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0 pointsnogridbag8y ago0 comments

I don't mean to derail this topic, but we don't have too many videos of my mother because for half of her life recording a video meant carrying one of those massive VHS recorders on your shoulder. When she passed and I realized how few videos we had, my first thoughts were: "How can I preserve these moments with my daughter, not just for myself but for her when I'm no longer around?" So I started looking into 360 degree video cameras and that sort of thing and that's when I remembered Google Clips. It's not ideal, but it may be one of the better solutions for preserving moments that doesn't require you to miss anything. I seem to take 90% of the photos of our family, which means I'm not in 90% of the photos.

I hope that doesn't sound strange, but you start thinking about these things during these times.

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majormajor8y ago

It's definitely something that deaths and similar events make you think about, but ultimately, I also find myself asking if it would be used at all. And if it was, would it be beneficial?

I have thousands of family slide photos from my grandparents. This is unusual, but they were big photography fans. Nobody looked at them for at least a decade. But about 10 years ago I had access to a nice scanner, so I digitized a few hundred of them, so that we could look at them more easily. Now I have thousands of slide photos nobody has looked at in two decades, hundreds of digitized versions nobody has looked at in one decade, and a handful of ones we printed or such that get looked at more regularly. I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.

And I think there's something to be said for the impermanence of memory for helping people move on with their lives. I thought I was going to die a few years ago - I didn't, which is great, obviously, but if I had, I wouldn't have wanted those who loved me to still be dwelling on me today.

Snapchat is basically the app recognition of this idea that not everything is worth saving, that for 99.99% of stuff the value today far, far outweighs any value in the future. Shame it's such a hard concept to monetize, I guess.

(I say this, but I'm not immune to the temptation, either. If you ask the people in my life, they'd definitely tell you they wish I'd follow my own advice around "remember, you're taking pictures for yourself, not for other people, and don't prioritize your pictures of others over other people themselves." :| )

setr8y ago

>I think quantity is overrated, and it just becomes write-only-memory. I still take hundreds of photos for myself every year, but I doubt my kids will ever look at them for more than a few hours, max.

My mother has a habit of taking a bunch of photos of an event, and posting all of them to fb, disregarding quality. Blurry shots, photos of people mid-scarfing down food, etc, it all goes up.

These kinds of collections are utterly worthless, and to a degree, kind of disgusting to go through. But the events themselves are perfectly worthy of being photographed, posted, and whatever.

The problem is the lack of curation. Its fine that she took many photos, as long as she only shared the two that actually looked good.

In the same way, I doubt you'd have the problem having many unseen photos if you selected, and shared, the ones that were worth sharing. I doubt all of the thousands should be shared; instead you're forcing the filtering process on every individual you pass the collection to.

And collecting all of your experiences in video would be fine, if you only actually shared the 0.01% of it actually worth sharing. Of course no one wants to do it on your behalf.

majormajor8y ago

> In the same way, I doubt you'd have the problem having many unseen photos if you selected, and shared, the ones that were worth sharing. I doubt all of the thousands should be shared; instead you're forcing the filtering process on every individual you pass the collection to.

That's kinda the point, isn't it? Hardly anybody actually spends their time curating their possessions for future generations, yet nobody is super sad about this missing inheritance. If we thought we'd value it more, there'd be more of a market for products to manage it - instead, things like Lightroom are a small nice. "On this day..." type reminders from Facebook and the like seem to be enough.

I don't think I have a problem: I have a bunch of pictures I look at, for me. It's just nothing more than that.

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epicide8y ago

I think it's a great conversation to have and one I've seen come up more and more.

I totally understand the inclination to capture as much as possible and have found myself wishing I had more photographs/videos/etc of certain things.

However, I think most of us are already past the point of useful amounts of capture. I definitely noticed it for myself when I realized I don't really ever go back and look at most of the pictures I take. When I do, it is almost always pictures of people that are gone. Even then, as the parent comment said, having one or two pictures from a time period or maybe one from a particular event is more than enough. Your mind fills in the details and that's awesome!

As far as the other side of things, I have definitely found myself spending more time trying to capture as much as possible (or capturing "just the right one") than actually enjoying the event.

I'm not saying don't take pictures. Far from it. I'm saying I don't think we have to try and preserve people via pictures. Because you can't.

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majormajor8y ago

It's definitely something that deaths and similar events make you think about, but ultimately, I also find myself asking if it would be used at all. And if it was, would it be beneficial?

setr8y ago

My mother has a habit of taking a bunch of photos of an event, and posting all of them to fb, disregarding quality. Blurry shots, photos of people mid-scarfing down food, etc, it all goes up.

These kinds of collections are utterly worthless, and to a degree, kind of disgusting to go through. But the events themselves are perfectly worthy of being photographed, posted, and whatever.

The problem is the lack of curation. Its fine that she took many photos, as long as she only shared the two that actually looked good.

And collecting all of your experiences in video would be fine, if you only actually shared the 0.01% of it actually worth sharing. Of course no one wants to do it on your behalf.

majormajor8y ago

I don't think I have a problem: I have a bunch of pictures I look at, for me. It's just nothing more than that.

1 more reply

epicide8y ago

I think it's a great conversation to have and one I've seen come up more and more.

I totally understand the inclination to capture as much as possible and have found myself wishing I had more photographs/videos/etc of certain things.

As far as the other side of things, I have definitely found myself spending more time trying to capture as much as possible (or capturing "just the right one") than actually enjoying the event.

I'm not saying don't take pictures. Far from it. I'm saying I don't think we have to try and preserve people via pictures. Because you can't.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse