Unless your prints are dye-transfer, and they’re not, the dyes in them will fade over time and the color will end up being painful to watch. The reason black and white prints last practically forever is that metallic silver don’t fade.
And there’s no reason your digital images will go away is if you save them as files.
I have photographs....the negative’s of some.....digital prints do not last.....UNLESS you use PHOTOGRAPHIC quality paper(KODAK quality)....your defense of the “digital/electronic “file” is laughable as they can be altered as a negative can’t. Contrast in quality and longevity between the two is a joke.
You'd think that, but there are issues. Let's say that you have a novel that you wrote back in the day using MS-Word 1.0. You've done a really good job on keeping up with your files, and managed to successfully transfer from 5.25" floppies, to 2.5" discs, to CDs, and now to a micro-SD card the same size as your pinky fingernail. Now, it's 2016 and you'd like to re-read and perhaps modify the file. How do you do it? MS-Office won't read it. Fortunately, OpenOffice might, but you'll likely lose some formatting information.
Same thing will eventually go for various file formats. For pictures, JPEG is a lossy format so you've already lost some fidelity if you don't store your data in their raw format. I figure you'll see more and more cameras and other devices go to lossless compression. However, you'll have to be sure that the format is well documented, because if you want to read the file 50 years from now, even if you've faithfully transferred the file over time without losing the data due to file corruption, you're going to need a program to read it. My advise for images is to go with a lossless format, and every few years think about whether or not you need to convert it to something new. With luck you won't lose any data in the conversions, though it's pretty likely you will. For instance, will your conversions know about, or be able to handle EXIF information? One would hope so, but there are no guarantees.
The real shame with a lot of people's data is that they do a lousy job of keeping track of it, and backing it up. I can't tell you how many people that I know that have lost everything when their hard drive crashed. Hopefully they'll have some of that stuff stored in 'the cloud', but there are no guarantees for that either, unless you're paying for it. What happens to that cloud data when someone dies? Can you even get to it?
There are tons of issues surrounding access to data of all kinds that people aren't really thinking about.