1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive
2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for
1 = are all the typical family group pics, lots of posing
2 = the photos where the subjects may not even know that they are being photographed, while doing the things they are cherished for by others. Sometimes they might not even like the presented actvities, but everyone else around them appreciates it .
- Photos of people repairing their family's gadgets
- Photos of people doing mundane tasks, ironing their clothes, cooking dinner for everyone, being exhausted, reading to others...
- This is what prevails while people are still alive who remember you. What you will be remembered by. Mostly what you did for other people and how people observed you.
Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these pics, than by typical family group photos.
Agree, but the other part of the advice I think is important and maybe even not fully explained in this blog post. Taking great photos is about using great light, this matters more than composition (you can crop in post) in my opinion. Rule of thirds is just a guideline, not a rule, if you’ve got great light and an interesting subject I couldn’t care less where those thirds lines sit. I mostly shoot on an old hassleblad with 6x6 square negatives and I often frame my shots with my subjects in the middle of the frame.
I have also done what the OP is describing, scanning all my family’s negatives. I wanted to devote the amount of time it takes me to scan and color correct a frame to a scant few of the images. My family liked to take “snaps” of places and vacations (think non-descript cornfields or national park visitor centers) and hostage photos of the kids clearly taken against our will.
I taught myself how to shoot on film to learn what I was doing, but going to the community darkrooom was the real education. I learned how good photographers used the light and saw the world by watching them develop and seeing the end product. Photography is just like any other endeavor, you get out of it what you put into it. For your kids and your kids kids, don’t just put into it some AI-computationally adjusted selfies and snaps of the tops of kids heads. Put some effort in, figure out what good light is, and take candid photos.
Might depend on your personality a bit. Basically all my favorite photos of lost relatives and friends were taken on awful cameras by people with no knowledge of lighting or composition for that matter. The photos (to me) are valuable for a wholly different reason, it never even occurred to me until this moment that they were probably bad photographers.
Yup, the best pictures I have, are those snapshots of real life action. Not the super prepared professional ones requiring set up (we also have those, my sister is a photographer).
Ah no, I was talking about my own pictures.
Some of the staged pictures my sister make of us, are nice as well, but overall I much prefer the blurry snapshot or video of a nice scene.
(But then again, my sister especially recommended to me to choose my partner as she would look very good on pictures, I replied I have other priorities, but ended up with her anyway)
> Isn’t the sign of a professional that they don’t need that setup?
A professional should be able to get good results without it, but also when you are a professional, the incremental benefit of having the equipment available and using it where appropriate is more than worthwhile.
This is probably the best way to get a good photo regarding the people in it. Composition, lighting are important as far as they make the picture "readable" if what you're looking for is the memory of the person. You'll still look kindly on a dark, blurry photo of a very authentic moment rather than an exceptionally well composed photo that's so staged you can't match it against the person you knew.
Staged photos aren't all bad, they're just usually unrealistic if you knew the people. Many group photos have a bunch of upright poses and stiff faces that maybe those people never had naturally. So you recognize the face but not the person, it's not the memory of them you would keep.
If you want to capture the memory of a person, take photos of them doing whatever they were usually doing, with their usual expression, lighting and composition be damned.
Without going into the 50 different things that go into a good photo, where you position yourself and the light are important. Being technically sound (correct exposure, depth of field) is the floor, then where the light is coming from, its quality and feel, there is a ton that goes into this. This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful than some random person’s photos walking around with a point and shoot.
I agree with you, I basically never take the staged photos (don’t have a self timer on my cameras anyway) but just snapping the shutter when people are doing things isn’t enough. I have boxes and boxes of photos of my family that I’m not even spending the time to scan and color correct because it’s not worth it. The great ones combine good light, technically correct, and an interesting subject.
> This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful
You're just on a different, more professional rail. Talking about professionals doing professional stuff. You don't warm your tires before you go for a drive just because that's why F1 cars have so much more grip in slow corners.
Capturing the perfect moment in the perfect technical conditions is perfect. But that doesn't happen very often in real life with family moments. Most of those perfect moments will be absolutely serendipitous and you'll capture them however you can. Not a single non-photographer looks at the snapshot of the perfect moment and thinks "different ISO would have been so much better, and look at those harsh shadows".
One of the photos most dear to me and my entire family was taken at the light of a low-power infrared heater. Which is to say just enough light to not accidentally poke a finger in your eye. The details are only barely visible but you can tell who's there, everything is as noisy as you can imagine and more, and the brightest thing in the picture is the glow in the dark pacifier between the 2 figures. And no amount of good lighting would have made that picture better without ruining the moment.
In fact almost all of the "most memorable" pictures in my album are technically crap. Over- or underexposed, crappy film stock or digital resolution, bad framing, bad focus, motion blur, fringing, the list goes on to tick all the mistakes one could possibly make. They're all subjectively better than the technically superior shots because the moment they captured was better. If you talk about family it will always be the moment. If you can make it technically good, go for it, it's just icing on the cake.
I think I'm being misinterpreted, probably my fault for the way I'm explaining things, I'm trying to be concise but I'm passionate about photography so I'm struggling.
I am not a pro, so far from it. I'd be embarrassed to even let a pro see my work. I don't want to advocate for needing things to be technically perfect, what I was advocating for was taking a single class, reading a single book, studying a couple blog posts or something. The little changes you can pick up can add so much to a photo. Say you move a little so the sun isn't behind your subjects, or you have the camera out explicitly in the winter mornings when the light is streaming into your windows and hitting a light curtain over the window... you've got yourself a free soft box. Or you've got the camera out in the hours before/after sunset and sunrise.
Little changes to behavior, your position, use of light that can put the extra thing on a photo that would already be great because it was a great moment.
I found a harddisk with a ton of ripped MiniDV footage of the kids when they were young. What I value most isn't the kids. Sure, they're adorable and I have a ton of snapshots from them...but it's things like 'oh, we had that TV then, oh, that room still had carpet, man, the trees were really short, oh that really annoying noise the parrot makes? He's been doing it for more than 20 years.'
It's not the subjects, it's the context that is cherished.
I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.
But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.
I travelled a lot circa 2008-10 in and around Asia and recently I've been uploading all those old travel photos to Google Photos simply because every day it randomly pops up pictures from a place I once visited.
Even the bad photos I took back then (I didn't have a great camera) are way better at keeping those memories alive than I would have expected, they may not be the best, but I was there and I took them.
My wife and I started traveling a lot after my younger son graduated and post Covid mid 2021 and we even did the “digital nomad” thing for a year. We still go somewhere to do something around a dozen times a year.
I blog about it. It isn’t for anyone else’s benefit but mine and I doubt I get any traffic to it. It’s more of a public journal. I pay $5 a month for MicroBlog. Our travel season is usually between March and October.
The blog is a much better way to remember trips than just static pictures.
I've had the same experience. My new approach is to do a mental check to see if I could get the same picture from a google search. If not then I get out the camera. That in effect compels me to either enjoy the moment, or to include people in the photo to make it unique.
Pictures of the Grand Canyon. You can see on Google. pictures of the grand canyon with my kid in the foreground... Pictures of a city nearby. You can find on Google pictures of the city nearby from the top of the tallest building in the city nearby. No. Out my back door if I turn left 10° more than I normally do I'll quickly arrive in a spot no human has stood in for decades. Not in a Google search.
I don't want to claim that maybe it's the surroundings that are mundane, because I don't find that true. One of my favorite films is koyanisqatsi, which is, really, just industrial film of earth. As mundane as it gets.
I suppose I cannot fathom this yardstick you describe.
I borrowed a couple Annie Liebovitz portrait books from the library for inspiration. Lots of good poses in there, rather than the standard straight ahead picture.
My favorite is the one of Bruce Springsteen sitting on his motorbike. I'm going to try and recreate it.
I've seen various photos of Keith Richards. What's amazing is he's not a handsome man, but somehow the photos of him are incredible.
Other comments cover it as well, but generally, you'll see categories like (none are hard and fast, there's overlap, etc)...
- portraits = posed photos with a person as subject
- snapshots / candids = what you describe as "live" photos
- street = snapshots, but of random people moving about their lives (much of photojournalism falls into this category, where the photographer is doing street photography at an event)
- landscapes = photos of the world, where people are not the primary subject, often wider angle
- wildlife = photos of animals, often with a very long telephoto lens
- macro = "super zoomed in" / close up (technically where the subject is equal or larger than the sensor on the camera)
Those are photographs. The other kind are portraits.
Incidentally, the word "selfie" used to be an acronym for "self-portrait." Now it refers to any kind of portrait (posed, but not necessarily of the picture-taker), so it has morphed into an acronym for just "portrait".
I've heard them called "candids" or candid shots. The only picture I have of my grandfather (who died when my father was young) is of him taking out the trash.
I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became an adult.
I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.
This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.
Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!
God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.
Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.
I'm fascinated by the "family memory TV" idea. Losing cherished memories—photos, videos, or writings—is a recurring fear of mine and a big reason I’ve embraced digital hoarding. Having a place to share this with yourself and others is really powerful.
Could you share more details about your setup? Do videos play continuously in your living room, or are they triggered by presence? Is sound muted or do you just have it at a lower level?
> God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Why? I've done data takeout from multiple social media sites. It's much less tedious than babysitting VHS->digital transfer (which I've also done).
The generalized answer is layered curation versus tagged curation. In my VHS scenario, there are several layers involved. First, I'm taking the video because I think there's something important going on. Many times I'll be in the background explaining why I'm recording this for the future. When the tapes and DVDs were made, there's a general summary of the topic, ie "Children Christmas plays and grandma's house, 1993" Finally, when I'm scanning/ripping, I'm also adding information and filtering as desired.
My next project is exactly what you mention: using takeout. This project is involving going through hundreds if not thousands of videos with names like "45437905_521345565468507_6881371949495794958_n_10156232738427354.mp4" all stuck in one big folder. 10-30% of these are probably memes or other throwaway stuff, mostly because there is little to no curation going on (until now). Even if I sort keep from delete, there's still the issue of generalized topic. (FB Takeout, for instance, gives all the files the same date) Assuming I could go through them all in some automated fashion, I'd still only end up with categories an automated system could provide. That's far too reductionist to actually work, eg who wants pictures of the dinners you ate, but that one time they made the 17-layer cake, oh yeah, don't want to forget that. These edge cases are part of what makes the curation so personalized and special.
