Eventually everything and everyone we have ever known will be lost to time.

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.

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.

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.

Eventually every single one.

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.

Not sure thats a bad thing. The older I get the more I want to go out a ghost.

I mean, most people don't ever look back at the photos they take. Phones have made photos almost valueless.

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 … 🤷‍♀️

How many pictures are lost because nobody ever looks at any of the 1000000 pictures they've taken?

That's a good thing.

Before digital? Millions. After digital? Possibly trillions? All those photos backed up to the “the cloud” make great training data, though!

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

Probably less than the moments that are lost in time before the invention of the digital camera.

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. Birth 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

Immich

They can ask the NSA for the backup

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 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.

Or equally as bad, relying on cloud services that will not stand the test of time.

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.

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.

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.

So?