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.
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
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
Eventually everything and everyone we have ever known will be lost to time.
Like tears in rain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