Feed-based sharing is not the same activity as recording for the future. There are different goals, audiences, situations, etc. More specifically, I'm probably going to end up with 4-7 huge hunks of hundreds of impenetrable filenames from different services, each with their own nuances -- and that's after going through takeout.
Starting in on that next project today, yikes, the last thing I want is thousands of small randomized videos from my life. You could conceivably do that by wearing a GoPro around and coding a bit. That would be a terrible (and egocentric) thing to inflict on house guests.
My wife used to give me shit for recording her and the children when we did things like the grand canyon and aquarium and what not. She used to say I should be taking pictures or filming the event or activity.
Now that they're older, she gets it. I can Google a dolphin, but I can't Google my oldest's reaction to seeing one.
Great tips in here! And I know this isn’t about videos… but, don’t forget about videos.
I love taking pictures. In particular, candid moment-capturing portraits that reveal something about the subject. Also, technically challenging ones with really long exposures (eg around a campfire), or narrow depth of field (eg of my kids playing in the backyard). I like to think I’ve taken plenty of “good” photos of my family over the years.
But something I’ve found is what I go back to the most are those poor quality, poorly edited, silly little videos I take of my family just living life. I used to avoid video because the outcome was just too hard to control. They would never turn out “good”.
But flipping through my digital albums now, I wish i took more videos. A poor video can capture a lot… maybe even more than a great picture. So I find myself taking a lot more videos now.
I gave my daughter a toy camera around age 2.5 or 3 and didn't realize it also captured video. She had unintentionally discovered the video function and has since captured many conversations, photos of our old house, videos of car rides, and loving moments between our family.
She's had it for almost 3 years now and it's been one of her longest lasting toys and is, without a doubt, the most meaningful. It gives "seeing the world through her eyes" a whole new meaning.
My 4yo child recently received a $10 digital camera at a generous birthday party and independently has figured out how to take videos (in addition to photos). Some self interviews, some videos of his sibling, his family. It really is amazing to see things from his eyes.
I do an annual one-take video around the house with the family, just talking about what has changed. Open cabinets and show what is in them. Talk about what is going on that week and what you are looking forward to. It usually goes for 20-30 minutes.
Those videos are destined to be pure family nostalgia gold. I hope you're saving them in a format that can be easily backed up and shared with family members, both present and future.
I also suggest taking a few candid snapshots and putting them into a book at some point. Video is good, but there's something special about a physical album that you can pass down for generations. If you distribute several copies of the books to various relatives, I'd be willing to bet they'll outlast the videos in the long run.
I agree, a frozen moment in time is special. But it also doesn’t quite capture subtleties that require the time dimension… e.g.; a quirky speech pattern that was a constant for a year or two but then just disappeared.
There is a related problem, which I hit while scanning family archives going back slightly more than 100 years. There is no good photo archival software.
If you now rushed to click "reply" to say that yes, of course there is, right here, hold your horses. You probably do not understand the problem.
Good photo archival software would let me keep my photos in formats that will be readable 25 years from now. It must not rely on any company being in business or offering any service.
It must support storing the same picture in multiple formats. It must support assigning dates to pictures that are not the same as the file date nor the EXIF date. It must support assigning imprecise dates (just a year, or ideally an interval).
It must support storing multiple files as part of the same "image", and I do not mean multiple versions/formats of an image here. Examples: front and back of a scanned paper photo, or 24 scans of a large format picture that are then merged together into a resulting stitched image.
All that information must be preserved in ways that will let me recover it even without any software (e.g. files in the filesystem).
I used many solutions over the years, and got royally screwed by most, the most recent one being Apple shutting down Aperture (which did most of these things pretty well). I am now close to writing my own software.
EDIT: to all those who respond with "just store it as files" — yes, of course they should be stored as files. But that's not an answer. You do want searchability, nice visual access, and other niceties on top of the basic plumbing.
It's open-source, so no worries about a company shutting it down, and it handles a lot of the stuff you're asking for. It’s designed for organizing and managing research photos, but it has features that fit archival needs pretty well.
Open and future-proof: Metadata is stored in JSON-LD, so even if Tropy disappears, your data isn’t locked up. It doesn’t modify your files either, so your originals are safe.
Flexible metadata: You can assign custom dates (even imprecise ones like "circa 1920" or a date range) and add other metadata fields to fit your needs. It’s not tied to EXIF or file timestamps, which is a big plus.
Related files: Tropy lets you group multiple images (e.g., front and back of a photo or parts of a large scanned image) into a single "item." Relationships are preserved, and you can see them all in the same context.
Search and organization: It’s way better than just dumping files into a folder. You get tags, categories, and a solid search interface to make your archive usable.
That is actually a really good suggestion! Thank you, I did not know about this project, and it is quite close to what I'm looking for. Perhaps I won't have to write all of the software myself!
My photo archival software is jpegs in a directory called 'photos'. Sometimes with subdirectories by date. Backed up however I'm backing up my computer.
For true durability, you've got to embrace the lowest common denominator.
Those rare features you can only get from Software X will lock you into Software X. If you want your archive to outlive Software X, you gotta do without them.
100% agreed. Protip: You can store metadata tags like the location or people in the picture by including them in the filenames of those jpegs, and then search it with a tool like "find".
Technically, you could do this in Mylio but probably not in the way you want.
Mylio stores “Live Photos” as
Photo.extension <- the “photo” it shows in the interface
Photo.xmp <- all the metatdata
Photo.myb <- everything else
Literally the myb is just a zip of everything else associated with the photo. So in the “Live Photo” case that would be the associated video file. If you have edited the file in Apple photos that also includes the XML Apple uses to non destructively perform the edit. As well as a copy of the original photo.
In your case you could just manually create the myb file by zipping up all the associated extra photos and changing the extension.
However the interface would only show the single main photo.
The best solution I've come up with is jpgs in a yyyy/mm folder structure + EXIF metadata. I know it's not your ideal, but it'll be supported and platform agnostic for the forseeable future, and there are plenty of apps that can search metdata tags.
That said - I used to rigorously tag photos for the event, place, and people in them, but it's just too much work. Some tooling around batch and auto tagging would be great, so long as it wrote back to the original image EXIF.
darktable does all of this. It’s a complex application like Aperture or Light Table. You run it on your own macos, Windows or Linux computer. You can write your own software to extend or change it. Photos.app does most of this sans the Windows, Linux or “write your own” parts.
This was my first reaction too, but it scratches an itch for me as well - I've thought about making a proper photo archival system many times and just never got around to giving it a shot.
If you just start taking photos (with permission) and keep taking them eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again in most cases. It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger. Each exposure is a chance at a good photo, for the most part.
The thing about family photos that's most important is to have THE NAMES of everyone in the photo, not "mom" or "lucy"... actual full names, so that someone in a generation or two can actually understand who is who. My wife's family had that... but then the photos were ripped out of the album, and all context was lost. 8(
As much as possible, I've got every face tagged in my photos so sproutlet has something useful when the time comes.
> It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger
This, this, this, and this!!!
My mother is the one that takes the initiative of taking pictures of people during events (whether important or just small outings). What she has a hard time understanding is that you must spam the trigger. She tries to frame the picture perfectly, and everyone on their most photogenic faces. Then, she takes ONE shot and oh... somebody closed their eyes a bit. "Let's go for another one, everyone go back in place!"
What she doesn't understand is that the best and most memorable pictures isn't the one where people are smiling straight into the camera. It's when people are doing something they enjoy and don't even notice the camera and don't do a perfect model pose.
I'm lucky if I delete only 9 of the 10 photos I took!
> > It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger
> This, this, this, and this!!!
Except that time is a huge cost. Merely taking the photos is quick, but sorting through them is slow and mind-bogglingly boring. The more photos you take, the larger the chaos is (and the more space gets wasted). If you are the kind of person who diligently categorizes photos right after they are taken, then sure, go ahead spamming the trigger; otherwise you'll just end up with with exhausted storage, and less and less motivation (over time) to start sorting through that ever growing heap of manure.
> Merely taking the photos is quick, but sorting through them is slow and mind-bogglingly boring.
I said this in another comment, but after a typical shooting it takes about 10 seconds - not more - to sort through everything. We don't take hundreds of pictures...
The alternative is taking only one picture and calling it a day - whether you made an ugly face or not. A couple of times I've asked people to take a picture of somebody else and me, and sometimes they only take one picture and either me or that person makes an ugly face... If he pressed the button 4 times I'm sure there would have been a fine picture.
I’ve actually found a lot of benefit in the exact opposite. I started shooting film which does have a pretty big cost per trigger press and it has forced me to consider each shot a lot more.
For me, I found having hundreds of photos on my DSLR’s SD card a daunting task and the raw photos would sit for months before I’d get around to reviewing them (if I even bothered at all).
Sitting down and spending an evening developing/scanning/converting negatives, however, I find rather enjoyable.
To each their own; I think the important thing is to find a workflow that works for you so you can capture as many memories as possible!
For most people, taking pictures is done with their smartphone - which is good enough, right!
My view is that striving for a perfect shot is counter-productive as you will better reminisce the memories by having taken a random picture of someone doing a goofy thing with a weird face.
I usually take 10 seconds after taking the pictures to discard those that don't deserve to be saved. In contrast, my mother, who strives for perfect pictures, has a lot more duplicate pics than I do.
>eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again
This is my issue. Social media has made this much more difficult for me, people generally want to look good in all the pictures. I never post them anywhere, maybe to a small group chat, but still it's the natural instinct many people have when they see a camera out.
So I find people getting self-conscious or otherwise uncomfortable/annoyed when I try to get candid shots. But I know they will appreciate them later, and often do, but it's hard to push past this initial reaction.
These threads have been helpful and motivating -- I will try to reference them later with family to explain why I'm taking all these pictures, and why they shouldn't stress too much about how they look.
There was a similar journey for our family after our parents passed and indeed, the photos with people doing ordinary things are the ones we share and enjoy. The Grand Canyon has a way of looking the same now as it did in 1955 and so those photos were discarded. Five boxes of photo albums were examined and the photos to keep were cut out and sent to be digitized organized by year and topic. I am glad someone wrote about their experience and the tips that come from having spent examining a life well photographed.
I can understand the sentiment not to add extra work of scanning pictures of items that have seemingly not changed over the years. But I personally find these pictures interesting. I love to look at old pictures of say a square or a street and see how much or little has changed. I guess it depends on the viewer but I hope my kids don‘t feel the need to dump the hundreds and thousands of pictures of things they’re not a focus of.
