A while back I tried to do this little project I called “35 birthdays”. I wanted to make an album on Facebook that had one photo of me from each of my 35 birthdays. Turns out there are a whole lot of my childhood birthdays without even one photo documenting them. No one thought to pull out the ole Instamatic and snap a shot. Not even one.
There are 140 photos of my child’s first birthday party. 140.
My kid is 3 now, and we have close to 4,000 photos of her. Yup. 4,000 photos in 3 years. All of one little kid. Digital cameras just make it way too easy to snap every second of your child’s life. Every moment is documented now, and the weight of it is crushing us (and our computers). My husband has been working on backing up our hard drive to another drive for a month now. I recently spent an entire weekend uploading photos to a site to print some of the photos from the past 6 months. It then took hours more to put them in albums.
How did we go from parents not even bothering to take one photo at their kid’s birthday in one generation to taking a photo of every frickin’ moment in a kid’s life the next? Those few photos of me as a kid are kind of precious: the wallpaper in the background, the cheesy party food, a glimpse of my mom’s giant hair…memories. Today’s kids are the most documented generation ever…will the thousands of digital memories I have of my daughter even mean anything to her?
What about you? Are you feeling the crush of the sheer amount of digital photos you have? Are we making too many digital memories? Who is even going to look at them?
I’d love to hear what you think in the comments section, below.
We certainly feel overwhelmed with the amount at times! In fact, we still have not finished assembling albums from our pre-digital era either. However, digital makes it so much easier to edit and delete, and with the right software, a digital album can be edited, assembled and printed within an hour. The secret is to seperate the gold from the dross and delete, delete, delete. Our daughter, now 15, enjoys looking through the albums we have completed, just as we do. She even appreciates the older family albums from the '30's and 40's that link her to the past. I trust that her children (should she choose to take that path) will appreciate the family history as much as we do.
When the first of our 4 children was born in 2000, we had good old film cameras (late to the party, I know). We had a 35mm SLR and a point-and-shoot camera. We took a respectable number of pictures and when we'd get the prints back, we'd always sift through them with the understanding that about 1/2 would wind up in the garbage.
When we did get a digital camera, we very quickly learned that it's ok to delete bad photos. Hell, it's ok to delete mediocre photos.
This is good because as we had more children, we watched the number of photos grow exponentially. When reviewing them after a birthday party or something, we delete probably more than half of them. Not delete as in 'leave on an archive DVD just in case' but really trash > empty trash.
Because each digital photo is nearly free in this age of massive digital storage, it's easy to just hang on to everything, but it's also good for the soul to choose one or two of ten nearly identical photos of your kid naked in the wading pool to pick the one that goes in the album for posterity (and possibly to display at their wedding).
I'm probably _less_ likely to sift through the morass of digital pictures than physical prints. My strategy so far: upload from the computer, file them and forget them. It's a chore even to select a few to email to family.
This is so true. For me, there's a window to engage with and sort them, and if I miss that, it's done. I took a trip with my sister this summer, and edited/organized the photos on the plane back. My sis emailed me, like, a week later saying she'd already forgotten much of what she was photographing in these masses and masses of pictures. I would have been in the exact same position.
As usual, The Onion hit this item on the head:
Police Slog Through 40000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire
Ha! Ah, The Onion!
…and of course, the funniest/saddest stories on The Onion are the ones that are eventually duplicated by real-life events.
oh you need to quit storing them on your computer – seriously! Start printing them out and start deleting the blurred or no-good ones. Quit that right now. I am constantly telling friends, relatives, and clients to take lots of photos BUT Print Them Out. They will one day be corrupted or totally lost in a computer crash. Such a waste. Print them out — did I say that yet? Seriously.
Hey Diane, Ed Burtynsky agrees with you!
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2008/09/full-interview-ed…
Thanks for the heads up Nora! I just watched the full interview.
They're not all they seem to be…?
