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I find this incredibly hard to do. Mainly because what I have found interesting in my parents collection of media probably would have been thrown out. I found o

I find this incredibly hard to do. Mainly because what I have found interesting in my parents collection of media probably would have been thrown out. I found one of the more interesting videos to be of my grandfather just recording a random dinner with my parents mid week. He was an avid tech fan and always needed the newest equipment. To test this one out he setup a tripod and just recorded. They chatted about the weather, family, news and they made several jokes, told stories about family, and it was just this fly on the wall moment for me watching a taste of what that relationship was like. This little slice of life moment really stuck with me and I made it a point to take similar recordings on my own. Weddings are great, but they are a performance. It is an abstraction from who people are. I enjoy a more candid style which I feel like gets tossed a lot more these days in pursuit of what we consider perfection. Storage is cheap so I keep almost everything.

Podgajski 3y ago
What your parents kept in the past was related to how difficulty it was to take in store the media. The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. Surely not every moment in your life can be as significant as that moment that your family was around the table talking about the news and the weather. The best photo presentations I did for clients was when there were fewer photographs presented, not more.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. I don't think this is true. Otherwise we wouldn't treasure photos of our great grandparents, or even of ourselves when we were babies.
  - etrautmann 3y ago
    the relationship between you and the photo will change if you took it, a friend/family member took it but you were there, or an ancestor took it. I disagree with the parent that there's one purpose for photos, but I agree with them that less can be more. Curating your photos improves signal-to-noise and makes them more likely to have an emotional impact on you, family, or someone discovering them after you've passed.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Photo curation is a quite different thing from photo archival. Treating the two as the same problem makes things much harder, at least for me: If I know that every decision to not pick a given photo means that it’ll be permanently deleted, I end up with much larger albums than is probably reasonable for sharing with friends and family. Storage is cheap, time spent worrying is expensive. I like being able to revisit my presentation/curation choices at a later point in time, e.g. when my audience, medium (portrait vs. landscape!), or aesthetic criteria have changed.

Podgajski 3y ago

What your parents kept in the past was related to how difficulty it was to take in store the media. The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. Surely not every moment in your life can be as significant as that moment that your family was around the table talking about the news and the weather. The best photo presentations I did for clients was when there were fewer photographs presented, not more.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. I don't think this is true. Otherwise we wouldn't treasure photos of our great grandparents, or even of ourselves when we were babies.
- etrautmann 3y ago
  the relationship between you and the photo will change if you took it, a friend/family member took it but you were there, or an ancestor took it. I disagree with the parent that there's one purpose for photos, but I agree with them that less can be more. Curating your photos improves signal-to-noise and makes them more likely to have an emotional impact on you, family, or someone discovering them after you've passed.
lxgr 3y ago
Photo curation is a quite different thing from photo archival. Treating the two as the same problem makes things much harder, at least for me: If I know that every decision to not pick a given photo means that it’ll be permanently deleted, I end up with much larger albums than is probably reasonable for sharing with friends and family. Storage is cheap, time spent worrying is expensive. I like being able to revisit my presentation/curation choices at a later point in time, e.g. when my audience, medium (portrait vs. landscape!), or aesthetic criteria have changed.