But I agree 100% on the non staged photo motive part. I took a lot of photos of my kids over the years and other people asked me to do the same for their kids. With the question why the fotos looked so good. I always explained my two secrets.
1. Go down to the same level as your kid. Most parents snap pictures of their little ones from above. This looks like a screenshot from the eye. The different perspective to see a kid how another kid sees it is more fascinating.
2. Don‘t Stage the Fotos. Try to capture interesting moments. You may have to lurk or wait. If you know the person well you get a feeling when a certain emotion will show on their face. That is something a staged photo won‘t give you.
Doing group photos like this becomes more and more difficult of course. And when kids age they become more and more aware of the camera.
My wife and I* scanned 4000+ film prints with an Epson scanner I bought in frustration at not finding a well regarded negative scanner. It took a weekend. They're untagged except by any writing on the film packs or the photos themselves.
It isn't that big of a deal. I'd do it for pay for other people if someone absolutely needed it, but it isn't that hard. 100GB including the static gallery site I set up, currently in glacier and on two NAS.
I am confused. Is that Epson scanner specifically for photos, or did you just use a regular document scanner and the document feeder happened to work with photos? Or did you actually do it manually?
that didn't exist in 2017 when we did these scans - all the negative scanners were approaching $5000 or more, and were very fiddly and manual. However they did give great output. The epson print scanner did great, though, and there was no fiddling. Put prints in the top, push a button, collect prints from the bottom 15 seconds later, type a folder/collection name, repeat the process.
good to see there's a competitive negative scanner in the sphere, now!
I second his opinion. No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower. Loved ones of course. But also the street! What I find the most interesting in old family pictures is a window into how people I know, or only apart by only one degree of separation, lived at a completely different time. What seemed mundane at the time is often the most amusing a century later. That's also what I like in old movies. Like just the streets of Paris in the early 70s look foreign to a modern eye. Hardly any traffic, you could park anywhere, hardly any advertising boards.
>No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower. //
One proviso to this - it's a travel record.
The next picture is a couple standing at the door to an apartment... but where is it... 'oh yeah Paris; your mother and i visited college friends. Forgot we'd even been there'.
Sure, way better with a person on the frame, but recognisable landmarks can still have utility in a photo collection.
I was working through my parent's slides and found pictures of St.Marks square -- didn't even know they had been to Italy.
For capturing memories, try to think about photos in small series...
Family at a Metro stop
Generic Eiffel Tower photo
Family at Eiffel Tower
Family eating a baguette walking down a random street
Etc.
As you say, they all provide context and often tell more of a story than a single candid of the family.
As for "include the photographer": unfortunately the photographer (aka me) is usually the only one who reads these articles. Whenever I ask someone else to take pictures of me they ask me to strike an artificial pose and then take a full-body shot. Hopefully one day my nephews will say "we don't know what uncle probably_wrong really looked like, but his pictures were great".
As for the suggestion: I stick to the rule "do not make albums with more than 36 pictures" which is the number of photos a roll of film used to deliver reliably. If you take 300 pictures and stick to the top 1% you'll quickly learn which pictures are worth keeping. Your friends and family will be silently grateful.
After doing some in-house scanning I sent a bunch of stuff out. At the time, there was a company in CA that put stuff on a pallet to India. A bit butt clenching but it was great and I wrote a review for CNET where I was in the Blog Network at the time. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/reviewing-the-result...
Was probably more selective than you. And agree that a lot of the day-to-day stuff outside of the house in particular simply wasn't recorded. No photos of my mother's chemistry lab for example.
I've thrown a lot of stuff out but could probably get more scanned but not sure after looking at it if another pass is worthwhile.
Drones are illegal without prior registration in most tourist destination we can reach with small kids in Europe, some of them just dont allow them at all. They are extremely obnoxious, 1 person recording annoys hundreds of others, pretty selfish behavior. They scare wildlife badly so it ends up dying on cliffs. No love nor respect for that, quite the opposite.
I've had one of smaller DJI ones, but reality was, when looking back, even with simple quick recordings I was annoying to rest of the family since it takes a lot of time to set it up, fly, and put it back again. I've donated it to Ukraine army cca directly when russia started the war, hopefully they did put it into good use.
Make great memories, sure, but do it with respect to others and laws.
I have six drones, an Osmo Pocket 2, Insta360 Go 2, GoPro, etc but I barely use the pocket cameras because the workflow to extract content for day-after story-telling via phone feels quite tedious. If you were only going to ingest footage post-trip and make a piece (as per the YouTube example), then I think it's less painful. A decent phone with good stabilisation can handle that though.
That said, two advantages for the Osmo Pocket:
- footage is not clogging up your phone storage, which can be particularly annoying if you are often unable to backup to the cloud
- it is literally pocket-sized, a nice form-factor compared to GoPro, and pretty quick to get out and use.
> A decent phone with good stabilisation can handle that though.
The Osmo Pocket 3 has much better low light capabilities owning to the built in gimbal compared to even top end phones (a couple of good vids on YT comparing them).
The ability to offload to removable SD is huge, especially when shooting 4k@120fps.
By the time you add a gimbal and external storage (on iPhones, only the highest end phones), that rig is pretty unwieldy!
4K anything adds up, for sure, especially if you can't cope with throwing out lesser clips!
I have a phone gimbal but haven't used it in years, so I don't disagree there.
My hassle beyond the iCloud backups when out of range is that I usually want to upload IG stories as I go, and picking through the Osmo stuff is painful enough that I just don't do it. So, for a brief time, I'd shoot everything twice which kills any personal moments (hiking with the kids, etc). And then I stopped. The Insta360 was even more limiting: smaller card, hard to tell if you were recording or if you'd run out of space, etc.
Drones are one of those things that _should_ be something I dig...but I never seem to pull the trigger because it seems like a big imposition on the other people in the same space experiencing the same things you are. Moab was a great example of that...we're out hiking on the 2nd or 3rd most popular trail and there's the constant wine of a drone _up_there_...you can't see it, but it's there, and somebody thought it was okay to use it.
Youtube/TokTok/Insta folks are similar. I'm at Mesa Verde and this guy is getting cranky because he can't get a picture of the sign, because people have the nerve to actually be there...and those people get to hear him take the 4th take of his intro...."what's up youtube"
I heard a lot of good things about the DJI Osmo and their action camera. I have been reluctant as they require you to install an app to use their products?
This may just be me, but having just finished a large family archival project of my own, this sort of video is exactly the sort I wouldn't have included.
The simpler, more candid, more off-the-cuff images and videos were gold. A drone by definition has setup and teardown time and is impossible to ignore for those being photographed.
Ethically, drones also break Kant's universalizability principle.
The setup and teardown for the newer DJI drones is quite miniscule, IMO. Even for the Mini 3 it's no more than 2 minutes to set up. Usually I'll do it while we are just enjoying/taking in a sight. Most of our destinations involve hiking so it works perfectly with a break and some rest.
This shot, for example (00:02:04 mark) really captures the moment my wife and I were standing alone on this massive breakwater in a way that nothing else could: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eixbTpEeVwg&t=124
I don't know how I could otherwise capture the full experience of that moment and place in a photograph or on a handheld video device.
If the area has a no drone sign, I won't use it. If it has an active denial in the app, then it can't be used without authorization. I've only run into two of those places while at the south of Taiwan (turns out there were power plants nearby).
But honestly, the drone is best for remote places to begin with, IMO so it tends to work out for my use cases.
This is something that I find surprisingly hard to locate - even in a house with thousands of pictures taken in it, simple pictures of how the living room is laid out are rare to non-existent. You have to piece together the evidence from other photos just to remember how it was.
Just to share my experience: My brother and I recently digitized all our family photos. The process doesn't have to be so daunting. We found someone on facebook marketplace with a high quality scanner, and paid them to scan every photo and put it on a USB stick. I don't remember how much it cost but it was pennies per photo.
Not a dig at you but I laughed a bit when reading it.
"it's not hard, just pay someone to do it for you"
I get the sentiment though. I've spent countless of hours trying to read up on digitizing our VHS collection while the proper thing would've been to just have a company do it for me. The main concern for me though is that they might just run the most basic settings and I'm telling myself that doing it myself will allow me to future proof the format a bit better.
Haha, yeah fair point. My comment does seem trite when you put it that way ;)
The point I was trying to make (which I think you understood) was that it was _surprisingly cheap_ to outsource. In the range of ~$100 for our entire collection.
I should mention that this project was undertaken because a relative's house burned down and, with it, all their family photos. So my comment is meant as encouragement for anyone sitting on a treasure trove of family photos who is thinking to digitize: do it! And to inform that this process that I thought would be very painful/tedious is something that can be outsourced for relatively cheap.
Does anyone have any recommendations of a site or a self-hosted option for uploading photo collections? I’d love to share photos of our child with the grandparents but end up just sending the odd snap through WhatsApp, it would be nice to make an actual collection.
There are things I really like, e.g. that you can restrict access per user.
But there's no comment/chat/discussion facility, so you cannot easily get feedback on your photos.
There's also NextCloud, but I think the solutions there are a bit more rudimentary. However, if you already use NextCloud (or a similar solution like a CMS for example), you could look for a plugin. https://nextcloud.com/
I highly suggest Immich [1], it's an open-source and self-host alternative for Google Photos. It's still under very active development, but I think it's the best out there.
Our photo library currently consists of 300,000 photos. It goes back 20 years, and while i would like to say it is curated, the sheer amount of photos makes that task pretty much impossible.
We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago. We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it includes photos of our family or something else "special", the photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for being deleted.
I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.
Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.
If you can code, you can run them by AWS rekognition to do face recognition. It works amazingly well (you need a score >98 for a match). Where I am impressed is that it is also remarkably resilient to faces aging, and in some case identify some toddlers from an adult face. In your case if it only goes 20 years it is maybe less critical, but in my case I have photos going back to late XIX century, and good luck guessing who was that toddler without a legend!
Hilariously, Google photos is really bad at this. It's decided that my daughter and I are the same person, and refuses to let me update this (i keep trying and it keeps getting set back to my name).
I had a similar experience with Google Photos where it merged the "profiles" of my two children. Like you, I tried separating them back out manually, with no real success. Ultimately, I turned the face identification feature off entirely (which has the effect of deleting all of the face data), and then turned it back on. It took a day or so for Google Photos to start re-indexing the photos in earnest, but that fixed the issue for me, and it was less work than the manual re-tagging that I had tried before.
