It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
Eventually everything and everyone we have ever known will be lost to time.
Like tears in rain.
Very few really care about all of the data you’re producing over your lifetime. How many times have you taken serious efforts to go to the city archives, or read through inherited documents and photos, etc…?? Are you doing anything with them or just sitting on them?? Flicked through it once? Fun.
Now with all of the bulk data we produce what are future gens gonna do with it? Prolly dump it into an AI to summarize and puke out into some trite little video memoir… That’s it, your life reduced to a twenty second collage for social clout.
If you set out to fight entropy, you’re not gonna win.
Pretty much. I’m a data hoarder, to a degree. My homebuilt, Ship of Theseus NAS is about 15 years old, and it contains data going back over 20. I save everything I produce.
I figure that one day, this data of mine will be fed into a system for future use, in the vein of how they construct people in the Star Trek Holodeck. So, I feel it’s up to me to curate that data, and be sure it’s accurate and reflects who I am.
These days it’s obvious that it will eventually be turned into training data for an LLM, but then at least, my data will have some structure and personality to it. Maybe someday a joke will be cracked for someone that came from a pattern I established. Probably not, but one can dream.
Fair enough, I like your way of thinking. I keep a lot of data too, even though I don’t have the same hope as you do… Oh well, not like it can hurt anything.
For a long time, when I’d replace a computer the new one’s hard drive would be so much bigger than the old one I would just copy the old computer’s entire drive into a folder of the new one - I think I did this at least four times before I decided that I almost never looked back into those older folders and found anything valuable.
I looked back 15 years like that once and found: clip art, and banner printing software for a printer I threw out 14 years earlier.
I am a mom and don’t like having a million pictures. My mom gave me some and it feels oppressive to have to hold on to them, honestly. One year my kids helped me by organizing the ones taken in their lifetime into bags by year. I used to take a roll of pictures, get them developed, but then only buy one or two, and was never a prolific photographer yet somehow ended up with hundreds of pictures I am not good at organizing or preserving.
I don’t care if the ones I have are lost. There is plenty enough documentation for people to know how things were.
A drop in the bucket compared to those that were never taken at all in the last 4,000 years of civilization before the picture boxes came to be.
That’s a good thing.
Eventually every single one.
Around a year ago, my dad went on a fishing trip with a friend, and his kayak flipped over due to how turbulent the conditions were, and due to that he lost his phone (which was in a waterproof pouch) in the ocean, which had likely multiple thousand family photos that weren’t backed up at all. The friend he was with decided to go diving in that area to try find it, but never did despite how calm the water had been after that incident.
Now he backs his photos up from his new phone to Google drive, however I’m not sure whether he’s actually checked if it’s syncing or not.
Mike Birbiglia (comedian if you haven’t heard of him) said his now wife’s phone fell out of her pocket and into a river from a bridge the first time they kissed. She’s a poet and she wrote a poem about how she still gets prank calls from fish
Not sure thats a bad thing. The older I get the more I want to go out a ghost.
don’t worry, google and facebook still has
your photostheir properties you and your friends have uploaded
when my wife died, i was 32. the kids were 7, 8, and 10. there are tons of physical pics. but looking back at pics from almost 20 years ago now… sure i am gonna send each kid a usb key but… if i lost them i still have my memories. i wish however i took more video. i miss her voice. i am sure the kids do too.
but if i lost the media, frankly whatever. i already feel the loss daily anyway so … 🤷♀️
Memories fade though. Looking through old photos can help keep them alive. Especially when you’ve lost someone. Believe me I know.
Old photos are something people don’t always realize are important and special until years later.
true. i did install immich and start organizing with the intent to export so there’s that at least. :)
What do you mean by intent to export? Export what and where?
curated photos and to an external storage.
So?
I mean, most people don’t ever look back at the photos they take. Phones have made photos almost valueless.
Yeah all the phone pictures I’ve got backed up I’ve hardly every looked up again, I think the fact that film cameras limited the number of pictures you can take and you had to develop them means those picture books automatically became more valuable
My parents were early adopters of digital photos, but also took a bunch on film and have scanned them. We have something around 20,000 photos. My parents display them on a screen in the living room and it’s awesome. We’re often mesmerized for dozens of minutes just watching and talking about the memories, and it’s a great way to connect with my parents now that we’re all adults, and really see the work they put in to give us a magical childhood. Before the physical photos were digitized we rarely flipped through the books if it wasn’t for a school project or something
Before the physical photos were digitized…
Not sure about you but in my house we had a photo wall where the best memories were and the books just held the “other photos” that also told the story. Most of my books from my parents were smaller and less memorable things like parties, fireworks, camping… but the shot of me scoring a goal, my sisters in a pyramid, that year we all dressed as scooby and gang…that was on the wall and now of course, on our digital frames we all own.
I’ll agree the value of a photo goes down when you can take 200 in a minute, but the memories we missed because we had to save the other 20 shots left… didn’t make those memories priceless.
Also people, back that shit up. When my kids turned 18 I shared a drive with them of all their younger years and have a digital executor for when I die who knows where the pics are (and what to delete 😏)
I guess those digital picture frames can be useful if setup correctly, but I’d have to go and filter the actual good photos from my big pile of random pictures
Yes; that’s what happened before digital photos. They were called “photo albums” and you only put the good pictures in them (while arching or throwing out the rest).
Yep. An archive of grandma’s old phone photos will just be pics of casseroles, receipts, and questionably shaped moles.
I’d fucking love to have that for my grandmother though
Took me a while to realize, that this was not abt dick picks
Before digital? Millions. After digital? Possibly trillions? All those photos backed up to the “the cloud” make great training data, though!
Probably less than the moments that are lost in time before the invention of the digital camera.
Those chemical photos are going to mostly fade into nothing within a few hundred years.
Bit rot happens to digital copies. It’s slower than what happens to physical copies, but over long enough time can also lead to data loss.
Digital loss definitely happens, but with a tiny bit of care, it can be absolutely prevented.
Immich
How many pictures are lost because nobody ever looks at any of the 1000000 pictures they’ve taken?
I think you are right, they are all stored somewhere and might even have back-up. But at some point of time it will be way to many photos to go through in order to pick those that are worth saving. And then all photos might be deleted/lost.
I had over 100k photos, and took a year to go through them. I built a filter for adobe lightroom and set it to filter photos by day of the year…and then, every day i would go through the photos i took on that day (over the last 26 years). I got through all my photos in a year, and never had to look over more than a couple hundred every day.
