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[Imbarkus]

My elderly (!) mom has albums of developed prints, Polaroids, 35mm, 110's even... arranged carefully with little acid-free corner holder stickers... from the old days. Arranged with care in albums, they had value in that you could choose an occasion to sit down and review them, have an event of it. In person. I have good memories of that.

A few years back I got her a digital camera, because that was all you could get, really. She had a few prints done up at Wal-Mart, added them to the boxes of photos she stores for one-day-sorting and album selection. It was hardly more convenient than what she had done before, and somehow easier to fall behind on, since the non-developed digital photo stockpile took no more room the larger it grew, unlike an increasingly insistent pile of undeveloped film canisters.

I bought her a photo printer one day, for her birthday I believe. Print them at home! Finally more convenience! But the paper and ink cost added up to at least the cost of the Wal-Mart development, and the time and care involved just seem to make it even easier not to make physical photos. Then the refills became hard to find, because the Kodak printer was "sunsetted," as, eventually, was Kodak itself.

Another printer, then, Canon this time, Happy Birthday Mom! Have the same set of problems! Soon replaced, this model will be. Impossible to find, the cartridges will be. Outrageously priced, they were in the first place. Foreseen this, I should have. Clouded by the Darkroom, was my vision... by the memories of what photos used to mean to her, and to professionals trying to make a living licensing them, and to everyone, really.

Now she has some photos on the "legacy" Kodak digital camera, some on her favorite toy the iPad, some on an ancient PC, some on some CD's that I burned for her as backup, some printed. I know how she feels. My photo "collection" is in much the same shape.

My kids, they just leave it all up to Instagram, I guess. They're down with OPP--Other People's PC's--being the home for their photos. They don't even use photos or regard them the same way that we did before the digital revolution. Photos are like air now, like words, ephemeral, impermanent, untrustable, manipulable, forgettable. My kids favorite photos are the ones that run through Snapchat and (ostensibly) don't even exist anymore after they are viewed.

I have to admit there is an appealing freedom to that. But a sad transitory nature as well. No doubt there is a paid subscription services angling for their meager dollars in promising some permanence to their photos, should they happen to care. It's a Brave New World for them I guess.

But it's certainly more appealing than my closet full of un-albumed developed prints, and my slapdash storage of digital shots (often in low-res, early-digital camera quality) scattered across CDs and hard drives. I guess my generation got the worst of both possible photo-worlds in the transition.

What do photos mean to you, and to the family that came before you? Feel like anything was lost?

 

[Vengrim]

For the most part, photos mean nothing to me. I've just never felt like I wanted to revisit something enough to take the time to photograph it now. Exception being the occasional pic of kids, yearbook, wedding. Just enough to go, "Oh! That's what Soandso looked like then!"

 

[Lister]

They still mean a lot to us, and their digital nature has only made them more so, not less so.

We snap away on family outings, of course, but also when something cute/random/funny/interesting happens - that might be with our point and shoot or our phones or our tablet - even someone else's! Grandma can snap a pic and shar eit wiht us right there and then. All the photos are automagically in the cloud and we can look at them on demand on our TV, on the tablet, on the PC, on our phones.

The main issue we have is that we tend to keep too many. Do we really need 20 pictures of our son smiling while sitting on the lap of a stone polar bear at the Zoo, from every conceivable angle? I'm better at keeping only the really good pictures - my wife wants to keep everything though, so sometimes I have to stealth delete the crappy ones.

But yeah, the convenience and availability of picture taking and picture viewing hardware (plus the cloud) means we do this MUCH more often. Certainly more often than we did back when I was a little boy. Opening up the album was something we did once or twice a year. Now, I'm looking at a desktop with a picture of my son, the calendar on my desk features pictures of all of us and even some of our friends, my cofffe cup features my wife blowing me a kiss and my son waving at me and just in time: my wife texted me my new favorite pic for the week - my 3 yo son gardening

Pictures are now a much more frequent part of our lives. I don't think we really lost anything, in fact, we gained a lot, IMHO.

One thing that REALLY bothers mefrom back in the day is the lack of video. Video back in the 80's and where I grew up was a much rarer thing, so as far as I know, there is NO video of me when I was a child. I would give anything to see video of me as a child, to see my friends as they were, moving, talking, and not just have my vague recollections of them. My son on the other hand will inherit probably TERABYTES of videos of him - half of which will probably feature him on some carousel or another

 

[sirap]

Back when I shot film I developed and scanned everything. I still have the negatives stored somewhere in this place. Same thing with digital, except now I keep backups in multiple cloud drives.

