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.
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 … 🤷♀️
After my dad died I made a photo board for his memorial, it’s so weird because there was maybe 100 or 150 of photos of his entire LIFE. Both my parents hated getting their pictures taken, and no way were you taking a video of them. It’s sad I don’t have videos of my dad. I’m trying to take more of my mom now but it has to be stealthy
To be fair I don’t think much anyone but the parents care for the photos. The number of old photos and albums I see in antique stores and estate sales is staggering. I’m not saying nobody wants them at all, but generally unless you have something very interesting like Dad working on some important civic project or a snapshot of him in theater as a soldier, or Mom as Wendy the Welder or in a foreign country as Doctors Without Borders, most of the generic family shots of christmases and travel get filtered out into the trash.
Also, most all modern ink and paper is non-archival, so it won’t last.
I’ve had a camera on the side of my house, streaming 30 pictures per second for 12 years, I only look at about 2% of those pictures - though I have a computer that sounds an audible alert when something interesting is happening in them…
That’s over 11 billion photos, so far, “lost” from just one camera out of six we have running 24-7 now.
I reccommend, and am certain many parents already do, to print the good photos and put them in a book.
Back your stuff up is good advice, in case the worst happens, but nothing beats physical books your kids can look through.
I bought one of those photo printers for this exact reason. Every once in a while, I’ll print some favorites and put them up in the house and in a photo book. It’s really nice to see them in physical form and not in my phone!
I’ve also given friends copies of group photos as gifts!
Better yet, back up to your computer, that is backed up to an external hard drive, that is copied to a trustworthy cloud somewhere. Always good to have duplicates should something happen.
I lost about 12 years of pictures after getting rid of OneDrive (getting rid of Microsoft cuz I maxed out the 1TB anyway), and no joke a few weeks later on my personal server, 4 out of 8 hard drives failed. Thinking it was my raid card, I replaced them, couldn’t get it to function. Apparently a storm that we had fried some components and not others, and I swear I had duplicates on some old offline drives, so when I installed those to restore, I did not have everything. Crushed my heart!! I bought a bunch of large flash drives specifically for photos and videos, and started to back up to those for historical purposes.
You should store you precious life moment with a little help.
Use digikam (free/open source) to get one’s files in order. And i you are willing to go NAS route, use freenas + immich (free/open source)
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.
Survivor bias.
You (generally) only know about physical photographs that have been preserved, and know not of those that have perished.
Digital photos have a higher chance of being preserved because the effort required to duplicate them is trivial. They may be inaccessible though.
I’m not sure that is the case. It’s certainly a trivial effort to switch on backups on your phone, but tge problem it that those backups go away at the same time your phone plan lapses. You’re not going to stumble across great aunt Mabel’s photos of family holidays, because her phone plan, and backups were cancelled when she passed away. It’ll be the same with parents too. Unless they’ve taken the time and effort to curate and share them, they’ll be gone with their owner. If you care about preserving those images, you need to have a conversation with people in your family, and arrange storage that will outlast you.
As someone who had to go through my mother’s and grandmother’s boxes of photo albums after they died, I can tell you that what people should be doing now is backing up select photos AND adding a full description in the files metadata. The vast majority of the photos in my mother’s and grandmother’s albums meant nothing to me because the context and history of those photos died with them.
Aside from adding metadata for those you leave behind, you should make it a personal habit to go through you own old photos you have backed up. Those photos true value is not as a legacy but as means to remember as you get older. Life is long (hopefully). The amount of life you forget is staggering when you remember it.
This here. Another thing to do is if you are taking video of family moments, narrate in the background what’s been going on for the past few days or a week. It adds additional context that is invaluable and would most likely be lost to even the person filming.
I mean, most people don’t ever look back at the photos they take. Phones have made photos almost valueless.
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
We had a house fire.
Several pictures saved from the fire are forever stuck to the glass from the frame where they were, forever behind a smoky glass front.
Other photos didn’t survive the fire or the firehouses.
No one backed up their Polaroids or instamatic shots.
All of them. Nothing survives the passage of time. Everything will disappear at some point.
My grandmother started throwing away photos of people she no longer recognized as dementia set in. No one was aware of this until it was way too late.
I don’t have many pictures from my childhood. My grandparents took a couple of videos, but I doubt those VHS tapes survive.
