I mean, most people don't ever look back at the photos they take. Phones have made photos almost valueless.

As someone who had to go through my mother's and grandmother's boxes of photo albums after they died, I can tell you that what people should be doing now is backing up select photos AND adding a full description in the files metadata. The vast majority of the photos in my mother's and grandmother's albums meant nothing to me because the context and history of those photos died with them.

Aside from adding metadata for those you leave behind, you should make it a personal habit to go through you own old photos you have backed up. Those photos true value is not as a legacy but as means to remember as you get older. Life is long (hopefully). The amount of life you forget is staggering when you remember it.

How many pictures are lost because nobody ever looks at any of the 1000000 pictures they've taken?

when my wife died, i was 32. the kids were 7, 8, and 10. there are tons of physical pics. but looking back at pics from almost 20 years ago now… sure i am gonna send each kid a usb key but… if i lost them i still have my memories. i wish however i took more video. i miss her voice. i am sure the kids do too.

but if i lost the media, frankly whatever. i already feel the loss daily anyway so … 🤷‍♀️

They can ask the NSA for the backup

Eventually everything and everyone we have ever known will be lost to time.

We had a house fire.

Several pictures saved from the fire are forever stuck to the glass from the frame where they were, forever behind a smoky glass front.

Other photos didn't survive the fire or the firehouses.

No one backed up their Polaroids or instamatic shots.

Not sure thats a bad thing. The older I get the more I want to go out a ghost.

My grandmother started throwing away photos of people she no longer recognized as dementia set in. No one was aware of this until it was way too late.

I don't have many pictures from my childhood. My grandparents took a couple of videos, but I doubt those VHS tapes survive.

One part of my wife's family lost basically everything in a tsunami. They managed to find two mostly-recognizable pictures, so even a box meant to be passed down isn't going to survive disaster.

I have a box of photos to scan, but I've never managed to get the scanner settings dialed in to where things look right to me and aren't gigantic files. I suppose it's OK, though; my family line dies with me so there's no one on to whom to pass them anyway.

Survivor bias.

You (generally) only know about physical photographs that have been preserved, and know not of those that have perished.

Digital photos have a higher chance of being preserved because the effort required to duplicate them is trivial. They may be inaccessible though.

Or equally as bad, relying on cloud services that will not stand the test of time.

Around a year ago, my dad went on a fishing trip with a friend, and his kayak flipped over due to how turbulent the conditions were, and due to that he lost his phone (which was in a waterproof pouch) in the ocean, which had likely multiple thousand family photos that weren’t backed up at all. The friend he was with decided to go diving in that area to try find it, but never did despite how calm the water had been after that incident.

Now he backs his photos up from his new phone to Google drive, however I’m not sure whether he’s actually checked if it’s syncing or not.

To be fair I don’t think much anyone but the parents care for the photos. The number of old photos and albums I see in antique stores and estate sales is staggering. I’m not saying nobody wants them at all, but generally unless you have something very interesting like Dad working on some important civic project or a snapshot of him in theater as a soldier, or Mom as Wendy the Welder or in a foreign country as Doctors Without Borders, most of the generic family shots of christmases and travel get filtered out into the trash.

Also, most all modern ink and paper is non-archival, so it won’t last.

After my dad died I made a photo board for his memorial, it's so weird because there was maybe 100 or 150 of photos of his entire LIFE. Both my parents hated getting their pictures taken, and no way were you taking a video of them. It's sad I don't have videos of my dad. I'm trying to take more of my mom now but it has to be stealthy

A drop in the bucket compared to those that were never taken at all in the last 4,000 years of civilization before the picture boxes came to be.

I reccommend, and am certain many parents already do, to print the good photos and put them in a book.

Back your stuff up is good advice, in case the worst happens, but nothing beats physical books your kids can look through.

Very few really care about all of the data you're producing over your lifetime. How many times have you taken serious efforts to go to the city archives, or read through inherited documents and photos, etc...?? Are you doing anything with them or just sitting on them?? Flicked through it once? Fun.

Now with all of the bulk data we produce what are future gens gonna do with it? Prolly dump it into an AI to summarize and puke out into some trite little video memoir... That's it, your life reduced to a twenty second collage for social clout.

If you set out to fight entropy, you're not gonna win.

My sister in law lost a lot of data since she didn't learn from her first fried SD card.

Probably less than the moments that are lost in time before the invention of the digital camera.

I've thought about getting my photos transferred to archival microfilm before, but backups on a usb hard drive, my own personal server, and a cloud service should do for now XD

Eventually every single one.

Father of two here. I have tried to start sorting through the pictures that were made during the years by my wife, parents and in-laws. We are literally talking thousands of pictures here. Trust me, you do not want all of those.

Let's project (pun intended) here. I grew up in the time of analog cameras, i.e. somewhere before 2000-ish. Back then you had to buy a camera, preferably a decent one. You had to buy a film roll, which had typically had a capacity of 24 or 36 pictures. If you ran out of film, you had to go out and buy new film. Having done that, the film had to be developed and the negatives had to be projected onto expensive paper, which needed their own chemicals to change actual pictures. When you took a picture, it had to count. A shoe box of printed pictures typically used to represent several years of personal history.

All of them. Nothing survives the passage of time. Everything will disappear at some point.

Immich

Before digital? Millions. After digital? Possibly trillions? All those photos backed up to the “the cloud” make great training data, though!