DSLR photos are for art, not memories. I use only my Android phone for memories (among other things).
I have a daily job that transfers photos from my phone to my PC.
Once a month, I copy all the photos/videos of the previous month into a directory. I fire up a simple Flask web app I wrote that builds a page showing all the photos/videos that are in a directory. Under each photo/video, I have:
- A checkbox on whether I want to keep it
- A textbox for putting a caption. Here I write whatever was going on that day (or when I took the photo)
- A field for entering tags (plain text, tags separated by commas).
When I hit a button:
- It copies all my selected photos/videos to another directory.
- In a static site generator, it creates entries for each day there is a photo/video. It adds rich text (e.g. Markdown) to the SSG entry with links to the copied photos/videos, and "captions". The tags I had entered apply to the blog entry/day (not to the individual photo).
That's it. I'm done.
Separately, I have a daily cron job to build the site, and make a new page showing me all entries for today's date (i.e. all photos/videos taken on Jan 27th). This way I can see what I was doing on this day 4 years ago, etc.
I keep whatever I want. If I go for a monthly book club meeting, I take a picture of the building it's in and note down what book I read.
It's very manageable. At one point I had a bug and didn't update it for several years. When I finally got around to fixing the bug, it didn't take long to catch up on that backlog.
I don't curate my DSLR photos. No time for that. It's why I don't use it for memories.
I inherited similar boxes of thousands of unorganized photos when my mom died. I threw them all away. They weren’t meaningful enough to her to organize, and they meant even less to me.
My lesson is I don’t take photos. I realized long ago that I never look at them again.
Not OP, but I also don't like taking pictures nor do I ever keep any.
I just don't like thinking about the past and the feelings they often bring up. Whether that's guilt over not talking to relatives that have passed, or the sadness from remembering how a good relationship ended badly, or even the good times that my current life doesn't allow to continue because people have gone their separate ways.
I don't know if it's healthy, maybe, maybe not. But it lets me go through the days a bit easier.
There’s nothing to argue about. If you like taking pictures and enjoy looking at them later that’s great. I don’t. I have maybe 10 photos saved on my phone over several years. I never look at old photos or albums. Certainly not going to spend tons of time organizing thousands of old photos that I didn’t even know about and that had just been sitting in boxes for 30 years.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to take photos (or keep other people's photos around) if that's not your thing. Other relatives and descendants who are into family history and genealogy might find those photos very interesting, possibly even priceless, so instead of doing it for yourself you might want to consider doing it for them.
I love taking photos and realised I had this problem so I spent some effort setting up a server that delivers a random (biased in various ways), labelled photo from my (huge) collection on demand via http, with parameters for size etc, and then set up some rpi based photo frames (using old monitors) that show a random photo every 30s, and similar for desktop background on all the computers in the house. Now I feel like I'm familiar with all my photos. I also have a simple web-based UI that shows the history of the last few dozen photos fetched so if one catches my eye I can find it easily, and a way to tag photos to include them in the "random" rotation more frequently.
I bought Google Photos for my dad, and so often he'd point out a picture that it showed him. That encouraged me to get it - it's such a simple thing, but getting a 'memory' every day is really so sweet.
> Labels matter. Even a few words helped me know when-and-where something happened: “1955 Nova Scotia” or my grandfather’s name. One of the saddest experiences was looking at a family-gathering photo from the 50s with several people in it, and having no idea who’s in it.
Dear lord, yes. My in-laws have just boxes and boxes of photos, some going way back into the late 1800s. The old ones are mostly people and faces. But we have no idea who these people are. My in-laws think they are related to them, otherwise, why would they be kept? But not a clue who this person is.
It's terribly sad in a way. My spouse doesn't want to throw it all away, it's family history presumably, but we have no idea if it'll ever be a history we know.
And so they sit in an attic, waiting for some magical technology to rescue it.
Online photo libraries have gotten much better at matching up people in photos over the last few years. I don't think it's completely crazy to assume that they might one soon be able to figure out something useful about family relations too (e.g. this mystery person was at these 3 known people's weddings, so they're likely another sibling of so-and-so).
My friend owns a little "clean out old houses" business in Japan. Recently we threw out dozens of large boxes of old photographs; the grandma told us she didn't need them anymore. The rest of the family all had their own lives in Tokyo, and could care less about the past. Sad to see, but I've seen it many many times.
And if you use Nextcloud on Android to back up your photos, it may have been not syncing the location since mid-December when Google removed certain permissions from the App Store version.
I bit peculiar and specific but came to mind and may save some person's geotagging.
Not sure to follow. My Nextcloud app on Android doesn't require location permission. And its job is not too geo-tag photos (that's for the camera app instead), but rather to sync whole files.
The automatic sync function of the Nextcloud app ends accessing the photos in a way that doesn't include the location metadata of the photo. So the file it puts on your Nextcloud server does not have the location metadata.
I'm in the middle of a similar project but using a mirrorless camera with a macro lens and a repro stand.
I second most of this, but would like to offer a different opinion about triage. In my experience, doing the triage often takes as much time as digitizing the slides. "Mindless" mass digitization where I just optimize for throughput has been a good strategy for the collections I've worked on.
Instead I'm more careful of what I choose to post process after I digitization. I haven't been throwing much away yet, I usually just don't process the stuff I don't find interesting. Storage is cheap these days.
I thought that was a strange approach, too - I'd have thought it'd be far quicker to cull post-scanning. Plus, then you have the whole catalog digitized in case someone else wants to come along and make different editorial choices later on.
These points are also useful for your own photo library. Forget about your relatives going through your stuff after you die, that doesn't matter. But which of the hundreds of photos you took over the past few years would you look at again?
Right, it's the same kind of pictures mentioned in the article. Life happening. The kids helping you cooking, mom goofing around, the family hiking etc etc.
It's not the landscape, some flowers, fireworks, a beach usually. What you care about are people and the moments you spent with them.
How do you guys organize your photos to give to your kids one day? We just have too many photos and videos. I like it, but I try to make some form of a library that has the best photos of each year/vacation/birthday, etc.
There is no need to see 50 photos of each vacation or birthday, but it's nice to see 3-5 and have the ability to dig deeper if you want to.
I take a ton of photos. I cull probably 80%. The remaining ones are all pretty good/interesting/meaningful. I end up with maybe 1000 for a year, then pick maybe 100 of those to make into a photo book for the year, which is what the kids actually look at.
Also:
Try to give everyone the same good camera. I gave my girlfriend a pro iPhone very early in the relationship, anticipating tons of photo taking, and it paid off. The phone could capture any moment, even challenging ones and very easily share it with her family and me.
iPhone handles face recognition as well. Also memories provide automatic collections of note, taking into account view and sharing patterns.
I suspect the process of making photos meaningful and surfacing gems will continue to improve.
So yes, take certain kinds of photos but more than anything capture photos (and video) in highest possible quality when it doesn’t disrupt experiences.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a self-hosted photo app that pushes to commercial cloud storage behind the scenes intelligently (I.e. I don't want thumbnails stored there etc) and which can use a local GPU for person-identification, scene identification etc.
I need to do this with the giant pile of Polaroids I found in my dad's closet. For me it hasn't been any technical or logistical barrier, just an emotional one. I know I need to do it before something happens to them that makes me regret waiting, but I just haven't had it in me yet even after two years.
> I bought a heavy-duty slide scanner to help me process the images. It’s a Canon CanoScan 9000F. I like it, in case you’re shopping for an affordable unit; in particular, I do not loathe the built-in software, which sets it apart from other scanners I’ve used.
I hope this is not unwelcome as it is admittedly tangential to the actual topic of this post, but this line makes me want to throw out an unsolicited recommendation for VueScan from Hamrick Software: https://www.hamrick.com/
I am not affiliated with them in any way aside from being an extremely happy customer. Easily the most value I've ever gotten out of a piece of shareware, perpetually licensed, supporting Windows, Mac, and Linux. I got into it to revive a '90s scanner whose software wouldn't work at all on modern computers, and I've come to prefer it over all OEM software even on my newer gear. Truly the great equalizer that makes the hardware features the only things which matter.
I currently use it with a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL (when I want CCD+CCFL scanning and/or large-format scanning) and an Epson PerfectionV700 (when I want CMOS+LED scanning). It supports the film/transparency scanning features of both if you have the appropriate expansion lids. Here's a random screenshot from my shots folder, not of transparency scanning but it's what I have on me. It does have a lot of built-in cleanup options which I use with about a 50:50 mix of cleanup in Photoshop CS3. I especially like its built-in debayering https://i.imgur.com/xfBwZq8.png
> Include the photographer. I have few pictures of my father, because he was always the guy behind the camera. When he did ask someone to take a picture it was always posed, such as “Mom and Pop standing in front of the Grand Canyon.”
In my experience as a frequent traveler of the US West, it's rare now to even be asked. For me probably fewer than five times. I don't know if people these days feel uncomfortable asking due to how damaged and low-trust society has become thanks to those who need us all to hate each other so they can stay in charge, or if people have just been out of the habit for so long that they never had that example and thus don't even think of it.
I've started keeping an eye out for groups of people posing for photographs, especially when they are visibly families vacationing with kids, and I will ask them if they want a group shot if I read them as amenable to it. Some people say no, even once in a while aggressively so, but the acceptance rate is incredibly high and it makes me happy to be able to give them those memories. It probably helps that I am visibly non-threatening in a privileged way that society does-but-should-not enable, and that I'm usually carrying a chonky mirrorless camera on a strap so people are less likely to think I'd steal their phone lol
> Even though I spent much of my childhood writing letters, there is only one photo of me with a pen in my hand — and that was taken by a friend at summer camp. Yet my friends and family all recall me with a book or pen within reach. My father never captured that essential part of who I was.
It's interesting to see the way the human mind works here. We take photos on vacations and of unique events due to their novelty making them feel like something that can't be re-experienced, and we don't photograph the day-to-day activities because they are so familiar to us while we're in those stages of our lives. Turns out it's the other way around: the Grand Canyon will always be there, and the people won't :/
> Crop photos closely. My father took a lot of photos of “Mom in front of a pretty vista” but in the long run I care more about Mom’s expression than the expanse of mountains in the background. Thanks to iPhoto I can zoom in, but a lot of detail is lost.