You don't appreciate photos until you're old, or the person you took them with is no longer around. My mum's favorite photo is a blurry snapshot I took of my grandmother a few months before her death. I took it with this monstrosity:

 

[Joni]

Move everything to a single storage area and print out the best ones.

 

[RangerX]

I know plenty of kids and younger people that still place a lot of value on photos.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

The worse you memory becomes, the more useful they become. My Grandma loves photos, even of stuff we did three months ago.

 

[ElectricBlanketFire]

I upload all of my photos to a hard drive that I keep on the top shelf of a closet in my office every few weeks.

I go through all of my Facebook/Instagram photos (mainly family) from since I've been married/dating my now wife about once a month. I really enjoy the real-time history.

 

[PushTheButtonMax]

My grandmother had a mountain of photo albums containing pictures of multiple generations of our family. She labeled a lot of the pictures, but there are plenty which we have no idea of who they are, and if she was still alive she could tell us exactly who some of these people were. It makes me sad, but then I start to wonder what's the actual value of knowing who these people from 100 years ago are. We still go about our day and live in the now.

All the same, I make sure my photos are always backing up to a cloud service and do a local backup every so often. I have plenty which hold personal meaning to me. Photos still have value, even if they're no longer physical.

 

[always crazy bacon]

Back when I shot film I developed and scanned everything. I still have the negatives stored somewhere in this place. Same thing with digital, except now I keep backups in multiple cloud drives.

You don't appreciate photos until you're old, or the person you took them with is no longer around.

Older, just 10 years is enough. People and places change or dissapear more than you remember.

 

[Izuna]

For the most part, photos mean nothing to me. I've just never felt like I wanted to revisit something enough to take the time to photograph it now. Exception being the occasional pic of kids, yearbook, wedding. Just enough to go, "Oh! That's what Soandso looked like then!"

Edgiest post of 2017, good work

 

[dragonlife]

Back when I shot film I developed and scanned everything. I still have the negatives stored somewhere in this place. Same thing with digital, except now I keep backups in multiple cloud drives.

You don't appreciate photos until you're old, or the person you took them with is no longer around.

Or almost completely dead inside.

I looked through some old photos recently that I never got to scan to completion, and it was... nice seeing how happy I used to be as a kid. I definitely teared up as I looked through them, just seeing myself with my family in different situations, and wondering what happened to me.

I'm wound so tight and never cry, so just being able to feel vulnerable for a bit... it was a good cry.

 

[Imbarkus]

They still mean a lot to us, and their digital nature has only made them more so, not less so.

We snap away on family outings, of course, but also when something cute/random/funny/interesting happens - that might be with our point and shoot or our phones or our tablet - even someone else's! Grandma can snap a pic and shar eit wiht us right there and then. All the photos are automagically in the cloud and we can look at them on demand on our TV, on the tablet, on the PC, on our phones.

The main issue we have is that we tend to keep too many. Do we really need 20 pictures of our son smiling while sitting on the lap of a stone polar bear at the Zoo, from every conceivable angle? I'm better at keeping only the really good pictures - my wife wants to keep everything though, so sometimes I have to stealth delete the crappy ones.

But yeah, the convenience and availability of picture taking and picture viewing hardware (plus the cloud) means we do this MUCH more often. Certainly more often than we did back when I was a little boy. Opening up the album was something we did once or twice a year. Now, I'm looking at a desktop with a picture of my son, the calendar on my desk features pictures of all of us and even some of our friends, my cofffe cup features my wife blowing me a kiss and my son waving at me and just in time: my wife texted me my new favorite pic for the week - my 3 yo son gardening

Pictures are now a much more frequent part of our lives. I don't think we really lost anything, in fact, we gained a lot, IMHO.

One thing that REALLY bothers mefrom back in the day is the lack of video. Video back in the 80's and where I grew up was a much rarer thing, so as far as I know, there is NO video of me when I was a child. I would give anything to see video of me as a child, to see my friends as they were, moving, talking, and not just have my vague recollections of them. My son on the other hand will inherit probably TERABYTES of videos of him - half of which will probably feature him on some carousel or another

This post cheered me up after mine... and my noticing I typo'd WTF in the title. So... thanks!

I am actually super-happy I have video of my kids when they were younger, that I've digitized to DVD and other formats. I guess I never really thought about the fact that there's none of me as a child.

I suspect I might have looked super-awkward most of the time, so it's just as well, to me.

 

[CopperPuppy]

Move everything to a single storage area and print out the best ones.

