we take entirely too many photos

[Don C]

One thing to remember in the culling process is WHOSE memories are being preserved.

We were cleaning the house of a very dear friend who'd died and we ended up having to discard 9 or 10 Carousels of slides she'd taken over the years. The problem for us was that we did not know the location nor the people in them. They were her history and memories, not ours.

It hurt to do this because we were in a sense discarding her life, but we did not know the people or places.

Kids sorting through (or not) your photos will face the same thing. Do they know, or value, the people and places represented?

[gabester]

Don C wrote:
One thing to remember in the culling process is WHOSE memories are being preserved.

We were cleaning the house of a very dear friend who'd died... discarded... slides... her history and memories, not ours.

Kids sorting through (or not) your photos will face the same thing. Do they know, or value, the people and places represented?

I was originally going to respond to this thread with the idea that if you put all the pictures "in the cloud" - sans truly personal ones and/or ones you can readily identify as utter crap - the "intelligence of the crowd" or at least people's intrinsic voyeurism ought to solve some of this problem for you.

I can't bring myself to go through our photos... but I'll spend hours looking at other peoples! Then again, I suppose I'm mostly talking about well-curated collections on FaceBook or Flickr or in blogs.

But the point you raise is very valid; to some extent a photo in many cases has very personal meaning and context. Me, I always snap several because it's difficult to tell at a glance on a phone-sized screen whether I got the shot. Looking back on older vacations and the like I'm surprised to discover that while I've seen my favorite shots at the time with some frequency due to rotation through a photo library screensaver, the "almost as good" ones seem more meaningful now, the sort of secret behind-the-scenes that didn't make the cut...

g=

[guitarist]

Raises another unhappy question, a 21st century problem: If you were to die suddenly, do your survivors know how to navigate your array of personal passwords, to manage your accounts? Your photos, writings, digital files, credit cards payments, mortgage payments, and banking records?

[ka jowct]

guitarist wrote:
30 or 40 years from now, there will be no shoeboxes to go through, discovering odd faded photos, outtakes. It's not even clear that photos and snapshots being taken now, by average folks, will be successfully preserved by their guardians.

I realize uploading to websites is an avenue that offers some protection, but it also has a kind of impermanence or perishability, as the sites and agreements shift and companies come and go. A website, cloud service, social media site, or hosting company is not the same thing as as shoebox. It likes to tell customers that it is, it's like a safe convenient storage locker, but it's not like a box in your mom's basement, which can be neglected for 20 years and found again. Mom's house doesn't have a TOS agreement, or contract, or password. A box with a lid on it, or old photo albums, aren't 'data storage', they're physical things.

This could be said for a lot of digital consumer content, which is in its most elementary state, just data. Before, a photograph was a photograph. Now it's data. How well data is or isn't preserved depends on a lot of factors, the user's habits, the services used, the storage methods.

I've been doing consumer-level digital photography for about 10 years (or however long, as soon as digital cameras became affordable and abundant) and I've already had photos wiped out by disasters (fire, but that kind of event takes non-digital photos too) and data losses, failed hard drives, etc. And since we can all delete photos we don't like, erase them, a certain kind of accidental preservation of personal images that hobbyists, archivists, artists, and historians prize will also be missing, when people in the future look at the past.

Not saying this is automatically a bad thing. And truth is, I'm not overly sentimental about printed snapshots or photo albums. Digital photography has more virtues than drawbacks.

But rediscovering a hidden trove of vacation photo outtakes (of your high school sweetheart, topless, or something) from 25 years ago, on a thumb drive (will it even load on anything?) will never be the quite as dramatic finding them in a shoebox in a basement.

Agreed.

[pRICE cUBE]

There is no such thing as to much photos.

[freeradical]

guitarist wrote:
Raises another unhappy question, a 21st century problem: If you were to die suddenly, do your survivors know how to navigate your array of personal passwords, to manage your accounts? Your photos, writings, digital files, credit cards payments, mortgage payments, and banking records?

Most people write their passwords down on a sheet of paper and stick it in a drawer of their desk.

[davester]

freeradical wrote:
[quote=guitarist]
Raises another unhappy question, a 21st century problem: If you were to die suddenly, do your survivors know how to navigate your array of personal passwords, to manage your accounts? Your photos, writings, digital files, credit cards payments, mortgage payments, and banking records?

Most people write their passwords down on a sheet of paper and stick it in a drawer of their desk.
Just because you do it doesn't mean that most people do it.