I used to care about my photos a lot. After accumulating a few decades worth of photos I've gotten to the point where I don't care about my photos at all.
I used to obsess over megapixel count, portrait mode, FPS, lighting, and so forth, because I used to think that these amazing images would be priceless in the future. Well, the future came and went, and to me they actually ended up being worthless.
At one time I cared about other people on the Internet seeing pictures of me and my friends and family doing things and being places. Now I don't want anyone on the Internet seeing pictures like that. I especially don't want bots to scrape the photos to build a dossier on my activities that data brokers can add to my profile that they then turn around and sell to whoever's buying.
So these days I don't ever bother even taking photos of anything any more. Instead what I do is try to be 100% "in the moment." I try to notice the small details, feel the emotions, immerse myself in the experience. I look for the things that make an impression. I find that a camera will always -- I mean, always -- detract from that.
I suppose that's my way of saying that there hasn't been a camera feature for a phone that I've cared about for many years now. For me the 2017 Pixel 2 was the point where phone camera technology got "good enough" for anything I ever wanted to use it for. Which, these days, is almost nothing.
When you get older, the photos aren’t for you, they’re for the descendants of you and your siblings, and their communities during funerals etc.
It sounds like you needed a healthy correction from too much sharing and organizing, but just a few shots will be treasured.
I doubt that the descendants will be that interested to be honest. It's not like we today pour over the images that exist of our parents and grandparents.
Having thousands upon thousands of images to look at does not make it better.
It's nice to have a couple from each year maybe, but the huge amount of pics we have today is just ruining the experience and value of the pics somehow.
As they are stored somewhere digital on a device or cloud makes them also somehow less accessible even though technically they are more accessible. If they lay around in an album on a coffee table or a book shelf makes them more visible. It makes it also a nice way of talking about the pictures with friends or relatives when someone pics up the album.
I do this. And I look over these pictures to get a sense of what their life was like. And where they lived. I found a small book of photos of my great grandfather and his family and they really made me happy to see.
We might not want to look at photos right now. But photos aren’t everyday items, they are long tail items. They are used infrequently, but when they are used, their impact is great.
Just because I don’t want something right now doesn’t mean I’ll never want it. Or that someone important to me won’t want it.
Suppose instead your great grandfather had an iPhone back then and you now had access to his library of 10s of thousands of food pics and random selfies in bars, on vacation, etc. Would you still be as excited?
I never thought about that, but honestly that sounds super cool, imagine our grand grand children 300 hundred years from now, if somehow they have access to our cloud images they can basically check out how their ancestor fully lived their lives, a true door to the past.
Sounds super cool for them, of course, we have been born to early for this, so from our perspective we still shouldn't give a dam. As probably we won't be ghost behind checking how they enjoy that portal to the past.
It's cool conceptually, but I think for family I haven't known, for family I have known and is aging/deceased that would make me pretty sad so I probably wouldn't use it.
Me? Even more so. I’d feed them into iPhoto and separate out photos of people and common things.
Then I would look at the metadata to see what geolocations and dates reveal hai vacation patterns.
Finally, I’d just randomly browse through to see what he was up to.
I wouldn’t do it all the time, but I’d definitely spend a few hours over the course of my life looking through them.
I’d love to see what random life was like from 1910-1950.
I'd go through them faster for sure but absolutely. Things changed so much in the last 100 years, even just the car pictures would be super cool to see.
Might be cultural or even a me thing though, I grew up with a grand-aunt that loved talking about how they survived the winter every year.
Oh my god, yes! I would love to not only understand my great grandfather as a real life person but also to have context of the world in which he lived.
Hell, I wish I had home movies of myself with my parents as a toddler/child that included audio. All our home movies were on soundless 8mm film.
Thats the key. You would be tired in a while if there was tens of thousands of photos of your grandparents.
Then you can go to sleep and keep looking when you aren't tired.
Couldn't we alternatively just use AI to identify the most interesting ones or ones with specific people we want to see?
It’s not like I have to look at them all at once. I wish there were 10,000 photos.
I’d go through them an hour at a time.
If there was more material, you could do more with it - create a model of their house using photogrammetry. Create panoramic images if the pictures intersect. Try to spot interesting historical details that might not have seemed significant back then, etc. :)
You never know - I had some contact with people gathering old photos and post cards or people trying to piece together what a particular part of the town or their home village looked like say 100 years ago and surprisingly little information is sometimes available.
We do, I really would like to have waaaay more photos of my parents, grandparents and of myself when I was younger.
That's why I take pictures of my children frequently so they will have that what I do not.
i think the difference from when i grew up is that there were many baby photos of me but they were hard to find and view, you needed to go to the persons house and look through all their photos to find them.
if i look at my brothers kids, their phones will be full to the brim with 1000's of photos of them. we have whatsapp groups filled with their photos.
i wonder how interested they'll be when they're 40 to see these photos. perhaps a few, but all of them?
