4 ms·

Bad take alert. I have just over thirty years of my own photos (scans too) and a lifetime of my parents photos to go through. Time has the quality of making th

by vr46 4y ago

Bad take alert. I have just over thirty years of my own photos (scans too) and a lifetime of my parents photos to go through. Time has the quality of making the ordinary extraordinary and the race to purge one thing to make way for another can be passed on as a task to the next generation.

ilyt 4y ago
Frankly most of the problem could be fixed by screening what you put into long term storage. If photo looks bad now it won't look any better in 10 years!
- eitland 4y ago
  Here's the thing: There exist plenty relatively high quality photos from Christmas and other family gatherings. Photos of ordinary things like cutting grass or milking cows however are really few and far between. Which means some things will forever be hard to explain to my kids. I keep almost everything except duplicates because I can always delete them later.
- vr46 4y ago
  No, that's exactly the wrong take in a different way. A photograph may has intrinsic qualities aside from technical ones, and time will change how you or others feel about the picture. And for the technical issues on top of that, technology has certainly allowed me to extract more from older photos. I suspect film scanning tech has topped out, but the processing on computer has improved slightly, and I'm able to eke pretty much all the useful information there is out of a negative or transparency. RAW processors too have improved a lot in ten years, I revisited a photo story from 2009 and pulled out a few previously unseen pictures and 2022 Capture One smoked the Lightroom 5 processor. The camera has been superseded by 2 or 3 generations (a Canon 5DII) but you could not tell. Combining technological advances with a picture of something or someone that might not be around in ten years and you'll be glad to have it. Maybe start culling pictures from 20 years ago now instead? :D

by vr46 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

Frankly most of the problem could be fixed by screening what you put into long term storage. If photo looks bad now it won't look any better in 10 years!

eitland 4y ago
Here's the thing: There exist plenty relatively high quality photos from Christmas and other family gatherings. Photos of ordinary things like cutting grass or milking cows however are really few and far between. Which means some things will forever be hard to explain to my kids. I keep almost everything except duplicates because I can always delete them later.
vr46 4y ago
No, that's exactly the wrong take in a different way. A photograph may has intrinsic qualities aside from technical ones, and time will change how you or others feel about the picture. And for the technical issues on top of that, technology has certainly allowed me to extract more from older photos. I suspect film scanning tech has topped out, but the processing on computer has improved slightly, and I'm able to eke pretty much all the useful information there is out of a negative or transparency. RAW processors too have improved a lot in ten years, I revisited a photo story from 2009 and pulled out a few previously unseen pictures and 2022 Capture One smoked the Lightroom 5 processor. The camera has been superseded by 2 or 3 generations (a Canon 5DII) but you could not tell. Combining technological advances with a picture of something or someone that might not be around in ten years and you'll be glad to have it. Maybe start culling pictures from 20 years ago now instead? :D