These days when we're all digital and not paying per roll of film, I take both. Zoom with your feet. It doesn't have to become an overwhelming number of photos — just two. Tying back to my earlier comment, when I offer to take a photo for people I usually tell them I'm going to take one of the scene and then walk forward and take one more. I did this just two weeks ago for a very appreciative family at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History at Kirtland AFB. One wide landscape shot of them where you can read the building façade and tell where they were, and one tight portrait shot of just them :)
I don't know, I never really cared about photos other people take, and I neither did I show my photos to other people. When I die, there will be nobody left to care about any of the photos I took. I guess I'm just not a family type
Strangely, the thought that my porn collection will be dumped is more unsettling
I wonder what will happen to the photos we take today, if they will "bit rot". The HDD and cloud storage wont last forever, maybe 20 years if we are lucky, or until someone stops paying the monthly fee. Meanwhile these films have lasted for 40+ years.
This is a good point. I have a backup strategy that includes cloud and offline HDDs, but at some point, when I'm not around to keep it all running, it'll probably just be family getting them off my laptop.
I should probably look at writing to bluray at some point.
I got hold on a bunch of classic PC games that where 10+ years old and lots of the CD's had data errors, so I wouln't bet on disc burning although plastic can last a long time so it has potential, maybe a startup idea, burning family albums on special bluerays that will last a long time =)
also the lasers get old as well, so there might be difficult to find a working blyeray reader 50 years from now, but just like the environment it's not our problem right now :P
I'm scanning in my family slides and right now I'm scanning in when my dad was in the Vietnam war. The shots of the Vietnamese and the town are fascinating.
Meh, not too fond of it. Great concept, but poorly executed. E.g. there's automatic people tagging based on faces it recognizes, but no way to tag additional people that it missed.
Maybe it will get better in time, but for now it isn't really helping me organize my pictures.
there's this wisdom I read a long time ago: "there's millions of photos of the Grand Canyon. There's only one or two photos of the Grand Canyon with you in it."
I really wish people would stop using medium.com. There is no real benefit, it is so easy to host a website and Medium keeps paywalling content that other people have written.
I have a daily cron job that shows me the entries for this day in past years (i.e. all Jan 27 entries).
Yes, videos are more fun to look at.
But people don't have the patience to watch more than a minute or two at a time. They can quickly scan 20-30 images and focus on the interesting one(s). But if they see 10 videos, they'll start a few, and after a number of seconds start "seeking" forward to see if there is something interesting.
Or they'll watch the first 1-2 videos completely, and skip the rest.
Look at the player's emotion in the image. What he feels in that split-second, the look in his eyes, gets lost if you just see the video.
Look at the out of focus area. The boys in the top-right hugging, the older couple in the older couple in the top-left who can't believe their eyes, the other players reacting to the home run.
Look at the bat, suspended in mid-air with no motion-blur. The object which kicked off the celebration completely frozen in time. Everyone in the photo is looking at where the ball went, but the player is looking at the bat.
TL;DR: Because it (generally) takes much longer to look at a photo than it does to actually create a photo, there's a time dilation that goes on. You can freeze a single moment, and then take the time later to absorb everything which goes on in it.
When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit!
There are two categories of family photos:
1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive
2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for
Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these pics, than by typical family group photos.Agree, but the other part of the advice I think is important and maybe even not fully explained in this blog post. Taking great photos is about using great light, this matters more than composition (you can crop in post) in my opinion. Rule of thirds is just a guideline, not a rule, if you’ve got great light and an interesting subject I couldn’t care less where those thirds lines sit. I mostly shoot on an old hassleblad with 6x6 square negatives and I often frame my shots with my subjects in the middle of the frame.
I have also done what the OP is describing, scanning all my family’s negatives. I wanted to devote the amount of time it takes me to scan and color correct a frame to a scant few of the images. My family liked to take “snaps” of places and vacations (think non-descript cornfields or national park visitor centers) and hostage photos of the kids clearly taken against our will.
I taught myself how to shoot on film to learn what I was doing, but going to the community darkrooom was the real education. I learned how good photographers used the light and saw the world by watching them develop and seeing the end product. Photography is just like any other endeavor, you get out of it what you put into it. For your kids and your kids kids, don’t just put into it some AI-computationally adjusted selfies and snaps of the tops of kids heads. Put some effort in, figure out what good light is, and take candid photos.
Might depend on your personality a bit. Basically all my favorite photos of lost relatives and friends were taken on awful cameras by people with no knowledge of lighting or composition for that matter. The photos (to me) are valuable for a wholly different reason, it never even occurred to me until this moment that they were probably bad photographers.
Yup, the best pictures I have, are those snapshots of real life action. Not the super prepared professional ones requiring set up (we also have those, my sister is a photographer).
Isn’t the sign of a professional that they don’t need that setup?
I have some friends that seem able to snap these perfect moments effortlessly.
Ah no, I was talking about my own pictures. Some of the staged pictures my sister make of us, are nice as well, but overall I much prefer the blurry snapshot or video of a nice scene.
(But then again, my sister especially recommended to me to choose my partner as she would look very good on pictures, I replied I have other priorities, but ended up with her anyway)
> Isn’t the sign of a professional that they don’t need that setup?
A professional should be able to get good results without it, but also when you are a professional, the incremental benefit of having the equipment available and using it where appropriate is more than worthwhile.
Agree, I strongly dislike the staged, hostage photos. Almost no one looks like they are having fun.
> and take candid photos
This is probably the best way to get a good photo regarding the people in it. Composition, lighting are important as far as they make the picture "readable" if what you're looking for is the memory of the person. You'll still look kindly on a dark, blurry photo of a very authentic moment rather than an exceptionally well composed photo that's so staged you can't match it against the person you knew.
Staged photos aren't all bad, they're just usually unrealistic if you knew the people. Many group photos have a bunch of upright poses and stiff faces that maybe those people never had naturally. So you recognize the face but not the person, it's not the memory of them you would keep.
If you want to capture the memory of a person, take photos of them doing whatever they were usually doing, with their usual expression, lighting and composition be damned.
Without going into the 50 different things that go into a good photo, where you position yourself and the light are important. Being technically sound (correct exposure, depth of field) is the floor, then where the light is coming from, its quality and feel, there is a ton that goes into this. This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful than some random person’s photos walking around with a point and shoot.
I agree with you, I basically never take the staged photos (don’t have a self timer on my cameras anyway) but just snapping the shutter when people are doing things isn’t enough. I have boxes and boxes of photos of my family that I’m not even spending the time to scan and color correct because it’s not worth it. The great ones combine good light, technically correct, and an interesting subject.
> This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful
You're just on a different, more professional rail. Talking about professionals doing professional stuff. You don't warm your tires before you go for a drive just because that's why F1 cars have so much more grip in slow corners.
Capturing the perfect moment in the perfect technical conditions is perfect. But that doesn't happen very often in real life with family moments. Most of those perfect moments will be absolutely serendipitous and you'll capture them however you can. Not a single non-photographer looks at the snapshot of the perfect moment and thinks "different ISO would have been so much better, and look at those harsh shadows".
One of the photos most dear to me and my entire family was taken at the light of a low-power infrared heater. Which is to say just enough light to not accidentally poke a finger in your eye. The details are only barely visible but you can tell who's there, everything is as noisy as you can imagine and more, and the brightest thing in the picture is the glow in the dark pacifier between the 2 figures. And no amount of good lighting would have made that picture better without ruining the moment.
In fact almost all of the "most memorable" pictures in my album are technically crap. Over- or underexposed, crappy film stock or digital resolution, bad framing, bad focus, motion blur, fringing, the list goes on to tick all the mistakes one could possibly make. They're all subjectively better than the technically superior shots because the moment they captured was better. If you talk about family it will always be the moment. If you can make it technically good, go for it, it's just icing on the cake.
I think I'm being misinterpreted, probably my fault for the way I'm explaining things, I'm trying to be concise but I'm passionate about photography so I'm struggling.
I am not a pro, so far from it. I'd be embarrassed to even let a pro see my work. I don't want to advocate for needing things to be technically perfect, what I was advocating for was taking a single class, reading a single book, studying a couple blog posts or something. The little changes you can pick up can add so much to a photo. Say you move a little so the sun isn't behind your subjects, or you have the camera out explicitly in the winter mornings when the light is streaming into your windows and hitting a light curtain over the window... you've got yourself a free soft box. Or you've got the camera out in the hours before/after sunset and sunrise.
Little changes to behavior, your position, use of light that can put the extra thing on a photo that would already be great because it was a great moment.
I found a harddisk with a ton of ripped MiniDV footage of the kids when they were young. What I value most isn't the kids. Sure, they're adorable and I have a ton of snapshots from them...but it's things like 'oh, we had that TV then, oh, that room still had carpet, man, the trees were really short, oh that really annoying noise the parrot makes? He's been doing it for more than 20 years.'
It's not the subjects, it's the context that is cherished.
That's an interesting insight.
I have another probably simplistic insight.
I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.
But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.
I'm going to take a different view on this.
I travelled a lot circa 2008-10 in and around Asia and recently I've been uploading all those old travel photos to Google Photos simply because every day it randomly pops up pictures from a place I once visited.
Even the bad photos I took back then (I didn't have a great camera) are way better at keeping those memories alive than I would have expected, they may not be the best, but I was there and I took them.
My wife and I started traveling a lot after my younger son graduated and post Covid mid 2021 and we even did the “digital nomad” thing for a year. We still go somewhere to do something around a dozen times a year.
I blog about it. It isn’t for anyone else’s benefit but mine and I doubt I get any traffic to it. It’s more of a public journal. I pay $5 a month for MicroBlog. Our travel season is usually between March and October.
The blog is a much better way to remember trips than just static pictures.
I'm sure that's true but... I know that I would never check that blog again had I written one.
Google photos pops a reminder of somewhere most days for me with a photo slideshow of somewhere I've been.
I do that too. But when I’m old and not traveling, having a journal would be nice.
I've had the same experience. My new approach is to do a mental check to see if I could get the same picture from a google search. If not then I get out the camera. That in effect compels me to either enjoy the moment, or to include people in the photo to make it unique.
Pictures of the Grand Canyon. You can see on Google. pictures of the grand canyon with my kid in the foreground... Pictures of a city nearby. You can find on Google pictures of the city nearby from the top of the tallest building in the city nearby. No. Out my back door if I turn left 10° more than I normally do I'll quickly arrive in a spot no human has stood in for decades. Not in a Google search.
