we take entirely too many photos

[mikebw]

ArtP wrote:
Wow.... (from the link above)

They point out that in 2011 there were 140 billion photographs on Facebook, which is … wait for it … 10,000 times larger than the number of photos in the collections of the Library of Congress.

And that is probably where 99.99% of them belong.

[Lew Zealand]

We have about 40K photos and I've only deleted the really bad ones. The "meh" ones are still there and since all are JPEGs from the camera, they don't take up much space— maybe 150G? They're just organized chronologically by event, one event per folder, which is easy to add to, manage, search, and maintain. All in the Finder as this system predates any dedicated photo organizing software of note.

Want a particular photo? Search the event name or just go to the date and open it's folder: full screen in the Finder with resizable icon previews and you can quickly scan for the best photo for your uses.

If I use a photo for something I give it a color tag in the Finder so I can quickly come back to it later. The colored ones are the keepers and if over time I find the rest of the event photos are too substandard/never used, I'll just delete the unneeded ones.

Works for me.

[guitarist]

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.

[vision63]

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.

Perfectly put.

[miK.]

“I have more pictures of my kids than my father ever looked at me.” - Jim Gaffigan

[Mike Johnson]

I've no shame in taking fifty photos from slightly different angles, not composing them, just slowing panning and tilting the camera, and I'm not even looking at it. Since I almost never take a photo without a person in it, there's only so much composing I could do, anyhow. You don't know when somebody will point or turn just the right way.

Anyhow, it's not the size of the library that gives me the shivers. It's that everybody has a phone or camera, and everybody takes 100 photos. Take a riverboat cruise on the Seine, everybody has their camera out the whole time. A middle school graduation, fifty parents are holding their cameras over the crowd. And for crying out loud, some cameras make noise with every snapshot! I don't think you can even turn off the camera sound on an iPhone, can you? Sitting in an audience at a ballet recital, sometimes all you hear is fake camera clicks and whirs.

[Lew Zealand]

Mike Johnson wrote:
…A middle school graduation, fifty parents are holding their cameras over the crowd. And for crying out loud, some cameras make noise with every snapshot! I don't think you can even turn off the camera sound on an iPhone, can you? Sitting in an audience at a ballet recital, sometimes all you hear is fake camera clicks and whirs.

Fools and their tools. Just mute the iPhone as one does in a meeting, this mutes all sounds. I do this all the time as I like candid photos, not posed ones. Especially as Little Z #1 is in the "make faces for the camera at all costs" phase.

[mrlynn]

I'm as bad as the rest of you at not editing and saving practically everything—no organization, either, except for dating a folder after I've downloaded a bunch of pics. Seriously weeding would take a huge amount of time and (worse) decision-making. There are reasons why I fancy shots that other people would consider completely useless.

What will happen to them? Zapped by the next coronal mass ejection? HDs tossed by kids? Who knows. For the nonce, I enjoy having them, and even inflicting the occasional slideshow on family.

It won't be long before the micro-miniturized cameras on our wrists will take and compose pictures just by pointing our index fingers and saying, "Click." Instead of thousands, we'll have millions. And doubtless, most of us will keep them all.

Me, I'm planning to get a much better camera than I have now. Don't ask me why.

/Mr Lynn

[IronMac]

guitarist wrote:
XXX

Agree with what guitarist wrote, which is why I am now considering printing out quite a few pics.

[davester]

Folks who take and keep zillions of pictures and then can't find anything are not doing photography. They are just caving to a need to hoard. I have a relative like this. She spends so much time taking photos that she doesn't actually enjoy the scenery. Ask her to show you her best shot of a particular trip and she can't possibly do it because that shot is hidden amidst mountains of garbage. It's like those little old ladies that live in houses full of cats or piles of newspaper. Photography should be about capturing the moments to remember or unveiling the artistry in a scene. That takes care and culling.