resolution!
• gratuitous distributed backup of the most valuable photos; after all people are most likely to want prints of the photos they care the most about.

These are just the most basic, originally intended uses. Off the top of my head I can think of these use cases:

• Photo-capable home printers often accept memory cards and/or USB connection from camera. If they had NFC photo readers you could just touch the print to the printer and get another one (although probably without a chip).
• Cameras could expose this NFC interface. You get into play mode and the photo that is currently displayed can be read off the camera by any reader. No fooling around with PictBridge or DPOF.
• If you can print a photo with the NFC tag, you should be able to print a photo index with all the photos stored in the tag.

We already have some technologies that could lead to this. Flash memory, writable optical storage, RFID, NFC, probably more. The tech may not be ready yet but so wasn't digital photography twenty years ago.

There may be some technical considerations:

• The NFC technology should be something that also has other uses. The more ubiquitous it is the easier it is to incorporate the functionality in devices and the bigger the chance this gets adopted.
• Data storage and transmission must have enough capacity to handle typical photos. 4 MB and larger JPEG files are not unusual today. There is the option of resizing the files to something more manageable but still acceptable for enlargements.
• The electronics embedded in the photo paper must be durable and provide some redundancy. It wouldn't do to discover that the faded print from your honeymoon trip cannot be re-printed fresh from the one you took out of the frame on the mantlepiece.

It's one of those things Kodak should have been working on rather than heading straight for bankruptcy. Oh well.