I don't want to claim that maybe it's the surroundings that are mundane, because I don't find that true. One of my favorite films is koyanisqatsi, which is, really, just industrial film of earth. As mundane as it gets.
I suppose I cannot fathom this yardstick you describe.
> Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull
Yah, I discovered that, too. Now I always try to get a person in the picture.
I borrowed a couple Annie Liebovitz portrait books from the library for inspiration. Lots of good poses in there, rather than the standard straight ahead picture.
My favorite is the one of Bruce Springsteen sitting on his motorbike. I'm going to try and recreate it.
I've seen various photos of Keith Richards. What's amazing is he's not a handsome man, but somehow the photos of him are incredible.
Leibovitz, not Liebovitz.
Is there a definition of "live" photographs in photography? I think taking photos of people while they're doing something makes them "live" in a way
Other comments cover it as well, but generally, you'll see categories like (none are hard and fast, there's overlap, etc)...
- portraits = posed photos with a person as subject - snapshots / candids = what you describe as "live" photos - street = snapshots, but of random people moving about their lives (much of photojournalism falls into this category, where the photographer is doing street photography at an event) - landscapes = photos of the world, where people are not the primary subject, often wider angle - wildlife = photos of animals, often with a very long telephoto lens - macro = "super zoomed in" / close up (technically where the subject is equal or larger than the sensor on the camera)
Those are photographs. The other kind are portraits.
Incidentally, the word "selfie" used to be an acronym for "self-portrait." Now it refers to any kind of portrait (posed, but not necessarily of the picture-taker), so it has morphed into an acronym for just "portrait".
I've heard them called "candids" or candid shots. The only picture I have of my grandfather (who died when my father was young) is of him taking out the trash.
Candid photos, snapshots, photojournalism.
I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became an adult.
I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.
This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.
Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!
God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.
Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.
I'm fascinated by the "family memory TV" idea. Losing cherished memories—photos, videos, or writings—is a recurring fear of mine and a big reason I’ve embraced digital hoarding. Having a place to share this with yourself and others is really powerful.
Could you share more details about your setup? Do videos play continuously in your living room, or are they triggered by presence? Is sound muted or do you just have it at a lower level?
> God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Why? I've done data takeout from multiple social media sites. It's much less tedious than babysitting VHS->digital transfer (which I've also done).
The generalized answer is layered curation versus tagged curation. In my VHS scenario, there are several layers involved. First, I'm taking the video because I think there's something important going on. Many times I'll be in the background explaining why I'm recording this for the future. When the tapes and DVDs were made, there's a general summary of the topic, ie "Children Christmas plays and grandma's house, 1993" Finally, when I'm scanning/ripping, I'm also adding information and filtering as desired.
My next project is exactly what you mention: using takeout. This project is involving going through hundreds if not thousands of videos with names like "45437905_521345565468507_6881371949495794958_n_10156232738427354.mp4" all stuck in one big folder. 10-30% of these are probably memes or other throwaway stuff, mostly because there is little to no curation going on (until now). Even if I sort keep from delete, there's still the issue of generalized topic. (FB Takeout, for instance, gives all the files the same date) Assuming I could go through them all in some automated fashion, I'd still only end up with categories an automated system could provide. That's far too reductionist to actually work, eg who wants pictures of the dinners you ate, but that one time they made the 17-layer cake, oh yeah, don't want to forget that. These edge cases are part of what makes the curation so personalized and special.
Feed-based sharing is not the same activity as recording for the future. There are different goals, audiences, situations, etc. More specifically, I'm probably going to end up with 4-7 huge hunks of hundreds of impenetrable filenames from different services, each with their own nuances -- and that's after going through takeout.
Starting in on that next project today, yikes, the last thing I want is thousands of small randomized videos from my life. You could conceivably do that by wearing a GoPro around and coding a bit. That would be a terrible (and egocentric) thing to inflict on house guests.
My wife used to give me shit for recording her and the children when we did things like the grand canyon and aquarium and what not. She used to say I should be taking pictures or filming the event or activity.
Now that they're older, she gets it. I can Google a dolphin, but I can't Google my oldest's reaction to seeing one.
Thanks for sharing, this is wholesome.
Beautiful and inspiring. Can you share the specific e-picture frame you mentioned?
Not the OP, but I've had great experience with Aura frames...Costco sells them each year on the run-up to Christmas.
Great tips in here! And I know this isn’t about videos… but, don’t forget about videos.
I love taking pictures. In particular, candid moment-capturing portraits that reveal something about the subject. Also, technically challenging ones with really long exposures (eg around a campfire), or narrow depth of field (eg of my kids playing in the backyard). I like to think I’ve taken plenty of “good” photos of my family over the years.
But something I’ve found is what I go back to the most are those poor quality, poorly edited, silly little videos I take of my family just living life. I used to avoid video because the outcome was just too hard to control. They would never turn out “good”.
But flipping through my digital albums now, I wish i took more videos. A poor video can capture a lot… maybe even more than a great picture. So I find myself taking a lot more videos now.
I gave my daughter a toy camera around age 2.5 or 3 and didn't realize it also captured video. She had unintentionally discovered the video function and has since captured many conversations, photos of our old house, videos of car rides, and loving moments between our family.
She's had it for almost 3 years now and it's been one of her longest lasting toys and is, without a doubt, the most meaningful. It gives "seeing the world through her eyes" a whole new meaning.
I suggest backing it up in multiple places.
Electronic forms are so much less durable than physical.
This is such a beautiful comment.
My 4yo child recently received a $10 digital camera at a generous birthday party and independently has figured out how to take videos (in addition to photos). Some self interviews, some videos of his sibling, his family. It really is amazing to see things from his eyes.
That’s absolutely beautiful! It will be so priceless for her when she grows up...
What kind of toy camera?
I do an annual one-take video around the house with the family, just talking about what has changed. Open cabinets and show what is in them. Talk about what is going on that week and what you are looking forward to. It usually goes for 20-30 minutes.
Those videos are destined to be pure family nostalgia gold. I hope you're saving them in a format that can be easily backed up and shared with family members, both present and future.
I also suggest taking a few candid snapshots and putting them into a book at some point. Video is good, but there's something special about a physical album that you can pass down for generations. If you distribute several copies of the books to various relatives, I'd be willing to bet they'll outlast the videos in the long run.
I think that photos give you a freezing feeling of a moment and that’s what makes them so vital to a person
I agree, a frozen moment in time is special. But it also doesn’t quite capture subtleties that require the time dimension… e.g.; a quirky speech pattern that was a constant for a year or two but then just disappeared.
There is a related problem, which I hit while scanning family archives going back slightly more than 100 years. There is no good photo archival software.
If you now rushed to click "reply" to say that yes, of course there is, right here, hold your horses. You probably do not understand the problem.
Good photo archival software would let me keep my photos in formats that will be readable 25 years from now. It must not rely on any company being in business or offering any service.
It must support storing the same picture in multiple formats. It must support assigning dates to pictures that are not the same as the file date nor the EXIF date. It must support assigning imprecise dates (just a year, or ideally an interval).
It must support storing multiple files as part of the same "image", and I do not mean multiple versions/formats of an image here. Examples: front and back of a scanned paper photo, or 24 scans of a large format picture that are then merged together into a resulting stitched image.
All that information must be preserved in ways that will let me recover it even without any software (e.g. files in the filesystem).
I used many solutions over the years, and got royally screwed by most, the most recent one being Apple shutting down Aperture (which did most of these things pretty well). I am now close to writing my own software.
EDIT: to all those who respond with "just store it as files" — yes, of course they should be stored as files. But that's not an answer. You do want searchability, nice visual access, and other niceties on top of the basic plumbing.
You should definitely check out Tropy: https://tropy.org/
It's open-source, so no worries about a company shutting it down, and it handles a lot of the stuff you're asking for. It’s designed for organizing and managing research photos, but it has features that fit archival needs pretty well.
Open and future-proof: Metadata is stored in JSON-LD, so even if Tropy disappears, your data isn’t locked up. It doesn’t modify your files either, so your originals are safe.
Flexible metadata: You can assign custom dates (even imprecise ones like "circa 1920" or a date range) and add other metadata fields to fit your needs. It’s not tied to EXIF or file timestamps, which is a big plus.
Related files: Tropy lets you group multiple images (e.g., front and back of a photo or parts of a large scanned image) into a single "item." Relationships are preserved, and you can see them all in the same context.
Search and organization: It’s way better than just dumping files into a folder. You get tags, categories, and a solid search interface to make your archive usable.
That is actually a really good suggestion! Thank you, I did not know about this project, and it is quite close to what I'm looking for. Perhaps I won't have to write all of the software myself!
A good alternative (though paid) is eagle.cool
My photo archival software is jpegs in a directory called 'photos'. Sometimes with subdirectories by date. Backed up however I'm backing up my computer.
For true durability, you've got to embrace the lowest common denominator.
Those rare features you can only get from Software X will lock you into Software X. If you want your archive to outlive Software X, you gotta do without them.
100% agreed. Protip: You can store metadata tags like the location or people in the picture by including them in the filenames of those jpegs, and then search it with a tool like "find".
I miss Picasa, in the sense that, when it was discontinued, I still had the underlying folder structure to fall back on.
I suggest Mylio: it ticks all the things you required, except possibly of `multiple files as part of the same "image"`.
It will store everything locally, keep your folder structure, every metadata is inside a sidecar XML, allows for various notions of "date" and more.
Not affiliated with them, just a happy user
> except possibly of `multiple files as part of the same "image"`
That's actually a fundamental requirement.
Technically, you could do this in Mylio but probably not in the way you want.
Mylio stores “Live Photos” as Photo.extension <- the “photo” it shows in the interface Photo.xmp <- all the metatdata Photo.myb <- everything else
Literally the myb is just a zip of everything else associated with the photo. So in the “Live Photo” case that would be the associated video file. If you have edited the file in Apple photos that also includes the XML Apple uses to non destructively perform the edit. As well as a copy of the original photo.
In your case you could just manually create the myb file by zipping up all the associated extra photos and changing the extension. However the interface would only show the single main photo.
The best solution I've come up with is jpgs in a yyyy/mm folder structure + EXIF metadata. I know it's not your ideal, but it'll be supported and platform agnostic for the forseeable future, and there are plenty of apps that can search metdata tags.