Add a caveat that you should keep a backup of the storage and this is the best advice.

For the most part, photos mean nothing to me. I've just never felt like I wanted to revisit something enough to take the time to photograph it now.

 

[emb]

I love going through old photos. Seems to only happen when someone dies though (and for the past couple years, that has meant our family inherited books and boxes worth of photos). It's so sad to me though, coming across quite a few images of family I don't recognize, to think that in another generation or two no one will recognize any of the people I love from these pictures.

There are a lot of things that I'd like to do - organize and tag my digital photos, get most of the older ones scanned, write names on the backs of most of the older ones, etc etc. But it grows to be a lot of work, and let's be real. I'll never go through with much.

Some things I probably can do at some point though: grab good ones other people snapped from Facebook, and also print out some of the better digital ones I already have. I think there'd be value in curating a smaller collection of especially great ones.

 

[Lister]

Add a caveat that you should keep a backup of the storage and this is the best advice.

Yeah, definitley. All our stuff goes directly to my NAS and it automatically backs any new files up to our amazon cloud AND google.

I learned this the hard way when I lost all our pictures after a hard drive crash. My wife cried, even though we still had hard copies of many of them. I sitll feel bad about it, and she still brings it up whenever I annoy her

Lol!

 

[IdreamofHIME]

For the most part, photos mean nothing to me. I've just never felt like I wanted to revisit something enough to take the time to photograph it now. Exception being the occasional pic of kids, yearbook, wedding. Just enough to go, "Oh! That's what Soandso looked like then!"

How grim.

 

[MoonsaultSlayer]

As someone who just went through my mom's old photos to find pics of my grandfather who recently passed, I think they were more meaningful then. You had a limited amount of film so you chose just the right moments to freeze in time.

Now we have endless "film" and storage and just snap away to be forgotten.

There's even such a striking difference in our "photo-etiquette" between our seven year old and two year old. I didn't have Facebook when my seven year old was born. So we have so many printed photos of him taken with an actual camera. With my two year old, it's all been with the phone and posted on Facebook. Unfortunately, I lost a Harddrive full of his pictures and am partially thankful that my Facebook is a digital photo-album, but also regretful for not printing any out.

 

[echoshifting]

I love printing out the best photos and making albums! It's easy, cheap and...kinda fun to put them together? Everyone should do it

I also keep a slideshow on my Fire TV...sometimes it'll come on and we just sit and watch it play forever. That's fun too.

 

[Squirrel Killer]

Photos always took some effort to make available to review. Back then it was developing and putting them in albums. Now it's storing the files and figuring out how to you want to review them. People still do the whole photo album thing, it just falls under the frightening term "scrapbooking." I used to copy the best ones to a screensaver folder. The past couple of years, I've made a 5-6 minute video of the best photos and videos as a "year in review." Set it as a background. Hell, sometimes, I just browse my photo folders reminiscing.

I think the first step is to get a central storage place for the photos (even the bad ones, what's a few Mb in the land of Tb HDDs,) whether it's just a bunch of folders or an honest to god image library. Once you have that, it's easy to copy the best to a "best of" folder or just use the central store to pick the best and use them however you want, print, slideshow, have printed on a shirt, etc... (just don't bother with a home photo printer, too much hassle, just send the best to Walgreens or some other online photo printer.)

 

[Mr_Appleby]

Since losing a bunch of us renovating our first house, due to a phone-death, I have my phone photos upload automatically to Dropbox*. My desktop PC will then grab them and I manually back that up (not as often as I should though)

For DSLR photos that's still a manual process unfortunately.

*I have the paid 1tb + some extra space gained for various things. Not sure what I'll do when that starts to fill up. Maybe call my friend who got a job there and beg for more space haha.

 

[crisdecuba]

I value photos and I enjoy creating order, so the transition to digital in the late 90s was great for me. I took over caring for our family photos and organized everything by year and then by event or occasion. Although you could take more pictures, you certainly couldn't go as crazy as you can today, so it was manageable and you really just tried to get the best shot possible.

Then a few years back I digitized all our physical photos and home movies and haven't looked back.

 

[Business]

Bravo.

 

[Mammoth Jones]

Just make sure someone you trust has the password to your shit. I have so many photos that are priceless to my life. My wife would be heartbroken if she couldn't access my account to retrieve all those photos if something happened to me.

Seriously.

 

[andythinkpad]

Scan all your old photos and upload them to both flickr and google photo.

I also have an offline backup on my NAS but they are not complete.

The flickr copy is the only master copy that matters because you can do proper keyword management.

