Photos aren’t like they used to be. No envelopes of printed 4x6’s. No sleeves of negatives to sort through. No albums to pull off the shelves and flip through with their sticky plastic protector pages. Today there is no barrier to pulling out your phone and taking a single or a hundred recorded images. They all get stored and backed up to the cloud like some limitless recording of your life. But then what happens? Do you believe these big tech companies are going to be in business forever? What about when your kids want to see photos after you die? Will they even have access? Will your account eventually be deleted?
Now that my kids are older and I’m the de facto keeper of family artifacts, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about durability and long term storage. I used to think I should digitize everything, but I’ve since changed my mind on that. I don’t know of a format or venue that will outlive me. My contribution will be to keep it intact and further organize what I have for future generations. The physical artifacts will remain in boxes and I’ll sort, group, and label them so it’s easier for others to know who is who. For the tens of thousands of digital photos during my kid’s lifetime, I think what makes the most sense is to leave that decision to my kids. When each of them is in their late twenties, I’ll hand them a solid state hard drive with a full copy of the digital photo archive. It then becomes their problem to sort out. Most of the photos they won’t care about and certainly not ones later in my life when they establish their own families. Just don’t forget to delete anything you might be embarrassed for them to see.