[coldpie]

So... what do y'all actually do with your hundreds of thousands of photos? I just bulk delete everything older than a month when my phone is low on storage. Do you ever actually go back and look at any of the hundreds of thousands of pictures? When do you do this?

[BLKNSLVR]

When you have kids, and when they turn into teenagers, you'll want to remember them as they were before.

;)

My daughter loves looking back at home videos of the family. So embarrassing, so beautiful, so many little things about their personalities that would otherwise be forgotten.

Just a few hours ago I was checking backups and stumbled into a nest of folders that had some more home videos in it, and of my son just being his quirky little kid self. Gives my life meaning, shows me I did stuff ok.

[coldpie]

If I ever have kids, I'll have to have a stern talking-to with my surgeon about a botched vasectomy ;)

[hbn]

I have photos backed up on Google Photos for the last 10 years. I go back to find old photos all the time. There's different reasons, sometimes I'm just feeling nostalgic for a time in my life and want to see photos for them. Sometimes I want to find a specific photo of someone to send to them.

Here's a practical example of it coming in handy: back in university I moved to another city for an internship and took some framed photos I had on my walls. When I moved back into my parents' house when the internship was over, the nails were still in the walls and I wanted to hang them the same way I had before but couldn't remember which photo went where. So I went into my Google Photos, typed "photo frames," and was able to find pictures in my library with the framed photos in the background, and piece together which photo went where to get everything back to where it had been before.

[skipnup]

All the time actually. I have monthly folders, automatically backed up by my phone to the NAS. Each month my wife and I sift through the photos and delete all duplicates and boring stuff and then we have around 150 photos per month that we sometime just have on as a slideshow.

Yearly, we create printed photo albums that we look at regularly and show to our kids.

But all this only works after lots and lots of hours of manual work filtering the photos.

Still, over the last 15 years or so for two people we have way more than 100k photos stored on the NAS.

[vel0city]

I look at them a good bit. Having a good tool like Google Photos or similar makes it easy to jump back to the photos from that one trip a decade ago, that holiday together with the family no longer with us, the dreams I had for myself in highschool. I find it interesting to see the changes in my life objectively by looking at myself, the places, the people, and things around me at various points in my life. I find it helps me continue to keep perspective of my life in the same way some might keep a journal. It can help me jump back into the shoes of who I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and reflect on who I am today and where I'm going.

If I don't have any real reference points, its hard to measure things. Its hard to improve things you cannot measure. And sometimes it just feels good to help remember the good times with people no longer with us.

[prmoustache]

I backup everything.

The thing is also to delete photos you don't want to keep long term. Most of my photos are only synced when I am on my local wifi, so until then having a good hygiene of deleting badly taken photos right after taking them.

Having said that I have recently started (late december) to do a weekly printing session of my key moments of each weeks. Well there have been weeks in january and february I didn't print anything. I sometimes only have one or two photo per day/event but since I put the date on the notebook next to the photo and keep all other photos it helps me find back the whole event if I want to see them all. I am using smaller photo format than 10x15cm, mostly zink 2"x3" adhesive photos and kodak instant print 3"x3" from instant cameras that have a printer function.

I should blog about that.

[Tempest1981]

I've been enjoying the iOS photos widget. Every day it surfaces new photos from the past, based on different themes. A nice 2 minute diversion each morning.

But you're right, otherwise I would never have time to dig back into old photos.

[rolisz]

Fun party trick: look up old photos of people when you meet them after a long time and show it to them. Everyone is shocked/embarrassed. Extra points if you can pull up childhood photos of them.

[masfuerte]

I liked that the X-Files reboot kept the old credits. Mulder and Scully look like babies. Then the credits end and reality intrudes. Of course, I'd aged at the same rate (maybe faster) but it was still a shock.

[ghaff]

I do cull/edit my photos but I have scanned photos going back to the 1960s that I look at from time to time.