The digital shoebox

We need a better system of keeping and passing on the digital jewels of family life and discarding the flotsam and jetsam.

My mother was forensic in her documentation of her family. The back of each black and white photograph, taken with a Box Brownie camera, was inscribed with a date, place and kids named left to right. There are more than 300 of these photos covering the 1950s and the 1960s (and earlier); they are followed by a similar number of colour photos taken over the following 20 years, mostly of grandchildren.

Just over a decade ago I started collecting and copying every family photograph I could get my hands on. I realised that following the introduction of digital cameras in the early 2000s we were in danger of losing continuity of our family’s photographic record. Not for want of picture-taking, or the cost of photography, but because of the number of images. So many photos are taken now that their value is diminished. They can exist in the ether, on a hard drive, on a phone that can be lost or superseded, or stored on the computer in a folder containing the odd significant photo among myriad other dreary images.

Even if you are able to locate digitally stored photos, there’s the issue of how to retrieve, filter and store important pictures. This isn’t like opening a photo album; protocols need to be learnt. And, no, it isn’t helpful for the haughty computer-literate to scold with assurances that “it’s all so intuitive”. It isn’t. I have better things to remember than how to retrieve and store digital images. How should they be tagged, annotated and made accessible to those who follow? I am concerned that by about 2030, the family photographic record will more or less cease to exist beyond, say, 2003, save for the odd pic that for some reason was printed.

I scanned all of my mother’s 300 black and white photos, arranged them in chronological order (in PowerPoint) and set about asking aunties (usually the keepers of such things) for more. My collection now stands at more than 500 and dates from the 1860s. Where do I store these pics? In the cloud? A privately accessed website? I don’t want these photos distributed; I want them perused only by my immediate family.

In the old days, back in the 20th century, photos were printed and stored in albums or in shoe boxes stashed in wardrobes. As basic as this system seems, it could well turn out to be the most effective way of passing on images to the next generation. You cannot save and pass on a family photographic record if it is being expanded at a rate of 1000 images a year across a digital lifetime. The value of an old-style photo album is that it showcased life’s best bits. What joy it gives grandparents, and grandchildren, to peruse an old photo album together and see the lives, the fashion; who was in the family circle “back then”.

Can I set up a cloud-based storage system where pics are saved, dated, tagged to a place, with access rights that can be granted (or denied) or passed on to others with powers of attorney? Can this sequence of images be augmented with other pictures added years later? And can this be done without the need for training and technology that will be superseded in 10 or 20 or 50 years?

New technology has improved so much about modern life. And yet it seems that with technology reducing the cost of photo-taking, the truly important aspects of human life – what is important at a familial level – are in danger of being lost, drowned out, by a rising tide of repetitive and pointless imagery. We need a better system of keeping and passing on the digital jewels of family life and discarding the flotsam and jetsam.