I wonder how many pictures will be lost to time from parents who don't back up or share the photos on their phone?
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.
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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).
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
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.
Yeah, when my father died, there were a ton of old family photos, some were his, but others came from his parents or maybe even older than that. They were interesting to look through but no one really wanted them. I took some of them but they mostly just sit in a box now. Highly doubt my daughter will want them when I'm done, though maybe she will.
Memories are nice when looking through them, but it's not like I'm often worrying about things I don't remember without a reminder.
Though I should take more pictures of and with my daughter so she can have some memories. But I rarely even think about pulling out a camera most of the time.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Link: https://www.google.com/intl/en/photos/scan/
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.
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.
Just beware that flash drives are not meant for long term storage. Mechanical HDDs are the best of the regular storage drives.
The best is to truly keep multiples. But flash storage would be more resilient and durable. Mechanical is susceptible to mechanical failure, impact, electrical shortages, etc. Both affected by heat, but if both were in a safe, my money is on flash storage if it were the only option.
flash loses charge from the cells. hard drives are mechanical, but they loose the magnetic charge at a significantly slower rate (or I should say, flash memory loses it faster).
but in both cases the files are better to be scrubbed regularly. zfs can do this with little effort, but creating once and then rechecking a checksum file could also have the same effect. gives the drive a chance to recognize and renew weak charges. I don't think flash drives and sd cards have such built-in functionality, so maybe have 2 partitions and copy the whole contents in a direction, overwriting data, next time the other direction. but always check the checksums before any such copy.
Dude we didn't come here to argue partition formatting lmao. Cool ZFS is good. But limited to a handful of Linux distros on a computer (not phone) and definitely not for the average Joe* to figure out how to use.
dude cool down with your tone and downvotes, this is not reddit. if you reread my comment, the zfs part and the partitioning part are independent possibilities. you don't need partitions for zfs. the 2 partition way is for when you don't have zfs for whatever reason. you will probably be able to make use of that even from your monthly subscription windows 12.
btw, there is zfs for windows too. but yeah the other way is easier, only more laborious.
I don't care what Windows uses, but you think windows would actually support another format? They've used NTFS forever, and ReFS hadn't really taken of despite its intro around server 2012 & windows 8. Sure it has WSL but idk they'll support ZFS that much.
I have been relieved they started supporting the open document format in recent Microsoft 365 desktop software.
No, flash is not more resilient and durable. They’re not made to stay unused for long stretches of time, they suffer the same issues as SSDs.
https://www.howtogeek.com/drives-discs-and-sticks-which-storage-media-has-the-longest-lifespan/
HDDs when plugged in can give you warnings if something is not looking good, giving you time to get the data off it and get a new backup. An SSD or flash drive however will just drop dead without warning.
They certainly can give you warnings, sure. If its something the drive can detect. Too many times, the articulating arm inside will hang up and tick as it moves back and forth, causing the disk to never initialize and therefore is dead. Other times, I've had to buy PCB boards on eBay to try and salvage a drive that has a power issue.
I've got SSDs from 2011 (Kingston hyper X 120GB's) that were configured in RAID0 and ran from 2011 when I was beta testing Windows 8 until I upgraded to bigger drives in 2016. I needed some data off of those a few years ago maybe 2023/24 and hooked them up, they not only ran just fine, but still showed 96% integrity or life span or whatever.
I've had HDDs that were 100% functional and then stored in a plastic bin, in my basement that's heated/cooled and humidity controlled, and hook them up and just don't read at all.
I've been in IT for about 20 years (professionally at least) and seen all sorts of weird things happen to mechanical drives, and would trust data being burned to a DVD-R at 8.5GB per double layer disc over HDDs for long term storage. As a matter of fact, I've got an old 256MB micro SD card from one of my first smart phones that I bet still has photos on it from the 1.3MP camera.
I’ve been in IT professionally for longer, and I’ve seen and experienced far more flash drives and SSDs just drop dead than HDDs without warning.
This isn’t controversial btw. You can google it, ask professional backup companies, etc. Drives that depend on holding a charge, which degrades over time, are not recommended for long term storage because long term storage is a known issue with them. They’re the wrong tool for the job.
No, HDDs will not always alert to impending failure - but SSDs and flash drives never will. Which do you think is preferable, “not always” or “never”.
Also when a mechanical drive fails you can usually fix it and recover your data. With flash/ssds, again, you never can.
As for burning to discs, yeah that’s even safer - but not generally viable due to the tiny amount of data they store, and the fact that basically no one has disc drives anymore.
in an age where people are constantly renting because they cannot afford to have their own place, digital backups could be longer living though.
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
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 uploadedTo 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?
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
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.
Setup something for her that's easy to use. An adapter that once connected simply copies everything from the card to a specific folder.
Make sure the computer that this is on is also backed using something like backblaze or crash plan.
Remember small steps. Start with copying the SD cards.
Then work on computer backup.
Then later add a tool(s) for managing the images, there's some good stuff out there.
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.
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.
All of them. Nothing survives the passage of time. Everything will disappear at some point.
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
Eventually every single one.
Before digital? Millions. After digital? Possibly trillions? All those photos backed up to the “the cloud” make great training data, though!
Immich
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.
there's certainly a different feeling to flipping through a photo album and scrolling on a phone
That's a good thing.
All photos will be last to time. Same as everything.
There's a few dye sublimation printers that are around $100 or so that print really nice 4x6s. It's definitely not the most economical way to print, but some run on just a battery and are great to take with to family events. Cheaper and better quality than polaroids, and they just print over bluetooth/wifi.
So?
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.
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)
Nah.
It's true that things will be lost in this way, but it's also try that parents are producing many gigabytes of photos and video of their children, most of which they're storing in the cloud.
My parent's have several photos of me under the age of 15. I have probably a thousand of my three year old twins.
I also have lots of videos of the mundane... how they eat breakfast, how they say whatever thing, using their favorite spoon.
It would be really weird to see video's of my own interactions with my parents at this age. I think it would be a profound experience. It's hard to see them in that way.
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.
I have zero photos of myself before 7th grade, and that’s okay 😎
but the Oh So Magical Boxes will surely keep them safe! I have no clues how it works but thats its job so it better be doing it, or else I'll buy the next model from the same brand sooner! I don't need to think about it! look it says its even waterproof so I'll bring it with me into the salty sea! it is also in my Cloud™, so what could go wrong! living the Hi Life, comfy life FTW!
All photos will be lost in time eventually.