Back in the good old days, we used to have vinyl albums and cassettes and photographs that you might actually put into albums. We were limited in how many albums we could own only by the size of our shelf/room/house and the depth of our pockets. You could tape someone else's albums, and build a large music collection off the back of the local library and friends who bought vinyl, but then the cost was in time, sitting by the turntable and putting in cassettes at the appropriate time, waiting for the record to end, pausing, turning over, writing out the inlay cards. If it would only have been an interesting task it could have become a hobby...
And with photographs, films were relatively expensive, developing them even more so. During some of my childhood years in the seventies, there were probably no more than 20 or 30 photos taken during the whole year! As a result, one valued the photos, kept them safely in a special drawer and selected the best ones for frames or albums.
Digital has changed all that. Despite the best efforts of the large record companies, some artists, the performing rights agencies and various governments, the sharing of mp3s is abundant and the cost of albums and individual tracks sold digitally is far lower than it was when a physical product was involved. Most people now have a far larger digital music collection, whether or not they paid for it, which they may hold in two places: on their main computer and on their mp3 player. New services from Apple and Amazon allow collections to be pseudo-saved to the cloud, but the lack of a physical product to care for and cherish means that most people don't actually make sure their music collection is safe.
And again, the same goes for photographs. The advantage of digital is that you can see the image immediately after taking it, and take another, and another, if it isn't up to scratch. But do you then delete the 'bad' images? I don't, and I suspect many don't. I intend to, but don't have the time when it comes to putting the images on the computer, so simply save everything to go through them all carefully and properly (with appropriate Photoshopping where necessary) when I have time. Who has time?
Cloud services, such as Flickr and Picasa, have existed for many years, but I'd be interested to know what percentage of casual photographers put their photos up on such sites? I started uploading photos of our baby, born last August, to Picasa so that his grandparents who live abroad could see the evolution. I didn't have time to edit the photos, so after 8 months had uploaded over 2000 photos! And thank Darwin I did.
I have always taken 'back-ups' seriously, having a good quality large external hard drive to make a clone of everything stored on my computer, including images and music.
Then I changed my computer...so the back-up was temporarily the only copy...and as soon as I had a moment (new babies notwithstanding) I was going to create a new 'original' from the back-up.
However, before I could do that, the external drive took a wee knock and stopped working. Three so-called professional data retrieving companies later and over £350 spent and there is no possibility of getting the data back from that hard drive.
In short, I have lost all photos and all memories for the past 8 years. All holidays, friends' weddings, family gatherings, pregnancy...(my partner's, not mine)... if only we'd printed off a couple of photos per 'event' for an album... if only I'd backed-up to the cloud as well (which I now have...can you hear the horse galloping away from the closed stable doors?)... if only I'd made the 'new original'... if only if only...
The music I can rerecord/repurchase/reborrow... though it might take a long long time to do so. But what price memories? The very fact that I had thousands and thousands and thousands of digital photos stopped me selecting the good ones for printing. The very fact that I had so many photos stopped me creating more back-ups (e.g. to DVDs).
When I look at my grandparents' photos, there are probably no more than 50 images to look through, showing a few relatives and their friends promenading in a park or standing formally in a front room.
When I look at my parents' photos, there are over a hundred... probably... but not an abundance. Our childhood birthdays warranted maybe a maximum of 5 photos. A holiday might warrant a full roll of film, but with 120 films that meant 12 images. Whoopie doo!
When our grandchildren look back at our photos, however, if they ever find the time, they will find tens of thousands of photos. I can't look at them all, will they? Is there any point in saving so many photos? If I'm ever rich enough to retire, will I want to finally sort them and print the good ones?
What we need, therefore, is an artificial limit placed on our digital files. Programs such as Picasa, or the camera software itself, should force us to choose a maximum of 5 photos per day for storing. The others will self-destruct after a given time limit forcing us to make the choice now.
Perhaps we could get a special 'event' button that would allow us, only twice per year, to increase that limit. To what, 10?
We would still have the problem of making sure we backed-up our back-ups, but perhaps that would force us to make sure we made copies, printed the best ones and ensured that our descendants had a vaguely manageable set of memories to look at.
Digital has cost me my memories. The solution is to create scarcity and permanence...
...and I would have put a photo or two in this blog...but I lost them all...
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