People who grew up with analog cameras still widely used, usually have photo albums, the real physical ones, with a lot of photos that can keep such good memories in it. But physical photos will degrade along time. It is prone to damages like chemical reactions that make the photos’ colors to change or fade, and also other unexpected things like flood, fire, or simply got lost, especially if you move a lot. As property prices also climbed, space is becoming an important matter and people’s lifestyles changed.
With the rise of technology in our daily life, many tech products offer a solution. Johnny Harris, the journalist behind Vox’s Borders, shared in one of his videos, how he keeps his photos and preserves the memories on Apple Photos. Keeping all the photos you feel worth keeping on a cloud-based product like Apple Photos can be very practical as you don’t have to store anything physically, you can access it from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection, and it can also help you to remember where and when the photo was taken, and even categorize who’s with you in those photos. But nothing is perfect. Apple Photos is very hard to use if you open it through the browser, which means you almost certainly need an Apple product to have a seamless experience, and the more you use it, the more you’re stuck in the Apple ecosystem.
Many people also rely on photo-sharing platforms to store photos and their memories. But these might not be ideal as platforms make changes regularly to keep up with the trend. They might change their product appearance, or eventually ask people to pay to use their product later in the future, or even discontinue the product altogether. It is true that everything you upload to the internet will be out there forever, but it doesn’t mean that it will stay the way you want it. Even when the platform is still around, most of the time, platforms compress the photo resolution, making it not ideal for the long-term as it will be too small for the future, as we know device resolution will only get bigger and bigger. Keeping our photos stored in an online service makes us dependant on it directly and indirectly.
After trying some trial-and-errors, I find the best alternative so far is to keep the digital photos in an external storage, with keeping a backup copy online is also recommended but might be too expensive and an overkill for some people. By also keeping it tidy by being mindful and only keeping the ones worth keeping even for decades, putting it in folders, and sort it by year or certain events, it will be a lot easier to find a specific photo later in the future. Let go of all those blurry, redundant, too dark, and too bright photos to keep the size small.
The important thing is to find what works the best for each of us, making sure that we have something to help us recall our good memories, and we know where to find them, even in the next decades to come.