For iPhoto: go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals - there are all your unaltered Photos.

Yes, but without all the interesting meta-data, presumably?

Metadata is stored inside the image files themselves. You do lose Album sorting and the facial recognition database is trashed if you fish your files out of the Library, but basically all metadata is stored via EXIF and IPTC.

You're not their target market.

This is true ... but what I want to do -- have my photos for years to come, is pretty much what everyone wants to do (otherwise, why did you take them). But how many people can even move their iphoto/itunes library across when they buy a new apple computer? Let alone all the important meta-data...

ANECDATA: A numerical majority figure it out. Typically a visit to the genius bar gets them on the path to Migration Assistant.

The ones who understand where their photos are or attach significance to them will make the effort. The remainder tend to work exclusively out of Facebook or iOS Camera Roll, which is why iCloud now backs that up.

Hope you're accomodating for bit rot with your SD cards

Yes, by backing up to my local RAID array and then syncing with S3. I just figure it's not worth re-using the SD cards and they're an extra backup.

I actually figured out every photo I take has

  - one copy on the SD card
  - two mirrored copies on my raid
  - 3 copies on S3
  - 3 copies on flickr (I believe)

for a total of 9!

DVDs safer?

Burned DVDs last between 5-10 years, depending on the quality of the media, as well as storage temperature, humidity, handling, etc. After that, data begins to "evaporate".

Flash memory depends more on write/erase cycles. Infrequently used media can theoretically last for decades, and is much more resilient with respect to storage and handling. Then again, in 25 years, how easy will it be to find a USB reader?

This is the smart approach. Keep everything as "format agnostic" as possible.

The only reason someone would not use this approach and opt for one of the services mentioned is marketing. There is no marketing for storing files in a "non-proprietary" format. It's simply a matter of not knowing how to do it.

What's funny is the proprietary approaches ultimately can make things more difficult for novices. At least it's more they have to learn: different rules for each service. How often I have heard novices wanting to know how to convert/export/transfer files to/from these services.

Compare this with learning the jpeg format, IPTC and EXIF. You only need to learn one set of rules. And every service uses jpeg. That's unlikely to change anytime soon.

It's a battle against the "lowest common denominator" in the interest of creating a strategic advantage via incompatibility and proprietary formats. But it seems always some compromise is necessary. All those services work with lowest common denominator formats like jpeg. They don't each have their own proprietary image formats, though they could. Compromise is made.

The entire web is built on "lowest common denominators": e.g., IP, UDP, TCP. To allow things to flourish you have to have some lowest common denominators that everyone can develop on top of. But let the battle continue. We the users all suffer inconvenience as a result.