Smile for the camera

My wife asked me the other day whether I could print out a particular picture of our eldest child that she could use in her end of term project at school.

"No problem," I thought - I've been diligently saving all our pictures over the years.  Three days later and I'm no closer to finding it than I was when I started.

Every two minutes, we take more photographs than were taken in total during the 1800s.  Indeed, it is estimated that in 2015, the human race will take one trillion photographs.

Our generation has become the most documented in history. We are more instrumented and interconnected than ever and as the power and ease of use of mobile technology grows, the amount of thought we invest in how we use it diminishes.  There's probably an offshoot of Moore's Law to describe that.

Photography is one of the most important means of documenting our history but is the proliferation of photography in the digital age helping us to document our lives better than ever before or are we devaluing them through sheer volume? How will future generations look upon us based on our digital footprint? Will they see a species in thrall to mildly amusing cats? Earlier this year, Google's Vint Cerf, pointed towards a more disturbing scenario.

As the simplicity with which we preserve our memories evolves, Cerf maintains that there's a real danger our generation is rushing towards a dark age, as the software and systems we rely on to preserve our lives become obsolete, taking our treasured data with them.

"We stand to lose a lot of our history. If you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives which is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people's tweets, all of the world wide web, then if you wanted to see what was on the web in 1994 you'd have trouble doing that. A lot of the stuff disappears."

I recall my first digital camera, sometime in the mid-1990s. Back then, CDROMs were the preferred way of archiving and I diligently saved and backed up all those early, now laughably low-res images to disc. Inevitably, many of those discs have degenerated and, along with them, the backups I made, just to be sure.

As time progressed, I began uploading to photo-sharing sites - sites whose names I can no longer recall, let alone remember the last password I used or the email address my account was registered to.

It seems unimaginable that social networks like Facebook or Twitter will fade into obscurity, but didn't we think the same about Friends Reunited or myspace back when they were the latest thing? Come to think of it, I'm sure I've got material uploaded to both of those. Inevitably, a quick check to see if they're still around (they are, but they're in a sorry state) is accompanied by the sinking feeling that my accounts on both were registered to a domain name I no longer own.

The solution? Cerf says we should print out the photos and documents we deem most valuable, just like we used to. In a digital world, it seems good old analogue is the safest way of future-proofing that we hold dear.

So that's what I'll do. Once I've waded through the thousands upon thousands of images I have backed up to my Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Google+ and Amazon Prime accounts. There appears to be some level of synching between all of those but how can I be sure I'm not missing out on important private memories that I chose not to share online? No problem; I have archived those on an array of hard drives...in their thousands.

If I want to preserve my most precious memories I'm going to have to invest a considerable amount of time organising and prioritising them. And all the while I'm generating more images every day.  The photo gallery on my mobile currently contains 418 photographs. Now, I'm relatively disciplined when it comes to housekeeping on my phone and a quick check reveals that I last wiped my camera gallery 23 days ago.

Of the 418 photos, then, that I've taken in the last 23 days, which would I consider worth keeping? And what criteria would I apply to make that decision? I'm renovating my house at the moment, so the pictures I'm planning to construct into a time-lapse are certainly of value for the moment. I could probably lose most of the photos of my cat - as amusing as they are in the moment, I don't really need 50+ pictures of her, mostly taken as I await that supposedly spontaneous silliness. Pictures of friends and family are naturally more important but do I really need every moment of that party the other weekend captured for posterity?  How can I be sure that the pictures I hold dear now are truly important or simply being kept because it's easier than it is to spend the time to categorise and validate them?

In the 30 minutes it's taken to write this blog, 7.5 million photographs have been uploaded to Instagram.  And I'm certain that none of those are the one I'm looking for, either.