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.
Not sure thats a bad thing. The older I get the more I want to go out a ghost.
I’ve thought about getting my photos transferred to archival microfilm before, but backups on a usb hard drive, my own personal server, and a cloud service should do for now XD
And yet, since the total number of pictures taken has become a lot higher in the digital (and especially smartphone) era, we will have way more surviving photographic documentation of everything that’s happened since then.
If people in 1986 took (say) 10 analog photos per month on average and 9 of them survive, that’s a lot less than if people in 2026 took 100 analog photos per month and 30 of them survive.
All photos will be lost in time eventually.
Given that the first 35 years of our lives, my husband and I accumulated photos that fit into about 20 albums and I can find photos from any time or event with ease. In the next 25 years we have maybe 100x as many and I can never locate the ones I’m looking because there are so F-ing many. I hope most of them get permanently lost! Plus, while I can get our kids to look as some of the ones in albums, I can never get them to look through the endless scroll of the ones online, even if I limit it one trip or event when there might only be a few hundred photos.
I have zero photos of myself before 7th grade, and that’s okay 😎
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 … 🤷♀️
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…
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
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.
How many pictures are lost because nobody ever looks at any of the 1000000 pictures they’ve taken?
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
Totally agree that the likelihood of an actual backup existing is almost zero, but the barrier to backing them up is also technically trivial.