I like taking pictures and have taken a lot when documenting a reno project or something else interesting but I don't have children and my girlfriend doesn't think she is photogenic so we don't take a lot of social-event-type pictures. I think that because we don't often take those types of pictures, our memories may sometimes be a bit less sharp than they would if there were photos to document specific moments but they seem to also be more well rounded or full memories. Photos are wonderful for drawing your mind back to and crystalising that specific moment, but this may at times be at the expense of all the other moments when a picture wasn't taken. So we try to take more and more pictures or better yet, a video, in an attempt to "perfect" our memory. Subsequently looking at the media which records the experience may be great but perhaps something is lost or denied from the original experience because we are so busy trying to record it.
This is a great point! I used to teach the Yearbook course at a high school and I found I was so caught up in helping students record the event that I didn't experience anything "live" because I was always behind a camera.
Last fall, I went to see U2 twice – both tickets were general admission. On the first day I arrived early, waited in line with other capital-F Fans, got a spot the front of the stage once we were realeased from our cattle pen and spent the rest of the night takinng my pictures. For the second show, I arrived up just before the show began and hung out in the big open space behind the crowd squishing together against the stage on the Rogers Centre field.
I danced, absorbed the music, the atmosphere and bonded – in a more relaxed way – with other (small-f?) fans.
Of course I treasure my photos – and video of Bono singing to my camera! – but I the in-the-moment experience can never be replicated. (Especially if you aren't in the moment to begin with!)
Two thoughts:
1) I take photos on two digital cameras, and upload them to Google's Picasa, which automatically shares back with my Android phone. They get looked at fairly often, and I organise into different folders that I share with different people. I think sorting early and making the pictures viewable by others is what has made them valuable.
2) The other thing to note is that while more and more amateur and automated photographs are being made, parliament believes that changing the law in a way that pretends the majority of photographs are professional makes sense. The reality is that professional photography represents a near insignificant number of photographs. Bill C-32, the current proposal to change copyright, includes silly measures to repeal things such as clarity on who owns the photograph when a camera is used by someone other than its owner. It also makes things less clear on commissioned photography. http://BillC32.ca/faq#photographers . It is amusing, but dangerous, how backward-facing our politicians are. Most of a copyright bill that alleges to "modernise" Canadian copyright is backward-facing.
It is very easy to go crazy with the digital pictures since they are "free", so it is important to 'separate the wheat from the chafe'. The crap can be disposed of, and the quality backed-up and saved on separate medi….
Another advantage with digital formats is that one can tag an image with any number of "keywords". This allows for more flexible organization, so it is not necessary to be so rigid in how one classifies things. Plus, the same image may be appropriate in different contexts….
Short answer: No!
Long answer:
My Partner and I decided to organize and compile 10 years worth of memorabilia and photos – digital and hard copies – into 11 double page spreads which will we have printed out and bound. We've been a couple since 2000 and hadn't done anything with our pictures; we hadn't so much as framed a single wedding photo. The goal was to have one double page representing each year of our relationship plus one page dedicated specifically to our wedding day.
Time to complete this project: 3 days.
It was our play on the 3 Day Novel Contest (which does allow for two writers to work together.) "The contest takes place every Labour Day weekend (usually the first weekend in September), as it has since 1977." (from http://www.3daynovel.com ) We kept to the, apart from storytelling method. The rules demanded we complete the project by 23:59:59pm Monday, September 6, 2010.
We finished our ready-to-print, high quality .pdf files with 4 minutes 23 seconds to spare.
Spark-related summary:
-A clear deadline was extremely motivating (our office and memories are more organized than ever)
-Scanning hard copies feels easy but is overwhelming (lifting the lid, placing photos, saving, cropping, naming)
-Photo accumulation increase exponentially as digital cameras and memory became cheaper (we have over 800 of our cats!)