One part of my wife’s family lost basically everything in a tsunami. They managed to find two mostly-recognizable pictures, so even a box meant to be passed down isn’t going to survive disaster.
I have a box of photos to scan, but I’ve never managed to get the scanner settings dialed in to where things look right to me and aren’t gigantic files. I suppose it’s OK, though; my family line dies with me so there’s no one on to whom to pass them anyway.
Apparently some people collect photos like that. They might even have some value to a museum.
They can show how people lived in the past.
If I do get them all digitized, I would be willing to send plenty of them off to museums if there is actual interest. I imagine there’s none here (Japan) for someone growing up in the rural great lakes area of the US, but someone somewhere might be interested.
Typically you’d want gigantic files. Lossless formats preserve detail that would otherwise be lost. I scan as .tiff and convert to .jxl. Smallest possible size while still lossless.
I remember PhotoScan giving good results. It takes 5 photos for each photo (middle and the 4 corners) and mixes everything.
Not sure about the privacy aspect though, it’s Google after all.
Thanks for the link. I don’t think I much like it, but I have considered getting a decent-enough camera and building a jig to take digital photos of all my old pictures. I’m not sure if that would wind up being any better than a scanner. A scanner at least controls for lighting very well.
They can ask the NSA for the backup
They are “cheaper” than s3 or back blaze since they outsourced the cost to taxpayers.
Or equally as bad, relying on cloud services that will not stand the test of time.
I mean in 2 or 3 generations noone is going to care about your personal photos anyway. Realistically probably not even that long. How many times have you sat down to look at photos of your parents or grandparents as anything more than a passing curiosity? People don’t even look at their own pictures. My sister just got married and her wedding package comes with like 1600 photos and a 2 hour video. Aside from when they first get them back I’d be willing to bet they never look back at 99% of those.
I look back at photos weekly, if you’re not looking back at them then stop taking them.
I learnt this after spending an entire day at a museum and taking loads of pictures. Then realised I am never going to look at any of these. So I stopped doing it. Why look at life through my phone when it is in front of me?
Conversely, I went to a place where my partner and I could hang out with, feed, pet, and snuggle heaps of animals we had never seen up close in real life—kangaroos, capybaras, porcupines (I was so scared but they were SOOOO sweet and loving!), baby binturong (we both cried, they climbed allll over us, my favorites easily), various reptiles, and way more. I was definitely in the moment but I did take oodles of photographs and videos. I look at them alllll the time. I am so happy I have photos and videos of that experience, I would regret so much if I didn’t!
How much time do you spend looking through them? Do you go through your entire collection, even the oldest ones regularly? Besides which, I agree that personal photos are valuable to the person, but unless something really fucking crazy happens in your life, nobody else really cares about your photos. Your kids might, your grandkids probably won’t, and your great grandkids probably won’t. And anyone further removed than that definitely wont. The post wasn’t about taking pictures, it’s about wanting to save them for ever
For the most part, iOS does a fantastic job of bringing up old photos I haven’t seen in a long time just on my Home Screen. I can click in, look at a few, think about those times, and then jump to the next thing I was doing. So some weeks it’s looking every day or two while other weeks less.
I agree that most people probably won’t ever look at their grandparents photos, but maybe that’s because they weren’t good photos? Like someone else said, context is important so marking things that happened makes them more valuable.
Which cloud service is going to last 1000 years?
Which paper photo is going to last that long? Keeping personal data for that long requires an unlikely amount of continuous effort.
Being realistic, Ente stands the best chance for realistic photo storage
Great prices and backed up in nuclear bunker and two other locations
Has legacy/death hand over features
Father of two here. I have tried to start sorting through the pictures that were made during the years by my wife, parents and in-laws. We are literally talking thousands of pictures here. Trust me, you do not want all of those.
Let’s project (pun intended) here. I grew up in the time of analog cameras, i.e. somewhere before 2000-ish. Back then you had to buy a camera, preferably a decent one. You had to buy a film roll, which had typically had a capacity of 24 or 36 pictures. If you ran out of film, you had to go out and buy new film. Having done that, the film had to be developed and the negatives had to be projected onto expensive paper, which needed their own chemicals to change actual pictures. When you took a picture, it had to count. A shoe box of printed pictures typically used to represent several years of personal history.
If they can be sorted into folders that at least helps. Our largest would be cat pics.
