The persistence of Flickr
It continually occurs to me that most people’s photographic histories are in great peril because of the digital revolution. I love flickr, and I love my digital cameras for the simplicity and economy of taking snaps, but 99.9 percent of these images only live out there on the Interwebs, or, worse, on some flaky external hard drive waiting to fail (or maybe in that stack of scratched up CD-ROMs?). Barring a fire or flood, family photo albums like the ones I was perusing yesterday will easily outlast me, but what will happen to the digital stuff when noone can remember Grandpa Jack’s flickr password?
Also, and perhaps more problematic, is the fact that we are absolutely inundated with images that most people are too lazy to tag or sort for quality. I’ve seen people on airplanes share pics that they have stored on their cameras! Conversely, I can visually recall most of the images in the dozen or so albums I have stored away in the garage. The physical act of creating those albums forced someone to make a choice about what each photo means. For that matter, the economic limitations of film also force people to make choices about what they shoot.
Now, I’m No Luddite™, but I’m beginning to wonder if future generations will be puzzled as to why their family histories and hairstyles are frozen around the time most people switched to digital. I’ve ranted about this before, I think, but it deserves another turn.
(I was also viewing a couple of videos my parents had transferred from Standard-8 to VHS, when the whole issue kind of smacked me upside the noggin again.)
Tags: Family