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.
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
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
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).
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 😏)
We didn’t have a ton of photos on display at our house, weirdly. Good on you for getting the pics to your kids. My mom shares the pictures of our childhood with us, but also with our cousins - for some of them those are the only childhood pics they’ve got. My dad has shared the login to the huge family cloud account with several of us for safety
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.
Fwiw I’ve found digikam to be a very nice tool to help with editing and writing metadata directly to photos.
It’s Foss and available for all OSs. Mainly helps because you can point it to a directory and highlight many photos and tag the same person, etc etc. It’ll keep a list of tags to add as well. Unreal for the price of free but recommend donating of course.
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.
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.
They can ask the NSA for the backup
Or equally as bad, relying on cloud services that will not stand the test of time.
Which cloud service is going to last 1000 years?
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
i was thinking about that too. have just read what they offer for another thread, and something is weird. is it correct that for free accounts they allow a year of inactivity before getting deleted, but if you don’t pay anymore and you use more than the free storage, they will delete your account after 30 days of missed payment?
and whats with the legacy kit feature? it has an option for a 30 day waiting period. but how does that pair with account deletion shortly after missing the payments?
Their team feels pretty friendly, shoot them an email with these questions and let us know
Eventually everything and everyone we have ever known will be lost to time.
Like tears in rain.
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
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.
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.
That’s taking a very literal stance on lost images.
The way people use their cell phone cameras isn’t too far behind…
just think of all the time the camera app is not running
But… are you really sure it’s not running?
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.
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.
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.
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
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. Birth 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
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.
I’m not sure if google has such a feature, even less so I want to recommend people to upload their life to google. but ente photos has a feature to pass your pictures to someone as a “legacy”
https://ente.com/blog/legacy-kit/
I wasn’t sure what happens when a paid account stops being paid, but they say they will notify all legacy recipients after a year that they should do something: https://ente.com/help/photos/faq/storage-and-plans
its still not clear to me what happens if you had 80 GB of media and payments stop. but by this I think they will just deny new uploads and let you recover it for a year and some.
edit: no, its only 30 days with a subscription: https://ente.com/help/photos/faq/storage-and-plans#subscription-expires
Totally agree that the likelihood of an actual backup existing is almost zero, but the barrier to backing them up is also technically trivial.
My sister in law lost a lot of data since she didn’t learn from her first fried SD card.
My mom has SD cards with thousands of photos she takes as part of her job and it drives me nuts that I have to keep telling her to back them up. She always says that she’s never had one fail, which is true, but she’ll unfortunately have to learn this lesson the hard way at some point.
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