Come on, my grandkids won't sift through 200GB of photos. They'll look at 10-100 at most and then get bored.
AI will do it for them.
You can already see this in action - I love when my iPhone brings up those little curated albums from events or people. I can only imagine how much better those will become with more and more photos and better intelligence.
Here's what grandpa and your uncle did 60 years today!
I don’t know if you’re joking or being serious but I think that would be really cool.
future historians would like to, though.
That's why it's important to document your house and your town (all of it, not just the glamorous bits), rather than travelling to exotic locations to take photos like some lame "influencer".
the thing that changes is when you get kids. I take a lot of photos of them and love it when google photos reminds me daily about them. but even that changes as they get older, the frequency goes down.
That was fun and interesting when your entire grandparents history fitted in a 100 pages album
Now that you have 40000 selfies with silly faces and 25000 pictures of burgers it's going to be way less interesting
I take photos liberally.
Then on a weekly basis I delete all the duplicates/failed shots/boring photos.
And then on a yearly basis I select the ones 10-50 photos that evoke the best memories and emotions.
Those 10-50 are the ones that I print and put in a separate album in the photos app to look at regularly. The rest I store “just in case”.
Picking 1 photo per week could be a good base to aim for. A slice of daily/weekly life.
Then perhaps a few more photos for each special event where lots of folks get together: birthdays, holidays, births/deaths, weddings, graduations, etc.
Probably end up with <100 photos, and if you print US 4x6/EU A6, probably fit in one album.
We do this with the family, come Christmas time when everyone's together, everyone gets to pick 50 to 100 pictures to cast to the Apple TV and go over each picture. It's a lot of fun seeing people's highlight of the year.
We may need to revise the 100 picture limit because as the family grows it's getting a bit long for one sitting :^)
This is probably a great use case for apple intelligence. There are many apps that try to organize your photos. But iOS itself could do that curating, removing duplicate, finding the timeless shots and organizing them into events. It already does something close to this, with Memories. Now we just need it to cleanup. But this might not be an incentive they have bc it will reduce storage needs.
I think that for every deceased family member there’s one random photo in a frame somewhere in the house. We have piles and piles of old photo albums from family that has passed. Those will never get looked at again.
Photos are incredibly devalued now.
I go through a large box of photos of my dead mother at least once a year. It helps keep her alive in the minds of my young sons who never got to meet her.
Grandkids will probably be able to make a VR reconstruction from a couple of bad photos.
Really interesting observation, but I would say there are still moments that can delight like we restored an old iPhone of my partner's and came across videos and live photos of our oldest when they were a toddler.
Whether this is actually worth the many, many thousands we have spent on our smartphones to preserve rare moments that matter amongst many that really don't is another question. If smartphones never had cameras at all we'd almost certainly preference our own "lower resolution" memories over carrying a small, cheap, lightweight digital camera everywhere in case of something special.
This comment seems completely at odds with history and how people actually acted prior to the smartphone revolution.
Film camera sales proceeded on a steady incline from their invention until the introduction of the digital camera.
Digital camera sales increased year on year for every year of their existence prior to the introduction of the smartphone.
Approximately everybody wants to have photos of their precious memories, and the idea that people wouldn't have kept buying digital cameras if smartphones didn't incorporate them is, to be frank, a little bit silly.
The primary difference between digital cameras and smartphones was that every family I knew had a digital camera, where every person I know has a smartphone. And every single person I know uses the camera on their smartphone very regularly.
I guess the idea is all your memories are precious. What the parent poster said certainly resonated with me: most of them are not.
Writing is also a big part of history, which also gave us the ability to preserve our most special events since over 6,000+ years ago. This is the first century that isn't permeated with unknowns because few made any deliberate attempt to record things - and we had the option to paint on a cave wall for 10,000s of years before that too.
That's not my point at all. My point is rather more mundane than that: People like cameras and taking photos. That's why they kept buying them as standalone devices until smartphones were good enough to replace having a standalone camera.
If the king of the universe suddenly decreed cameras on phones verboten, people would go back to buying standalone cameras, not back to floral written descriptions, commissioning a portrait on canvas, or cave paintings.
The real difference is the rise of social media. Digital camera photos were taken for you, for your family and close friends.
In the post-facebook world we live in now, smartphone photos are taken for other people - a curated snapshot of your life to show off to acquaintences and strangers. Something of the intimacy of photography has been lost.
Honestly I just have an RX100, physics means that it will always be able to take optically better photos than an iPhone even though the post processing is definitely “worse”. It fits in my pocket just as easily as a phone and I can take both normal photos and selfies pretty easily. It’s not the cheapest option but I appreciate having better image quality in a form factor I can easily shove in my pocket.
