The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are more important to a family because there are so few of them. I only have one picture of my grandfather

The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are more important to a family because there are so few of them. I only have one picture of my grandfather because it was taken when cameras were rarer than hen's teeth and 35mm film hadn't been invented yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of pictures between the family members. Every vacation, every meal, every unimportant moment in time. I don't have time to look at my own pictures and I don't expect anyone else ever will. Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it. We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look. I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.