I love this video from Google Photos. It captures the generational differences when it comes to family photos perfectly!
I am definitely more on the “take-a-gazillion-photos-and-put-them-into-albums-that-some-fancy-technology-can-index-for-me-for-later” category when it comes to family photos!
Where my photos go these days
My photos are typically uploaded to Flickr and Google Photos by default. I also sometimes share albums on Facebook but I don’t have complete archives there at all. I also make multiple backups of my primary photo library and RAW files because I am more than a little neurotic about losing my family photos.
At the same time, I love living in a time where we can take so many great photos and share them so easily. Having machine learning systems go through our photos and make them so accessible, despite taking 23 photos of the same sunset, is amazing.
Google Photos definitely has the edge when it comes to identifying what is in our photos. As long as I have my Flickr (and other) backups for full resolution images, I’m happy to keep sending all my photos to Google Photos too.
Not sold on Apple Photos yet
I haven’t used Apple Photos much. The libraries tend to become pretty big. My current edited library is about 128GB. That is stored in Flickr in full resolution (I uploaded most of that when we arrived in Israel – a decent upload capacity and no data caps is a must) and in Amazon S3.
I don’t really see me using Apple Photos for my full library. For one thing, I don’t have the drive capacity for that on my current MacBook Air. For another, iCloud storage pricing is still relatively expensive compared to other storage options. Still, I created a small Apple Photos library to play around with the new Apple Photos app.
One of the changes that I like is that I don’t have to replicate my photos in the Apple Photos library. I can “import” photos that I have stored on different drives without actually moving or copying them. That saves a lot of space.
That said, Apple Photos still seems to take up a lot of extra space on my drive relative to the imported photos. At the same time, the library may seem to be relatively big because I activated the Photos iCloud Library and it is importing photos shared through my iPhone and iPad.
I probably need to play around with Apple Photos and use a bigger subset of my library to get a better sense of how much space it will actually use once I’ve accounted for my iCloud library.
Those old family slides
My current mission is to have about 150-200 slides from my childhood scanned and added to my digital library. The big challenge with older generations’ photos is that there either aren’t many or they are in physical formats that will only degrade over time.
The slides are mostly in pretty good shape and there are a lot of amazing memories in there. So much I have forgotten from my childhood.
My Grand Plan is actually to co-ordinate with my brother and sister to have all the slides they have from my mother digitised and shared as a collected family archive.
When I look at photos of my parents’ childhoods, I’m struck by how few I have access to and just how few there are altogether. It isn’t quite as bad as the great grandfather in the Google Photos video with just two photos in his whole life but there really aren’t many photos going back a couple generations.
If anything, our kids will have too many photos of our lives and theirs but, hopefully, machine learning will keep developing and the (likely) terabytes of family photos we leave for them when we eventually leave this life will become a rich and valued archive of memories.
tag:twitter.com,2013:782137150833823744_favorited_by_2871342029
Photo Sesh
https://twitter.com/pauljacobson/status/782137150833823744#favorited-by-2871342029
I also like Google photos, and having lost waaay too many photos to theft and laptop crashes in the past I am also always checking that my photos are stored safely somewhere.
I also have hundreds of slides I want to digitise, so if you find a good way to do it I would love to know!
Apparently Orms in Cape Town can digitise slides. I’m sure there must be labs in Joburg too.
This Article was mentioned on pauljacobson.me
This Article was mentioned on pauljacobson.me
It’s time to either renew or cancel my Flickr Pro subscription. I have my doubts about whether it is worth spending the $50 to renew so I thought I’d explore my options in this post.
This Article was mentioned on pauljacobson.me
Something about John Berger‘s quote about “[w]hat makes photography a strange invention” really appeals to me. He apparently made this remark in response to Susan Sontag’s book, “On Photography”:
PhotoQuotes has a slightly different version of Berger’s quote:
The Art of Creative Photography has a short piece about Berger and his perspective on photography along with links to parts of a TV documentary Berger participated in. I haven’t watched the series yet but it looks fascinating.
I don’t think I heard of John Berger before today and that is a pity. I noticed that he passed away yesterday at the age of 90. The Guardian paid tribute to his work late yesterday:
One of his passages from his book “Keeping a Rendezvous” touches on my passion for documenting my life and my family, partly as a way of maintaining a memory of each moment I capture:
Image credit: Life in Shadows by Sippanont Samchai, licensed CC BY NC ND 2.0Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Share on Skype (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading…
Jamie Rubin wrote a thought-provoking post on his blog about his accumulated library of photographs, and his thoughts about what to do with it. The problem is that I am not organized about my photos the way I am in other parts of my life. I’ve made reluctant attempts at organization now and then, but […]