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.
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.
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.
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
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
Eventually every single one.
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.
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
Before digital? Millions. After digital? Possibly trillions? All those photos backed up to the “the cloud” make great training data, though!
Immich
That’s a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
there’s certainly a different feeling to flipping through a photo album and scrolling on a phone
So?
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.
