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1 of 5 Credit: Paul Schultz

Photographs are one of the closest links we have to our own memory.

Storing photos used to be relatively easy in the days of analog: piles of negatives and prints housed in shoe boxes or a multitude of photo albums and picture frames would be a mainstay in every household. Photos weren't infallible, though, with issues like fungus and fading an issue.

Digital photography, on the other hand, demands a slightly different mindset. It makes us change how and where we store our visual memories. Arguably, the most important images that photographers are making today are stored on hard disks, memory cards, USB sticks, NAS units and online sharing services like Facebook.

But what would happen if something suddenly rendered all these images obsolete? The age-old question of "What would you save first if your house was burning down?" doesn't really extend to non-physical formats like digital images and video. What does the 21st century family save in this situation?

Though the humble JPEG format has been around since the early 1990s, many other image and file formats have fallen by the wayside. That's not even taking into consideration the demise of physical formats that hold these files, including floppy discs, optical discs and the fallibility of media we use today like the humble CD or DVD.