That said - I used to rigorously tag photos for the event, place, and people in them, but it's just too much work. Some tooling around batch and auto tagging would be great, so long as it wrote back to the original image EXIF.
darktable does all of this. It’s a complex application like Aperture or Light Table. You run it on your own macos, Windows or Linux computer. You can write your own software to extend or change it. Photos.app does most of this sans the Windows, Linux or “write your own” parts.
Sounds like you need to store photos in a folder structure. That’s about as universal as it gets
This was my first reaction too, but it scratches an itch for me as well - I've thought about making a proper photo archival system many times and just never got around to giving it a shot.
If you just start taking photos (with permission) and keep taking them eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again in most cases. It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger. Each exposure is a chance at a good photo, for the most part.
The thing about family photos that's most important is to have THE NAMES of everyone in the photo, not "mom" or "lucy"... actual full names, so that someone in a generation or two can actually understand who is who. My wife's family had that... but then the photos were ripped out of the album, and all context was lost. 8(
As much as possible, I've got every face tagged in my photos so sproutlet has something useful when the time comes.
> It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger
This, this, this, and this!!!
My mother is the one that takes the initiative of taking pictures of people during events (whether important or just small outings). What she has a hard time understanding is that you must spam the trigger. She tries to frame the picture perfectly, and everyone on their most photogenic faces. Then, she takes ONE shot and oh... somebody closed their eyes a bit. "Let's go for another one, everyone go back in place!"
What she doesn't understand is that the best and most memorable pictures isn't the one where people are smiling straight into the camera. It's when people are doing something they enjoy and don't even notice the camera and don't do a perfect model pose.
I'm lucky if I delete only 9 of the 10 photos I took!
> > It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger
> This, this, this, and this!!!
Except that time is a huge cost. Merely taking the photos is quick, but sorting through them is slow and mind-bogglingly boring. The more photos you take, the larger the chaos is (and the more space gets wasted). If you are the kind of person who diligently categorizes photos right after they are taken, then sure, go ahead spamming the trigger; otherwise you'll just end up with with exhausted storage, and less and less motivation (over time) to start sorting through that ever growing heap of manure.
> Merely taking the photos is quick, but sorting through them is slow and mind-bogglingly boring.
I said this in another comment, but after a typical shooting it takes about 10 seconds - not more - to sort through everything. We don't take hundreds of pictures...
The alternative is taking only one picture and calling it a day - whether you made an ugly face or not. A couple of times I've asked people to take a picture of somebody else and me, and sometimes they only take one picture and either me or that person makes an ugly face... If he pressed the button 4 times I'm sure there would have been a fine picture.
I’ve actually found a lot of benefit in the exact opposite. I started shooting film which does have a pretty big cost per trigger press and it has forced me to consider each shot a lot more.
For me, I found having hundreds of photos on my DSLR’s SD card a daunting task and the raw photos would sit for months before I’d get around to reviewing them (if I even bothered at all).
Sitting down and spending an evening developing/scanning/converting negatives, however, I find rather enjoyable.
To each their own; I think the important thing is to find a workflow that works for you so you can capture as many memories as possible!
For most people, taking pictures is done with their smartphone - which is good enough, right!
My view is that striving for a perfect shot is counter-productive as you will better reminisce the memories by having taken a random picture of someone doing a goofy thing with a weird face.
I usually take 10 seconds after taking the pictures to discard those that don't deserve to be saved. In contrast, my mother, who strives for perfect pictures, has a lot more duplicate pics than I do.
>eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again
This is my issue. Social media has made this much more difficult for me, people generally want to look good in all the pictures. I never post them anywhere, maybe to a small group chat, but still it's the natural instinct many people have when they see a camera out.
So I find people getting self-conscious or otherwise uncomfortable/annoyed when I try to get candid shots. But I know they will appreciate them later, and often do, but it's hard to push past this initial reaction.
These threads have been helpful and motivating -- I will try to reference them later with family to explain why I'm taking all these pictures, and why they shouldn't stress too much about how they look.
There was a similar journey for our family after our parents passed and indeed, the photos with people doing ordinary things are the ones we share and enjoy. The Grand Canyon has a way of looking the same now as it did in 1955 and so those photos were discarded. Five boxes of photo albums were examined and the photos to keep were cut out and sent to be digitized organized by year and topic. I am glad someone wrote about their experience and the tips that come from having spent examining a life well photographed.
I can understand the sentiment not to add extra work of scanning pictures of items that have seemingly not changed over the years. But I personally find these pictures interesting. I love to look at old pictures of say a square or a street and see how much or little has changed. I guess it depends on the viewer but I hope my kids don‘t feel the need to dump the hundreds and thousands of pictures of things they’re not a focus of. But I agree 100% on the non staged photo motive part. I took a lot of photos of my kids over the years and other people asked me to do the same for their kids. With the question why the fotos looked so good. I always explained my two secrets. 1. Go down to the same level as your kid. Most parents snap pictures of their little ones from above. This looks like a screenshot from the eye. The different perspective to see a kid how another kid sees it is more fascinating. 2. Don‘t Stage the Fotos. Try to capture interesting moments. You may have to lurk or wait. If you know the person well you get a feeling when a certain emotion will show on their face. That is something a staged photo won‘t give you. Doing group photos like this becomes more and more difficult of course. And when kids age they become more and more aware of the camera.
A casual tourist photo can unexpectedly capture fascinating layer of history of the place...
My wife and I* scanned 4000+ film prints with an Epson scanner I bought in frustration at not finding a well regarded negative scanner. It took a weekend. They're untagged except by any writing on the film packs or the photos themselves.
It isn't that big of a deal. I'd do it for pay for other people if someone absolutely needed it, but it isn't that hard. 100GB including the static gallery site I set up, currently in glacier and on two NAS.
I am confused. Is that Epson scanner specifically for photos, or did you just use a regular document scanner and the document feeder happened to work with photos? Or did you actually do it manually?
Too late now I assume, but I use an OpticFilm 8300i and it is great (software wise I use VueScan and Lightroom paired with Negative Lab Pro).
that didn't exist in 2017 when we did these scans - all the negative scanners were approaching $5000 or more, and were very fiddly and manual. However they did give great output. The epson print scanner did great, though, and there was no fiddling. Put prints in the top, push a button, collect prints from the bottom 15 seconds later, type a folder/collection name, repeat the process.
good to see there's a competitive negative scanner in the sphere, now!
I second his opinion. No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower. Loved ones of course. But also the street! What I find the most interesting in old family pictures is a window into how people I know, or only apart by only one degree of separation, lived at a completely different time. What seemed mundane at the time is often the most amusing a century later. That's also what I like in old movies. Like just the streets of Paris in the early 70s look foreign to a modern eye. Hardly any traffic, you could park anywhere, hardly any advertising boards.
>No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower. //
One proviso to this - it's a travel record.
The next picture is a couple standing at the door to an apartment... but where is it... 'oh yeah Paris; your mother and i visited college friends. Forgot we'd even been there'.
Sure, way better with a person on the frame, but recognisable landmarks can still have utility in a photo collection.
I was working through my parent's slides and found pictures of St.Marks square -- didn't even know they had been to Italy.
Absolutely.
For capturing memories, try to think about photos in small series... Family at a Metro stop Generic Eiffel Tower photo Family at Eiffel Tower Family eating a baguette walking down a random street Etc.
As you say, they all provide context and often tell more of a story than a single candid of the family.
One criticism and one suggestion.
As for "include the photographer": unfortunately the photographer (aka me) is usually the only one who reads these articles. Whenever I ask someone else to take pictures of me they ask me to strike an artificial pose and then take a full-body shot. Hopefully one day my nephews will say "we don't know what uncle probably_wrong really looked like, but his pictures were great".
As for the suggestion: I stick to the rule "do not make albums with more than 36 pictures" which is the number of photos a roll of film used to deliver reliably. If you take 300 pictures and stick to the top 1% you'll quickly learn which pictures are worth keeping. Your friends and family will be silently grateful.
I agree with most of that.
After doing some in-house scanning I sent a bunch of stuff out. At the time, there was a company in CA that put stuff on a pallet to India. A bit butt clenching but it was great and I wrote a review for CNET where I was in the Blog Network at the time. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/reviewing-the-result...
Was probably more selective than you. And agree that a lot of the day-to-day stuff outside of the house in particular simply wasn't recorded. No photos of my mother's chemistry lab for example.
I've thrown a lot of stuff out but could probably get more scanned but not sure after looking at it if another pass is worthwhile.
If you can, get yourself a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and a drone.
Completely transformed our catalog of memories. When you weave scenery with experiences and people, something magical happens.
Our recent trip to Taiwan: https://youtu.be/7LWxVzZco0A
Drones are illegal without prior registration in most tourist destination we can reach with small kids in Europe, some of them just dont allow them at all. They are extremely obnoxious, 1 person recording annoys hundreds of others, pretty selfish behavior. They scare wildlife badly so it ends up dying on cliffs. No love nor respect for that, quite the opposite.
I've had one of smaller DJI ones, but reality was, when looking back, even with simple quick recordings I was annoying to rest of the family since it takes a lot of time to set it up, fly, and put it back again. I've donated it to Ukraine army cca directly when russia started the war, hopefully they did put it into good use.
Make great memories, sure, but do it with respect to others and laws.
I have six drones, an Osmo Pocket 2, Insta360 Go 2, GoPro, etc but I barely use the pocket cameras because the workflow to extract content for day-after story-telling via phone feels quite tedious. If you were only going to ingest footage post-trip and make a piece (as per the YouTube example), then I think it's less painful. A decent phone with good stabilisation can handle that though.
That said, two advantages for the Osmo Pocket:
The ability to offload to removable SD is huge, especially when shooting 4k@120fps.
By the time you add a gimbal and external storage (on iPhones, only the highest end phones), that rig is pretty unwieldy!
4K anything adds up, for sure, especially if you can't cope with throwing out lesser clips!
I have a phone gimbal but haven't used it in years, so I don't disagree there.
My hassle beyond the iCloud backups when out of range is that I usually want to upload IG stories as I go, and picking through the Osmo stuff is painful enough that I just don't do it. So, for a brief time, I'd shoot everything twice which kills any personal moments (hiking with the kids, etc). And then I stopped. The Insta360 was even more limiting: smaller card, hard to tell if you were recording or if you'd run out of space, etc.
