Photos Photos Everywhere but Not a Memory to Find. Or Why Printed Photo Albums are More Important than Ever Before.

(This post is a follow-on to my earlier post “Facebook killed my blog”.)

Ahhh, the beauty of digital photography, the beauty of camera phones, the beauty of the web and services like Facebook , Flickr and Instagram.

Taking and sharing photos has never been easier or cheaper… but finding special pictures taken 3, 6, 9, 24+ months ago, or picking out special memories from 3 or 4 years ago, has never been harder.

It’s only going to get worse, and I for one don’t trust Facebook, or anyone else, to keep my really important photos for me, or my children, or my grandchildren, in a way that will be easy to peruse and read 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

It’s kind of like asking you “what was your favorite song from 2001?”  Can you name it right now?  Probably not.  But if I showed you a list of the top 10 or 20 songs from 2001 and asked which was your favorite you’d say “oh yeah, I remember those, and that one was my favorite”.

It’s not that I don’t trust the premise of cloud storage, it’s that I don’t trust that the theory of “just go ahead and collect any and all photos you want for ever and ever” is a viable way of capturing, sharing, being reminded of, and handing down lifes most important memories.

I used to believe it… but I don’t anymore.  Here’s why, and what I’m doing about it:

We take a lot of pictures:

A lot of pictures.  In fact in their April 2012 issue National Geographic estimated that in 2011 Americans took almost 80 billion digital photos and that by 2015 this will grow to over 105 billion photos per year or roughly 1,000 photos per household, per year.  Me?  I’m way beyond this and am averaging between  7,000-8,000 digital photos per year over the past 3-5 years.

When you consider that you will have your children living with you for say, 20 years, that’s at least 20,000 or more photos for that time period alone.  And if you take pictures into say your 70’s that’s upwards of 60,000 photos.  For me?  It’s worse… Since beginning to use digital cameras in 1999 I have accumulated over 50,000 photos stored on my hard drive already.  At an average of even 5,000 per year over the next say 30 years I’ll be pushing 200,000 photos to share with my children and grand children.

I used to think “digital is great, when the kids move out on their own I’ll give them each a hard drive with all the family photos on it to have forever and ever”.  But seriously, who is going to look through 10,000, 20,000, or 50,000 photos?  Not my kids, not even me.

Photo organizing “best practices” don’t solve the problem:

Oh, they’ll help.  Things like organizing photos into folders by year, month, and activity.  Tagging photos with names, locations, and events.  Using facial recognition, backing up to the cloud will all help, but we’re still creating a huge data retrieval issue.  How do you easily go back and pick out the most important photos?  The most important life events?  How do you remember what you’re trying to remember?

For our grandparents/great-grandparents  (circa early to mid-1900’s) this was easy; the relative cost and complexity of having a photo taken meant that only the most special events were captured: weddings, births, deaths.  And you only took one photo per event.  Little Jimmy blinked in the family portrait?  Tough, that’s what his great grandchildren are going to see.

For our parents/grandparents (circa mid 1950’s to mid-1990) it was easier to take photos, but still costly and cumbersome enough that they weren’t taking random photos on a daily or weekly basis.  By and large they were fairly important or memorable events; the first day of school, the family vacation to Disneyland, high school graduations.

For us and our kids?  Zero cost and complexity.  That amazing looking dinner I’m having tonight? Click.  That pretty sunset? Click.  My friend being goofy?  Click.  My child getting married? Click.  1,000+ clicks per year… every year…  for life.

The important gets lost in the mundane, the memorable gets lost in the unimportant, and the memories drown in the noise.

But we can store and share them in the cloud:

And all we’ve done is just move the two previous problems to the cloud.  Remember that picture you shared on Facebook last year with you and your cousin you hadn’t seen in 15 years?  Ya, go find it.  Or the photo from 3 years ago of little Susie taking her first swim?  Ahhh, that one you don’t even remember you took.

It’s kind of like garages.  Our first apartment didn’t have a garage, and I longed for the day when we’d have garage space to store our extra stuff.  And when we bought our first home I was so excited at the prospects of our two car garage.   Finally, all the room I’ve ever needed!  And guess what, about 10 years later I was looking longingly at houses with three car garages, “that will solve my problem” I said.  And guess what happened when I got a three car garage?  Yep, filled it up too, and I have boxes neatly stacked on shelves, and I don’t even know what’s in most of the boxes.

