[stoppingdown]

Short form of the question: which file format should we use for long-term archival of our photos?

Long form with context.
I've been using Adobe Lightroom since October 2017 and Capture One from that date. I've been able to run Lightroom (the last version which didn't require a subscription) up to the beginning of this year; then I bought a new laptop, upgraded to macOS Big Sur and that old Lightroom can't run any longer. I bought PhotoSupreme that I'm now using for all the DAM operations in place of Lightroom. In case of need I still can run Lightroom in a virtualised Mojave, but I want to get rid of this as soon as possible.

Up to now I've always kept and archived the original RAW files for my photos (NEF for Nikon and ARW for Sony). Now I'm worried about two things:

1. That sometime in future the latest version of the RAW processing software I use won't be able to deal with my older files (e.g. Nikon D100, D70, ...)
2. That when I need to work again on a photo that was processed with an older piece of software I have to do a lot of work. I'm going to explain this with an example: I've started preparing a new photo book to print. Whenever I deal with a photo processed before October 2017 I have to export it with Lightroom - now I can still do that with the Virtual Machine, but as I said above I want to get rid of this approach. Without Lightroom I can post-process the photo from scratch with Capture One trying to visually match the look that I got with Lightroom (I exported low-res JPEGs for all the photos). Very doable,  but time consuming. If I had a non RAW file copy (e.g. TIFF) with all the post-processing applied I could just open it and convert to the desired format for printing.

Add to this the point that I'm fine with Capture One but I can't bet that, say, in ten years I'll be still running it (I can't even be sure Capture One will still exist).

I've been thinking of this kind of issue since a lot of years ago (2005, at the times of the OpenRaw initiative), but I never really worked on it. At the time I thought DNG could be an option, but now I'm not sure about it. I rather think a non-RAW format (JPEG, TIFF, ...) would be better.

So... which format? Capture One offers me: JPEG, JPEG XR, JPEG 2000, TIFF, PNG, PSD. I think that JPEG2000 would be ok, but CaptureOne doesn't support lossless compression (such as TIFF).
And what color profile to embed? sRGB of course is too narrow, but Capture One offers only AdobeRGB as alternative; unless I go with the native camera profile.

[toni-a]

If size is a concern then HEIFF is the obvious choice, but RAW converters I know don't offer conversion tp HEIC

[stoppingdown]

Interesting suggestion about HEIFF, thanks. Well, indeed I thought that I can pick *any* format that is reasonable and if Capture One doesn't export it I can go through exporting a TIFF and then converting with an external tool (Capture One allows to specify a post-processor after each export, and in any case I can easily implement a batch on my own).

[MatjazO]

Short answer would be nobody knows. ;-) But that doens’t help.

I can share my approach at least. I do store photos I do care about in 3 different formats: raw, jpg and dng. Not any additional work needed, though, but for some longer time needed to move/ import files.

I shoot as raw&jpg. Jpg from camera is pure archive, while I do convert raws to dng while importing to Lightroom. In the end, I do export selected photos in jpg again. This last part will probably soon become something like HEIF, if it will indeed become mainstream. Which it didn’t so far.

[stoppingdown]

Yes, nobody knows :-) So it's useful to hear what others are doing.

[stoppingdown]

Follow up. After two years I've actually decided for HEIF. Capture One still doesn't export it, but exporting TIFF and batch-converting to HEIF with ImageMagick works.
Too bad that macOS still doesn't support HEIF with pixel depth > 8 bit (Preview opens them as blue blobs). Now, being archival files there's no need to frequently open them, but a quick visual inspection just to check it has been exporting properly would be not bad. Gimp opens them, but it's slow — you can't quickly browse through a directory.

[mike]

This is a subject I haven't heard or read much about in a long time. DNG was going to save us all if I recall. ? To date, I don't know of any raw format that can't be converted one way or another. Most, if not all, are still covered by the big players. There's not that much code to carry along (probably for my lifetime anyway). I also don't believe you'll ever not be able to convert a raw file. Besides the big players, there's plenty of open source code and plug-ins (rawpy) out there. Which makes it easy to convert all your files to something else, provided you have the disk space to save it all and don't mind writing a handful of lines of code. But it all leads to essentially your second question; how do you do this in a timely manner?

TBH however, at this point I'm not even sure how to go back and really look for or browse all my old raw files. Everything before the last 10 years isn't easily accessible either by finding it or remembering it.

My methodology for this, and take it with a grain of salt, is to keep all the raw files along with edited files I printed or shared. If they're just vacay/fun shots I printed or shared on social media, I delete most those. Nowadays, the saved edited files are full res jpegs being I generally print jpegs. I also can't see jpeg going away anytime in my lifetime.

[toni-a]

This is a subject I haven't heard or read much about in a long time. DNG was going to save us all if I recall. ? To date, I don't know of any raw format that can't be converted one way or another. Most, if not all, are still covered by the big players. There's not that much code to carry along (probably for my lifetime anyway). I also don't believe you'll ever not be able to convert a raw file. Besides the big players, there's plenty of open source code and plug-ins (rawpy) out there. Which makes it easy to convert all your files to something else, provided you have the disk space to save it all and don't mind writing a handful of lines of code. But it all leads to essentially your second question; how do you do this in a timely manner?

TBH however, at this point I'm not even sure how to go back and really look for or browse all my old raw files. Everything before the last 10 years isn't easily accessible either by finding it or remembering it.

My methodology for this, and take it with a grain of salt, is to keep all the raw files along with edited files I printed or shared. If they're just vacay/fun shots I printed or shared on social media, I delete most those. Nowadays, the saved edited files are full res jpegs being I generally print jpegs. I also can't see jpeg going away anytime in my lifetime.

JPG is staying for sure,  but keeping the original RAW files, is still very important, newest version of DXO with AI noise reduction helped me salvage old photos of my daughter as newborn that were too noisy to be considered as keepers, AI noise reduction works only on RAW, were they JPG I wouldn't have been able to do this.

As for DNG, a DNG converter will always be available and I don't see the advantages of DNG versus native RAW files, and since Canon DPP is my preferred RAW converter ( it doesn't work on DNG), I am keeping CRW, CR2 and CR3 files, besides Artificial Intelligence based noise reduction is now  included in DPP however for selected new cameras, if compatibility is extended to all models just like they did with DPP4, I might well be extensively using it on some old files .

[Rover]

For me, JPEG in, JPEG out - it's all I get, after all.

[toni-a]

For me, JPEG in, JPEG out - it's all I get, after all.

Storage is cheap, keeping RAWs isn't an issue, I shoot RAW plus JPG, most of the time for events JPG are widely enough. and I often delete RAW files afterwards.
For important events and when you need to edit the photos RAW is essential, so I always keep the RAW files (only for the keepers though)
with storage prices low, storage space is not an issue