The great thing about phones today, they double as a great camera. Chase Javis often quotes, “The best camera is the one you have with you”.
The worse thing about phones today, they double as a great camera. Just go to any ‘special event’ (particularly those involving kids) and there’s a bunch of people trying to capture the moment through the lens of their phone. How many people have missed being present, because they watched an event through the lens and screen of their phone.
For some reason we cherish these badly taken photos and hold on to them for dear life. But how often do we refer back to them 2 weeks after we have taken them?
Sure it is nice to go down memory lane once in a while, “O remember when we went to the beech, but it was too cold to actually go in the water?” Or “gee look at how small she once was”, but do we need to carry this photo album around in our pocket, and would we do it, if it was physically printed out?*.
I’m not sure what the solution here is. Do we get more selective about the photos we take, or maybe more ruthless with the ones we delete? Should there be a limit, you can only carry 200 photos in your pocket? Like a mini portfolio of our life’s experience.
I work for a guy who loves taking photos, I only discovered what happens when you take 10,000 photos on an iPhone thanks to him (iPhone uses, if you have noticed the numbering is IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc). To help manage his growing library of photos we setup a Qnap NAS, this is a special box that lives on the network & saves photos from his phone to it. It has redundant drives in it, meaning if one fails, it can be replaced without losing any information. He would also like it to replicate to another device at another physical location, just in case of a fire.
All these measures are well and good, but he never actually sits down to appreciate his collection of thousands of photos, nor does he take the time to sort and organise them. The task is just too overwhelming for someone who is as busy as he is.
I think the action I need to take from today is to wipe clean the photos off my iPhone. I will however back them up first to my computer. But it will be interesting to see how many times I reach for my phone to show a now, non existent photo. I know for a while I did it a lot, not so much anymore.
*side story, I went to a 90th earlier in the year and there was an old lady around 85 I believe who did actually carry around physical printed photos to show people a life once lived.