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.
Before digital? Millions. After digital? Possibly trillions? All those photos backed up to the “the cloud” make great training data, though!
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
Immich
Not sure thats a bad thing. The older I get the more I want to go out a ghost.
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.
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
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.
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 😎
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.
All photos will be lost in time eventually.
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.
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.
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.
