[nogridbag]

I don't mean to derail this topic, but we don't have too many videos of my mother because for half of her life recording a video meant carrying one of those massive VHS recorders on your shoulder. When she passed and I realized how few videos we had, my first thoughts were: "How can I preserve these moments with my daughter, not just for myself but for her when I'm no longer around?" So I started looking into 360 degree video cameras and that sort of thing and that's when I remembered Google Clips. It's not ideal, but it may be one of the better solutions for preserving moments that doesn't require you to miss anything. I seem to take 90% of the photos of our family, which means I'm not in 90% of the photos.

I hope that doesn't sound strange, but you start thinking about these things during these times.

[majormajor]

It's definitely something that deaths and similar events make you think about, but ultimately, I also find myself asking if it would be used at all. And if it was, would it be beneficial?

I have thousands of family slide photos from my grandparents. This is unusual, but they were big photography fans. Nobody looked at them for at least a decade. But about 10 years ago I had access to a nice scanner, so I digitized a few hundred of them, so that we could look at them more easily. Now I have thousands of slide photos nobody has looked at in two decades, hundreds of digitized versions nobody has looked at in one decade, and a handful of ones we printed or such that get looked at more regularly. I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.

And I think there's something to be said for the impermanence of memory for helping people move on with their lives. I thought I was going to die a few years ago - I didn't, which is great, obviously, but if I had, I wouldn't have wanted those who loved me to still be dwelling on me today.

Snapchat is basically the app recognition of this idea that not everything is worth saving, that for 99.99% of stuff the value today far, far outweighs any value in the future. Shame it's such a hard concept to monetize, I guess.

(I say this, but I'm not immune to the temptation, either. If you ask the people in my life, they'd definitely tell you they wish I'd follow my own advice around "remember, you're taking pictures for yourself, not for other people, and don't prioritize your pictures of others over other people themselves." :| )

[setr]

>I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.

My mother has a habit of taking a bunch of photos of an event, and posting all of them to fb, disregarding quality. Blurry shots, photos of people mid-scarfing down food, etc, it all goes up.

These kinds of collections are utterly worthless, and to a degree, kind of disgusting to go through. But the events themselves are perfectly worthy of being photographed, posted, and whatever.

The problem is the lack of curation. Its fine that she took many photos, as long as she only shared the two that actually looked good.

In the same way, I doubt you'd have the problem having many unseen photos if you selected, and shared, the ones that were worth sharing. I doubt all of the thousands should be shared; instead you're forcing the filtering process on every individual you pass the collection to.

And collecting all of your experiences in video would be fine, if you only actually shared the 0.01% of it actually worth sharing. Of course no one wants to do it on your behalf.

[majormajor]

> In the same way, I doubt you'd have the problem having many unseen photos if you selected, and shared, the ones that were worth sharing. I doubt all of the thousands should be shared; instead you're forcing the filtering process on every individual you pass the collection to.

That's kinda the point, isn't it? Hardly anybody actually spends their time curating their possessions for future generations, yet nobody is super sad about this missing inheritance. If we thought we'd value it more, there'd be more of a market for products to manage it - instead, things like Lightroom are a small nice. "On this day..." type reminders from Facebook and the like seem to be enough.

I don't think I have a problem: I have a bunch of pictures I look at, for me. It's just nothing more than that.

[setr]

I would think you also don't want thousands of random photos in your archives: you'd ideally have filtered through it already, and whatever remains is likely worth looking back on

An archive of 10,000 images, i think, should be an impressive work; a grand feat of labour, through years of collection and curation. Even if you don't care about the content, you'd have to care about the effort spent. For personal use, or for sharing.

>Hardly anybody actually spends their time curating their possessions for future generations, yet nobody is super sad about this missing inheritance

I think ideally, you wouldn't have to curate for the future generations, just the future you, to create a valuable collection. But people often don't even curate for themselves, maintaining a mostly worthless collection. (With maybe a few hidden gems)

And I think curated collections, even those that never leave the basement, are assigned an inherent value. The attic used as a dump can burn and no one will care.

And in the same fashion, constantly recorded lifespans will also have little value (except maybe to historians), if it stays as a data dump. The value of that feature is lost if left alone, as is the collection of objects dumped in the attic. But the act of collecting gives you the chance to derive value that you otherwise couldn't (say because you didn't expect that particular moment to be noteworthy before it occurred for example), by curating it. A found, used but unprocessed film roll has no value; a gallery of selected photos can be extremely valuable.

[epicide]

I think it's a great conversation to have and one I've seen come up more and more.

I totally understand the inclination to capture as much as possible and have found myself wishing I had more photographs/videos/etc of certain things.

However, I think most of us are already past the point of useful amounts of capture. I definitely noticed it for myself when I realized I don't really ever go back and look at most of the pictures I take. When I do, it is almost always pictures of people that are gone. Even then, as the parent comment said, having one or two pictures from a time period or maybe one from a particular event is more than enough. Your mind fills in the details and that's awesome!

As far as the other side of things, I have definitely found myself spending more time trying to capture as much as possible (or capturing "just the right one") than actually enjoying the event.

I'm not saying don't take pictures. Far from it. I'm saying I don't think we have to try and preserve people via pictures. Because you can't.