3 ms·

> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is how you lose historical

by chii 3y ago

> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is how you lose historical records, because the critical eye of the day is going to be very different in 50 years. have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM , which is a video of the British Library's archive. They collect published material, no matter how mundane it might seem to be, because only someone from the future looking back can tell whether it was worth preserving. Digital data is trivial to preserve compared to physical materials! Don't delete the digital photos!

Podgajski 3y ago
I don’t believe we could ever capture enough photographic and visual data to perfectly re-create the past. So where do you personally stop? That’s the question I was asking. It’s sort of a future fear of missing out your suffering from.
- wantoncl 3y ago
  To offer a counterpoint: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn... Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction. Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?
davidmurdoch 3y ago
When I read that I just thought I should just delete everything then.
- Podgajski 3y ago
  Ha! I’m curious, why is that? I’m curious because in the mid 90s, I burned all my black-and-white film negatives in a rage of creativity. I felt like all my old work was dead and I was just relying on that and not creating anything new. I look back at that moment with both her and liberation so it’s hard to say whether it was good or bad.
raffraffraff 3y ago
I had a minor fascination with "life in the 70s" in Ireland. I wanted to know what sort of life I could have if I was sitting catipulted back in time 50 years. What would I eat? How often would I wash? What job would I do? What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet). If I went to my local grocery, what could I get? You'd think that this should be easy to answer but it really isn't. For example, you might think that you could just search for music created prior to 1975 and that's the list of music I'd listen to. But it isn't. I can remember how insanely hard it was to get a copy of something, even in the 90s. I wanted a track by Nirvana called D7. At the time I was searching for it, it hasn't been released. I heard it on an obscure pirate radio station. I eventually found it while visiting London, inside a huge HMV store, in the ridiculously expensive imports section. The single was more expensive than two regular albums. So the actual list of music that you might reasonably hear, or hear of, and then to be able to get... It's pretty tiny. Similarly, you might be able to get your hands on mangos, chilis and spices, but not in my old town. You'd be lucky to find peppers. I found a jigsaw puzzle, "brands from the 70s", which has all the most popular supermarket brands you'd find in the UK & Ireland. My mother spent 10 minutes looking at the photo on the box, stabbing the various items with her finger, saying "Oooh, I remember when the packaging looked like that! And those sweets! You can't get them any more!" and off she goes, remembering some story from her childhood in the 60s... some old man who used to call into their house for a chat on his way up the road, and would have a bar of Fry's Chocolate Creme to split between 5 kids...
- martythemaniak 3y ago
  > What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet) Don't forget car exhaust! The air here is so clean now I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car while driving. It's hard to imagine everything smelling like that all the time.
  - pbmonster 3y ago
    > I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car It's worth noting that most classic cars are tuned running too rich fuel mixture - because they are driven so rarely, it's more important that the engine runs at all than that the engine is running efficiently. Those cars smelled different - once the choke was off - wen they where new.
throw_pm23 3y ago
> This is how you lose historical records I think GP is right. If you look at most people's photo albums, there will be a picture and then five blurry versions of it taken seconds apart from each other. Being a bit selective often means you will be more likely to browse the album again.
- scruple 3y ago
  I have two shared albums on Google Photos. One is an archive that holds (essentially) every picture of our kids. The other is a curated album of pictures from the first. But I started these albums when our twins were born, and now we've got 3 kids, so there's... ~12,000 in the everything album and ~700 in the curated album. I try to get a couple of pictures in there every week or two, since we don't do social media but want to share pictures with family and friends.
prmoustache 3y ago
On the other hand with digital cameras and phones we tend to take several photos of the same scene. In that case it would help taking the few seconds to decide on which one is the best and delete the others. We rarely do that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by chii 3y ago

Podgajski 3y ago

I don’t believe we could ever capture enough photographic and visual data to perfectly re-create the past. So where do you personally stop? That’s the question I was asking. It’s sort of a future fear of missing out your suffering from.

wantoncl 3y ago
To offer a counterpoint: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn... Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction. Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?

davidmurdoch 3y ago

When I read that I just thought I should just delete everything then.

Podgajski 3y ago
Ha! I’m curious, why is that? I’m curious because in the mid 90s, I burned all my black-and-white film negatives in a rage of creativity. I felt like all my old work was dead and I was just relying on that and not creating anything new. I look back at that moment with both her and liberation so it’s hard to say whether it was good or bad.

raffraffraff 3y ago

I had a minor fascination with "life in the 70s" in Ireland. I wanted to know what sort of life I could have if I was sitting catipulted back in time 50 years. What would I eat? How often would I wash? What job would I do? What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet). If I went to my local grocery, what could I get? You'd think that this should be easy to answer but it really isn't. For example, you might think that you could just search for music created prior to 1975 and that's the list of music I'd listen to. But it isn't. I can remember how insanely hard it was to get a copy of something, even in the 90s. I wanted a track by Nirvana called D7. At the time I was searching for it, it hasn't been released. I heard it on an obscure pirate radio station. I eventually found it while visiting London, inside a huge HMV store, in the ridiculously expensive imports section. The single was more expensive than two regular albums. So the actual list of music that you might reasonably hear, or hear of, and then to be able to get... It's pretty tiny. Similarly, you might be able to get your hands on mangos, chilis and spices, but not in my old town. You'd be lucky to find peppers. I found a jigsaw puzzle, "brands from the 70s", which has all the most popular supermarket brands you'd find in the UK & Ireland. My mother spent 10 minutes looking at the photo on the box, stabbing the various items with her finger, saying "Oooh, I remember when the packaging looked like that! And those sweets! You can't get them any more!" and off she goes, remembering some story from her childhood in the 60s... some old man who used to call into their house for a chat on his way up the road, and would have a bar of Fry's Chocolate Creme to split between 5 kids...

martythemaniak 3y ago
> What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet) Don't forget car exhaust! The air here is so clean now I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car while driving. It's hard to imagine everything smelling like that all the time.
- pbmonster 3y ago
  > I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car It's worth noting that most classic cars are tuned running too rich fuel mixture - because they are driven so rarely, it's more important that the engine runs at all than that the engine is running efficiently. Those cars smelled different - once the choke was off - wen they where new.

throw_pm23 3y ago

> This is how you lose historical records I think GP is right. If you look at most people's photo albums, there will be a picture and then five blurry versions of it taken seconds apart from each other. Being a bit selective often means you will be more likely to browse the album again.

scruple 3y ago
I have two shared albums on Google Photos. One is an archive that holds (essentially) every picture of our kids. The other is a curated album of pictures from the first. But I started these albums when our twins were born, and now we've got 3 kids, so there's... ~12,000 in the everything album and ~700 in the curated album. I try to get a couple of pictures in there every week or two, since we don't do social media but want to share pictures with family and friends.

prmoustache 3y ago

On the other hand with digital cameras and phones we tend to take several photos of the same scene. In that case it would help taking the few seconds to decide on which one is the best and delete the others. We rarely do that.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]