-Facebook has trained me to think I have copies of photos I do not have because I have glanced through "albums" online (family and friends have stopped printing hard copies of their kids and emailing photos from shared events)
-Facebook makes it easy – for the most part – to retrieve missing images (but often at lower quality)
I blogged about that last point, and this Spark question, here: http://andieasawriter.blogspot.com/2010/09/not-wo…
That's totally interesting. How did you narrow it down from an editorial p.o.v? I mean, other than not having 800 cat pictures, how did you decide what to focus on to create a narrative of your lives together?
Memories are what keeping photographs is all about. Can we have too many of them? I think not. I was first introduced to photography as a hobby back in 1977, and I have amassed thousands of photographs over the years.
Like some of the responses shown here, I believe it is a matter of organizing them.
Before digital photography came around, I would shred any photographs that were obviously useless, such as those that were completely blurred, off color, or otherwise ruined. Then, they get categorized by subject and date. (Even then, that yielded many categories.) …and that is just the basic organization.
Then, there are those photographs that stand out more than others. These get selected and framed, while others are placed into albums as snapshots.
Now, enter digital photography…
I used to develop my own black and white film back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With digital photography, the chemicals, darkroom equipment and photo paper have been replaced with printers, scanners, ink and paper, so in a way, I have gone back to developing my own photographs, this time with a laptop running PCLinuxOS, a Cybershot DSC-H10, and an Epson Stylus NX415. I also have a mechanical film camera (a Pentax K-1000)
Thanks to DigiKam (photo management software), Xsane (for scanning of photographs), and the GIMP (a photo editing suite), I have a system for keeping memories, both film and digital.
I like to keep most memories on my laptop, excluding those that are obvious mistakes of the technical kind, and always be sure to backup these images to some kind of media (be it an external drive, blank CDs or DVDs, flash drives, etc.)
Even photographs that would have been scrapped are generally saved, as I may use them in some digital art project. It is all in the editing.
After my photographs have been organized into albums, be it physical albums, or folders created within DigiKam, I then select those I want to include in my Picasa folder, Flickr folder, or uploaded to my website.
…and then my best photographs get uploaded to my account at JPG Magazine.
As someone for whom photography is a practice of everyday life I do believe that, in general, I have too many images. During the transition from analogue to digital I watched the number of images I made balloon; adding children to the mix created an image explosion.
This is one of the reasons I've actually switched back to film for about 90% of the images I produce. I think I'm pretty good at editing images but I found with digital I spent a lot more time editing afterwards than I really wanted to [when it's really the process of making images I enjoy]
Analogue asks me to consider the image being made more seriously and, more often than not, gives me something that reflects this extra effort in return.
I still use the digital SLR for times where it's clear advantages win out but but for the everyday I carry a camera loaded with film and, for the time being, am happier with the process.
The biggest question is, will be be able to look at them electronically. They'll be obsolete. When was the last time you played your favorite 8-track?
This conversation is making me think of a few things:
1) Many years ago, while staying at a hostel in Rome, I was sharing a dorm room with a woman from Australia. She was heading home in a day or so and was upset because she had lost her camera. "Now, I won't have any memories," she said.
2) I was at a Peaches show a number of years ago. Standing in the audience, I realized that I was one of the few people not holding a video camera. I realized that when any of them wanted to look back on this concert they need only play the video. Their memory of the evening won't evolve or mutate with time. It will always be just as the video says and does. (And I do wonder what that means about the experience itself. How are they experience the event since they are removed one step but I suppose that is a different conversation.)
3) I don't think this is true of photos. Photos don't tell the whole story. They spark memories and conversations. A friend recently started a website – http://www.lettershome.ca – for people to post letters and photos of the house they grew up in. The site is just starting up but the idea is for the people who live in the house now to respond with a photo and story of their own. Of course, this often means taking print photos and digitizing them, which might go against the question posed here. But I like that digital – or digitizing – photos allows us to share these images, these memories and stories, opening up conversations and introducing people that might not otherwise cross paths.