 

[Oppo]

Lost some along the way but I've kept most of my digital pics... and I didn't mess with film much back in college, even though I learned to develop and all that. My Lightroom album has digital pics for every year going back to 2001. The new "black and white nostalgia" is just low rez/contrast feature phone pics. My first digital cam was an old Fuji Finepix, and phone cam was a Sony Ericsson t68 I think.

A cool thing you can do is put them on some public-room computer or old iPad (what I did) and let it run in super shuffle mode. It's hilarious seeing what a randomish selection will surface out of tens of thousands of photos. Especially if you scan old ones in. My dad did this and the screensaver never fails to elicit random yelps of recognition or gasps every so often.

 

[Tezzeractor]

I absolutely love that pictures are online now. Like your mother, mine has a few nice photo albums. And although the memories within might make me nostalgic, memories of the album itself fill me with dread. In my childhood I obviously didn't have a long attentionspan or patience, and when the album was brought out, it meant sitting on the couch looking at the same old photos for probably an hour. We reviewed way too often. My irrational feelings for the album have stayed with me as an adult.

I do like photos though, but I like accessing them fast and uploading them fast. It's not a huge time investment and that's important to me.

 

[The Spoony Hou]

Edgiest post of 2017, good work

I guess I might be edgy too, but sometimes looking at pictures makes me sad, especially if they are of people being happy. It's something like "look how happy they were", and I kinda feel like those times aren't coming back.

I don't know. But I'm not big into pictures.

 

[rbanke]

I feel you OP. for me, it's not just photo's either, it's also videos now that it's so easy with cell phones. We have tons of .30-5 minute short videos we have no idea what to do with right along with the (seemingly) millions of photos.

I still don't feel like anyone has figured out a way to deal with all of the media we create these days aside from posting them on services that are typically forgotten soon after they're uploaded, which is more about showing others your stuff, not really revisiting past memories.

For now, my wife and I seem to find ourselves accidentally going through the photos and videos every once in a while and always say 'man we should really organize these somehow' but short of some of the photo's cycling through our Roku's screen saver, we never do. Someone will figure it out eventually.

 

[One Eyed Willy]

As a parent, I triple backup every photo of my kids. On prem, cloud, cloud and hawk eye things regularly. Years ago I lost 2 HDDs (one backup) in 2 weeks and almost lost every photo of my kids. I don't mess around any longer.

It's one of my highest priorities.

 

[spyroflame0487]

This is a fascinating development on multiple fronts. Did it get easier with technology? Is it the product of our world now?

My Great Uncle took tons of photos and videos in his life, and he saw the whole evolution of cameras from black and white all the way to smart phones. He was in the process of digitizing many of them before he died last year, and many of the ones we saw in his funeral video were ones he took that he had scanned and digitized. I'm sure most of the family had no idea many of the photos existed.

This problem is coming up now at home. I haven't printed a physical photo in years, but I have a huge "Archive" of our photos from holidays, get togethers, graduations, birthdays, etc. My mom has tons of unsorted photos and tons in albums just like I'm sure everyone does. I'd love to digitize them all and work on fixing them if I can but it's time consuming (although I made time fixing up some older ones of my aunt we had found for her funeral too so I guess the time can be made)

For my Mom and Dad (and to an extent, my Grandma) they now see a lot of photos on facebook and will save them or view them on there and ask me about them ("X said you posted this photo, can you show me?") Since I've decomissioned the Wii as part of my regular collection of consoles though, I have used it as a "photo viewer" for them. That was a great addition to the console that I wouldn't have thought would get that much use out of.

 

[natsuyasumi]

Very well-written post, OP.

 

[Moose Biscuits]

Edgiest post of 2017, good work

It's not really edgy though? I feel much the same way, I'm not too interested in taking photos of stuff. Any photos I do take end up in my phone, on an SD card, on a hard drive, and don't get looked at again.

 

[emag]

It's not really edgy though? I feel much the same way, I'm not too interested in taking photos of stuff. Any photos I do take end up in my phone, on an SD card, on a hard drive, and don't get looked at again.

Do you have kids?

 

[Moose Biscuits]

Do you have kids?

I don't, no.

 

[captive]

Move everything to a single storage area and print out the best ones.

Right, this. The issues OP have are generally all caused by the OP.

We print photos in our house. I also have my surface pointed to a folder where all the best shots go and it uses that as my screen saver. My phones camera also points photos there. So i do have to curate a little.


I forgot i also do photo books of the kids form the grabd parents. If anythibg this stuff is so mucb easier now. My mother in law loves them so much.