[logifail]

> Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever cloud they're currently occupying.

OTOH there are many photos I have, taken a decade or two ago, where I wish I'd written down my thoughts and reactions at the time, rather than just taken the picture. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but just having lots of pictures and no contemporaneous words, leaves more of a gap the longer ago it was.

[spc476]

I have a ton of family photos where I'm lucky if someone scribbled the year on the back; a bit more lucky if it's the month and year. The number of photos where names were written is way far less ("I remember Bob, but who is standing next to him?" "I don't know.").

Also, the 70s and early 80s were a bit more orange than I remember.

[mekoka]

Spot on.

A few years ago, when on a hike, if I came about some beautiful scenery, out came the camera. I'd spend most of the time capturing images with the device, rather than take in the landscape through my own senses.

Later, I'd look at those photos and noticed that they failed to convey a great deal of the emotional dimension. Now, I spend more time looking at the landscape, trying to notice all the details, and only take one or two snapshots. The idea of writing down my thoughts and reactions is worthwhile, or for practicality, maybe just audio record them and transcribe later.

[Vivtek]

This is an excellent point. I've been trying to go back and fix that, by correlating pictures with journal entries or blog posts and the like. I wish I'd taken better notes about who all these people were and what they meant to me at the time.

[lisper]

This is the reason I'm still runnins OSX Mavericks. I have a HUGE investment in iPhoto in the form of curated albums and photo captions. All attempts to migrate the iPhoto albums to Photos have failed. So I keep Mavericks machines mainly so I don't lose my iPhoto albums.

[lawkwok]

Apple Photos and I’m sure many other photo clients has a caption feature that lets you type notes for a picture. I haven’t hit into any character limits so you could presumably write a journal entry for each image.