Also, I've always really enjoyed all things Spark (show/podcast, blog) and I'm excited about being a first-time commenter.
great first-time comment, Kathleen! thanks to you & everyone here for such interesting thoughts on the phenomenon…
No. There is no telling what technology will be able to do with images in the near-future. Even now Picasa has a facial recognition feature for auto-labeling photos. It is better to err on the side of more. Of course this is not to say that you should not be culling pictures during your 'photo capture, storage and display workflow'.
Deleting poor or redundant pictures should begin as soon as you take a series of pictures, right on the camera. More should be deleted when you copy them to another storage media (a step already no longer necessary to do manually) and finally more should be deleted when you sort through them for distribution (Flickr, Picasa, social media, email and print).
With diligent deleting the volume of photos is less of a problem as you can be confident that what remains is "decent". Who knows how useful 40 photos of your child's third birthday will be ten, twenty or thirty years from now. Besides, storage media is getting cheaper and more accessible every year.
Like 'Kathleen O' I am an avid listener (usually podcast) and first time commenter. Thanks for the great show (and the extra stuff like the full interviews)!
As a family historian & scrapbooker, photos are supremely important to me. I have 7 old family albums that my aunt gave me just before she died, & those photos are treasures. Yes, I take thousands of photos every year, but I (usually) go through them as soon as I download them & delete the junk. They go into my photo editing program (Memory Manager by Creative Memories) where I can sort, tag, journal & edit. And my digital scrapbooking program (Storybook Creator Plus) has allowed me to make wonderful photo books that my family love to look at (even my husband likes to show them off!) There are millions of digital photos that get stuck on computers & left there. We need to get them out of there & into our lives – print them, share them, frame them & display them, before your computer crashes & they're lost forever!
I have 36,000+ images in my iPhoto collection and probably several hundred others in other folders, not to mention prints in albums and photographs shared through various social media and my several website related attempts to create both a display and backup zone.
Yes, the volume is daunting. But I would not have it any other way.
In Montreal, I was taken by a Japanese enamel plate. Quartered and recompiled, the image was an opening slide in a presentation–how many business presentations invoke a gasp of wonder from the audience? The initial image was flawed as a photo–but I spotted its potential as graphic art.
This is an example of an opportunity not afforded when one must be cautious in photography. Captured images offer us so much more than their face value and initial intent.
Mmm yeah, I have way to many digital photos. I've had to get an external hard drive just to stop them clogging up the main computer. It's nice to have a lot more photos but I think the cheapness of it has made us less compromising about which pictures we want to keep.
I like this issue. My wife and I went to Orlando for our honeymoon. I shot 10,000 photos with 4,000 photos of Sea World alone. I take alot of photos because I believe in the 5% rule. If I shot 10,000 photos then I should have 500 photos that are absolutely perfect. But because I have a DSLR I have about 5,000 that are awesome with the rest being good enough to junk.
Now with my Nexus One phone I find that I shoot more with my phone and find that 5MP being good enough. And I reach for my DSLR with my 50mm 1.4 lens alot less and find that I shoot only when something I want to document with a few photos alot more. My photos grow about 100 or less a month.
With my first born turning 7 months old next week, my wife and I have shot probably 2,000 photos. The bulk of them being shot with our matching phones, we have shot 60 to 70% on our phones.
It is a daunting task to maintain them and back them up. I use Lightroom and iPhoto to manage them all. And giving out DVD slideshows to family is the best way to really use them.
How does the Spark community use their photos? Do they build up and find nothing to do with them or do you find uses for them?
Thank you Nora for the excellent podcast. I refer Spark to everyone interested in seeing what podcasts are all about.
Pictures, Pictures, Pictures! at last count I was up to over 20,000. What if my computer crashed? Well it did and it took forever to restore all those pictures to the new hard drive, I would'nt wish that on my worst enemy.
When we go on vacation or a short trip to say New York city, I download the picturs and select the ones I think capture the trip and save them in a separate file. This file then becomes my "Book" file. I then go the the "Blurb" book site and arrange my pictures in a book. They print them in a bound book and it's eay to share and not too expensive. Our friends and family just love to leaf thru. It's alot better than showing them on a screen.