What kind of pants do you wear? Or are you in one of those locales where you have a coat on year-round?
Asking because my iphone barely fits in my jeans pockets. I'm a dude, so I still have somewhat usable pockets.
Yeah agreed kids are the difference. Everything else is either dabbling in being an artist - which most people are not - or noise.
It’s not even about terribly special moments. Stitched together, those videos and Live Photos of even small moments help me remember what they were like then.
Ironically the only photos I connect with are the ones I took (and I'm still taking) with my dad's 35mm slr from the 80s. It's the one he used to take all my childhood pictures and I'm confident I will be able to take pics of my kid(s) with it.
I shoot maybe one roll of film a month on average, so about 400 pics a year, 1/10th are keepers, that's 40 good pics per year and I remember where I took every single one of them since I started this in 2018.
I got a crappy 25 year old Kodak that takes 110 cartridge film at a thrift store for $5. Those 24 pictures seem more real than the 1000's on my phone. Remembering where you take them is cool
I could have written all of this myself. It exactly mirrors how I progressed to the same conclusions. Very well said!
These days, most of the photos I take are with disposable cameras that I buy whenever I go on a trip. Despite the name, the high cost of the camera makes each shot more precious, and I much prefer the low-fi film grain style to whatever black magic is going on in my smartphone sensor. Also, the novelty/nostalgia makes people smile when you ask them to take a picture of you. And then there's the anticipation of sending the film off for development, not knowing what will turn out well and what will be an underexposed mess. Highly recommended.
You don't have kids then, at least no in kids age.
I did first part of the curve like you - full frame nikon, amazing photos, milky way in the night camping etc. Now I just carry around phone (Samsung in my case, use that 10x physical zoom quite a bit).
The stuff I can snap or record, most of it would be uncatchable with camera - I would have to run around with it constantly like an idiot and shove it in everybody's face, missing much more from those unique moments. Its not so much for me but for everybody else not being there, ie grandparents, so the question is - do you care more about you being in the moment, or sharing the moment with your closest ones. Its amazing how better connected they are with whats happening to their grandchildren living not so close to them, compared to a generation ago.
Also, how much of these memories our kids will have once adults - 'you know, daddy wanted to be in the moment so sorry not many photos or videos from important moments of your childhood' is pretty lame to me, but thats me. I still see purpose of photography as service to others rather than me, me and me all the way down.
Since kids are so active, there are some cool things like very slow mo videos that give completely new perspective - process it in 30s if needed at all and share. Completely unavailable even in current 5000$+ cameras. And yes on big screen you see various errors and less quality, but nobody I know watches it on big screens anymore.
For that reason, I bought some Fuji X100 and just take pictures with it if I need, for at least it's a fun exercise for actually thinking about what exactly do I really want to capture and why.
I went the opposite way.
I used to not take photos because I never went back to see them. And even if I did, one the best moments to review THAT photo is when I am talking to someone else about a related memory.
Now with Google photos, if we are talking about that one time when I was a kid driving a tractor, I search for tractor in photos app and presto, like magic the conversation about that memory has a nostalgic photo to boost the moment.
Family loves it!
I don't take pictures for the internet, I take them for the memories and to try to add a little artistry to the things in my life.
I also think cameras can be a positive part of "the moment" wherever that is. Photography and dealing with a camera can be a meditative way to see reality.
This has nothing to do with the iPhone and more with your social life. You went from a pro social network stance to a pro privacy one. That change meant you are taking less photos.
This is not happening in the real world, though. Everyone is on tiktok today and they need these powerful cameras more than ever.
Honestly, the more photos I take with my phone, the more I find myself craving a film camera.
It's not just the look of film which I find more appealing than digital photos, the physicality of the whole thing. Operating a film camera (especially older ones like Leica rangefinders or large format view cameras) is a very hands-on and deliberate process. You don't take a photo with an old camera, you make a photo.
This means you need to spend a lot more time composing the shot, focusing on the subject, metering the light (or using the zone system [1] if you want to go really old-school), setting the lens aperture and shutter speed, and finally taking the picture. In the case of a large format camera, you find yourself ducking under a dark cloth and focusing the (upside-down) image on a piece of ground glass, even using a magnifying glass for critical focusing!
The deliberate process doesn't stop with exposing the image. It continues into the dark room with creative control over the development and printing processes. From a single negative you can spend hours making test prints and playing with the exposure of the final print, using techniques such as dodging, burning, and masking. You can also do some crazy things with an enlarger; even producing wall-sized prints at home!
I feel this but I also just google photos and it will show me slideshows from trips or moments in my life in the past and I'm like wow I forgot about that wonderful moment. Please keep photographing.