Side note:  Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft know this phenomenon all too well and it’s why they are happy to give you a wad of free cloud storage… for now.  The lure of “hey, store all you want now, sort it out later, it’s “free””, is pretty compelling.  But in ~10 years I’ve accumulated over 115GB of pictures and my cloud storage needs could grow to terabytes of need, for which the previously mentioned services are more than happy to charge me for… by year… every year… for life.  As a wise man once said “Homey don’t play that game”.

And just getting more storage that’s easier to fill up only exacerbates the problem.

It’s not a storage issue; it’s an organization, prioritization and reminder issue.

Ok, so I can store all the photos I want both in the cloud and on my hard drive.  I can organize into folders, tag with meta data, use facial recognition… now all I have to do is think of the myriad retrievals I want to make to pull up the “important” memories.

Go ahead, try and remember the memories you want to remember so you can make the right query to be reminded of what you want to remember.

Oh, and your kids?  They don’t have a clue about the memories that were important to you or how you flagged them, they might as well scroll through 50,000 photos.

And we don’t even see the train coming:

A study released in June 2013 of 3,000 Britons by OnePoll heralds the “death” of traditional photo albums with 66% of all respondents indicating they now catalog their pictures on computers, tablets or smartphones and only 13% of 18-24 year olds said they had ever used a printed album.

But as noted earlier, the problem isn’t a storage/organizational issue, it is a summation/reminder issue, and photo albums do a pretty good job of that.  Remember, kind of like asking you “what was your favorite song from 2001?”  Can you name it right now?  Probably not.  But if I showed you a list of the top 10 or 20 songs from 2001 and asked which was your favorite you’d say “oh yeah, I remember those, and that one was my favorite”.

Put simply, memories need to be triggered, and you can’t say “show me just my important memories”.

So what to do, one man’s approach:

As I said in Facebook Killed my Blog, I had a startling realization that we are quickly moving away from the shoe box full of memories that could be relatively easily looked through, to a world where the important gets drowned out in 10’s of thousands of other, much less important photos.

With my blog my original hope was that at the end of each year I’d simply hit “Print”, or export the content to a book publishing site, and have a hard copy printed.  However, I realized several major problems, the first of which is the quality/resolution of photos uploaded and stored on blogs is much too low to be used in reasonable size on a printed page.  Add to that the amount of re-formatting required to convert from a blog look and feel to one appropriate for a printed book and it became apparent that this was not a viable approach.

My solution? Reverting to printed books capturing what I feel are the most important life events for the past year.

Yes, I still do specific books for particularly special events, but the top 10-20 things for the past year?  Captured in an annual family photo book.

I use a fairly straightforward approach:

• January of each year I create a new photo book project.  I happen to use MyPublisher but there are several other choices, play with a few to see what works for you.
• Every 4-6 weeks I looks back through my photos, most of which are now taken on my phone and automatically synced to the cloud and the MyPhonePictures folder on my PC, and copy the ones worth saving to folders by year/month/event-name on my hard drive.
• I pick 3-5 or more of the best photos for a significant event and add them to the Photo Book.  Each new entry gets a text box with a title of the event, location, date and a short write up of where we were, what we were doing and who we were with.
• I keep a Table of Contents on the first page of each photo book and update it as I add new entries so I have a 1-page “at a glance” view of the top events for a given year.
• At the end of the year (actually January the following year) I print three copies of the book, one for my wife and I and one for each of my two boys.
• My family albums are stored online, available to anyone I provide the link to.  And they will be there as long as MyPublisher, recently acquired by Shutterfly, keeps their service going.
• I of course didn’t start my first book on January 1^st, in fact it was June or July last year when this hit me so I went back to the start of the year and caught up to the present.  Then I went back to the previous year and created, and printed that year’s family photo album, and I’m now working on 3 years ago.
• It takes some time, but it’s fun going back, and I know I’ll now have to only look at the Table of Contents page to be reminded of the important events for that year, or flip through 30-50 pages per year to recall our most important memories, I’ll have hard-copy back-ups of our most important photos and events, and with the short write-ups for each event I know my children, and their children, will have some sense of the context of the pictures they are looking at, and the printed book now becomes a photo-index to the 50,000 photos on my hard drive.

By the way, I’m patenting the idea for a data storage system that does this automatically… so don’t even think about trying to copy it ;-)!