Do digital photos decay over time?

[Rigo]

G'day all,
Got a lady customer who reckons some of her digital pics seem to loose their quality over the years whether stored in her computer, phone or in iCloud.
The pics open but apparently she can see they no longer look quite as before, a little washed out she says.
From my understanding if the file opens up and all the pic is visible, that means all the bits needed are still in there.
Am I possibly missing something in my understanding? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[frase]

Sorry what? No offense though I think the poor lady needs to see an optometrist. How are digital images going to fade - iClouds sunlight?
Oh my...

Tell the client they need to upgrade the GFX card to a 3080.

 

[glennd]

I can imagine a situation where you move digital pics from phone to cloud or service to service and they get recompressed according to each service's requirements. Lossy recompression (eg jpg) will cause degradation in the image quality.

However if a digital pic is not being moved about but is just sitting in one location to be looked at then any apparent degradation will be in the equipment used to reproduce the image and in the eyes of the beholder.

 

[Alexey]

Otherwise, she's crazy.

Aside of the obvious idea that her eyesight is fading, I'm thinking maybe brightness/contrast/saturation/enhancement settings changed on the monitor for whatever reason.

 

[HCHTech]

I'm thinking maybe brightness/contrast/saturation/enhancement settings changed on the monitor for whatever reason.

And, if it's the SAME monitor, its image quality is likely degraded regardless of what it is displaying. "But it still works fine!" - I can hear them say.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Manage your photo and video storage - Apple Support

Learn about photo storage and saving space with iCloud.

support.apple.com

Storage optimization means smaller more-compressed and generally crappier pictures sent to the device, but the full version is still in iCloud.

This is a portion of the XKCD joke. Also, any form of cloud storage could modify or corrupt your data at any time and you'd never know... the same holds true of local storage but there are fewer actors involved. I don't know if this is a real problem however, I've never observed such a change in the wild.

 

[Rigo]

Thanks folks for the inputs.
I did believe along the lines of the explanations and did say so but photos are not my thing except for recovering and retrieving them as part of the jobs. I only look at photos once or twice and that'll do for me.
Keep them for years? I haven't that experience.
I still horde stuff downloaded in the dial-up days though .
Yeah, that link with the stick guys was perfect for someone like her