Drones are one of those things that _should_ be something I dig...but I never seem to pull the trigger because it seems like a big imposition on the other people in the same space experiencing the same things you are. Moab was a great example of that...we're out hiking on the 2nd or 3rd most popular trail and there's the constant wine of a drone _up_there_...you can't see it, but it's there, and somebody thought it was okay to use it.
Youtube/TokTok/Insta folks are similar. I'm at Mesa Verde and this guy is getting cranky because he can't get a picture of the sign, because people have the nerve to actually be there...and those people get to hear him take the 4th take of his intro...."what's up youtube"
I heard a lot of good things about the DJI Osmo and their action camera. I have been reluctant as they require you to install an app to use their products?
No app required; you can bypass the registration of the cameras. Drone is a different story; I think you have to register that (can't remember).
Recent models will brick themselves after a few shots if you don’t do the online registration and activation process.
This may just be me, but having just finished a large family archival project of my own, this sort of video is exactly the sort I wouldn't have included.
The simpler, more candid, more off-the-cuff images and videos were gold. A drone by definition has setup and teardown time and is impossible to ignore for those being photographed.
Ethically, drones also break Kant's universalizability principle.
To each their own I guess.
The setup and teardown for the newer DJI drones is quite miniscule, IMO. Even for the Mini 3 it's no more than 2 minutes to set up. Usually I'll do it while we are just enjoying/taking in a sight. Most of our destinations involve hiking so it works perfectly with a break and some rest.
This shot, for example (00:02:04 mark) really captures the moment my wife and I were standing alone on this massive breakwater in a way that nothing else could: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eixbTpEeVwg&t=124
I don't know how I could otherwise capture the full experience of that moment and place in a photograph or on a handheld video device.
That sounds amazing, but how many places can you actually use it?
Surprisingly many.
If the area has a no drone sign, I won't use it. If it has an active denial in the app, then it can't be used without authorization. I've only run into two of those places while at the south of Taiwan (turns out there were power plants nearby).
But honestly, the drone is best for remote places to begin with, IMO so it tends to work out for my use cases.
I just scrolled through my gallery, and the number of meaningful photos I had was zero.
Snapped a photo of my room first thing.
This is something that I find surprisingly hard to locate - even in a house with thousands of pictures taken in it, simple pictures of how the living room is laid out are rare to non-existent. You have to piece together the evidence from other photos just to remember how it was.
I tend to keep the first picture taken by a new device to be that of my daughters. :-)
Just to share my experience: My brother and I recently digitized all our family photos. The process doesn't have to be so daunting. We found someone on facebook marketplace with a high quality scanner, and paid them to scan every photo and put it on a USB stick. I don't remember how much it cost but it was pennies per photo.
Not a dig at you but I laughed a bit when reading it.
"it's not hard, just pay someone to do it for you"
I get the sentiment though. I've spent countless of hours trying to read up on digitizing our VHS collection while the proper thing would've been to just have a company do it for me. The main concern for me though is that they might just run the most basic settings and I'm telling myself that doing it myself will allow me to future proof the format a bit better.
Haha, yeah fair point. My comment does seem trite when you put it that way ;)
The point I was trying to make (which I think you understood) was that it was _surprisingly cheap_ to outsource. In the range of ~$100 for our entire collection.
I should mention that this project was undertaken because a relative's house burned down and, with it, all their family photos. So my comment is meant as encouragement for anyone sitting on a treasure trove of family photos who is thinking to digitize: do it! And to inform that this process that I thought would be very painful/tedious is something that can be outsourced for relatively cheap.
Outsourcing video is generally a lot more expensive. Probably worth thinking seriously about how much you really want to do.
Does anyone have any recommendations of a site or a self-hosted option for uploading photo collections? I’d love to share photos of our child with the grandparents but end up just sending the odd snap through WhatsApp, it would be nice to make an actual collection.
I self-host an instance of Lychee for all my family photos: https://lycheeorg.dev/
There are things I really like, e.g. that you can restrict access per user.
But there's no comment/chat/discussion facility, so you cannot easily get feedback on your photos.
There's also NextCloud, but I think the solutions there are a bit more rudimentary. However, if you already use NextCloud (or a similar solution like a CMS for example), you could look for a plugin. https://nextcloud.com/
I highly suggest Immich [1], it's an open-source and self-host alternative for Google Photos. It's still under very active development, but I think it's the best out there.
[1] https://immich.app/
This looks really nice
Check out ente.io, they offer both hosted and self-hosted.
Synology NAS with their photos app can do that. I.e. create albums and share them with other people
I even have a Synology NAS and for some reason have never thought to use it for this
Our photo library currently consists of 300,000 photos. It goes back 20 years, and while i would like to say it is curated, the sheer amount of photos makes that task pretty much impossible.
We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago. We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it includes photos of our family or something else "special", the photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for being deleted.
I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.
Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.
If you can code, you can run them by AWS rekognition to do face recognition. It works amazingly well (you need a score >98 for a match). Where I am impressed is that it is also remarkably resilient to faces aging, and in some case identify some toddlers from an adult face. In your case if it only goes 20 years it is maybe less critical, but in my case I have photos going back to late XIX century, and good luck guessing who was that toddler without a legend!
Hilariously, Google photos is really bad at this. It's decided that my daughter and I are the same person, and refuses to let me update this (i keep trying and it keeps getting set back to my name).
I had a similar experience with Google Photos where it merged the "profiles" of my two children. Like you, I tried separating them back out manually, with no real success. Ultimately, I turned the face identification feature off entirely (which has the effect of deleting all of the face data), and then turned it back on. It took a day or so for Google Photos to start re-indexing the photos in earnest, but that fixed the issue for me, and it was less work than the manual re-tagging that I had tried before.
Huh, interesting. I'll try that thanks!
Here's how I do it while preserving sanity:
DSLR photos are for art, not memories. I use only my Android phone for memories (among other things).
I have a daily job that transfers photos from my phone to my PC.
Once a month, I copy all the photos/videos of the previous month into a directory. I fire up a simple Flask web app I wrote that builds a page showing all the photos/videos that are in a directory. Under each photo/video, I have:
- A checkbox on whether I want to keep it
- A textbox for putting a caption. Here I write whatever was going on that day (or when I took the photo)
- A field for entering tags (plain text, tags separated by commas).
When I hit a button:
- It copies all my selected photos/videos to another directory.
- In a static site generator, it creates entries for each day there is a photo/video. It adds rich text (e.g. Markdown) to the SSG entry with links to the copied photos/videos, and "captions". The tags I had entered apply to the blog entry/day (not to the individual photo).
That's it. I'm done.
Separately, I have a daily cron job to build the site, and make a new page showing me all entries for today's date (i.e. all photos/videos taken on Jan 27th). This way I can see what I was doing on this day 4 years ago, etc.
I keep whatever I want. If I go for a monthly book club meeting, I take a picture of the building it's in and note down what book I read.
It's very manageable. At one point I had a bug and didn't update it for several years. When I finally got around to fixing the bug, it didn't take long to catch up on that backlog.
I don't curate my DSLR photos. No time for that. It's why I don't use it for memories.
I inherited similar boxes of thousands of unorganized photos when my mom died. I threw them all away. They weren’t meaningful enough to her to organize, and they meant even less to me.
My lesson is I don’t take photos. I realized long ago that I never look at them again.
I've read lots of bizarre stuff on HN but this one really takes the cake.
I'm not even going to argue coz something tells me it's going to be futile.
Not OP, but I also don't like taking pictures nor do I ever keep any.
I just don't like thinking about the past and the feelings they often bring up. Whether that's guilt over not talking to relatives that have passed, or the sadness from remembering how a good relationship ended badly, or even the good times that my current life doesn't allow to continue because people have gone their separate ways.
I don't know if it's healthy, maybe, maybe not. But it lets me go through the days a bit easier.
There’s nothing to argue about. If you like taking pictures and enjoy looking at them later that’s great. I don’t. I have maybe 10 photos saved on my phone over several years. I never look at old photos or albums. Certainly not going to spend tons of time organizing thousands of old photos that I didn’t even know about and that had just been sitting in boxes for 30 years.
Bots, or people who think like them.
I think the vernacular nowadays is NPCs.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to take photos (or keep other people's photos around) if that's not your thing. Other relatives and descendants who are into family history and genealogy might find those photos very interesting, possibly even priceless, so instead of doing it for yourself you might want to consider doing it for them.
I love taking photos and realised I had this problem so I spent some effort setting up a server that delivers a random (biased in various ways), labelled photo from my (huge) collection on demand via http, with parameters for size etc, and then set up some rpi based photo frames (using old monitors) that show a random photo every 30s, and similar for desktop background on all the computers in the house. Now I feel like I'm familiar with all my photos. I also have a simple web-based UI that shows the history of the last few dozen photos fetched so if one catches my eye I can find it easily, and a way to tag photos to include them in the "random" rotation more frequently.
I bought Google Photos for my dad, and so often he'd point out a picture that it showed him. That encouraged me to get it - it's such a simple thing, but getting a 'memory' every day is really so sweet.
> Labels matter. Even a few words helped me know when-and-where something happened: “1955 Nova Scotia” or my grandfather’s name. One of the saddest experiences was looking at a family-gathering photo from the 50s with several people in it, and having no idea who’s in it.
Dear lord, yes. My in-laws have just boxes and boxes of photos, some going way back into the late 1800s. The old ones are mostly people and faces. But we have no idea who these people are. My in-laws think they are related to them, otherwise, why would they be kept? But not a clue who this person is.
It's terribly sad in a way. My spouse doesn't want to throw it all away, it's family history presumably, but we have no idea if it'll ever be a history we know.
And so they sit in an attic, waiting for some magical technology to rescue it.
Labels matter.
Online photo libraries have gotten much better at matching up people in photos over the last few years. I don't think it's completely crazy to assume that they might one soon be able to figure out something useful about family relations too (e.g. this mystery person was at these 3 known people's weddings, so they're likely another sibling of so-and-so).
My friend owns a little "clean out old houses" business in Japan. Recently we threw out dozens of large boxes of old photographs; the grandma told us she didn't need them anymore. The rest of the family all had their own lives in Tokyo, and could care less about the past. Sad to see, but I've seen it many many times.
Good lessons. If you are using a cell phone, make sure the location is recorded.
And if you use Nextcloud on Android to back up your photos, it may have been not syncing the location since mid-December when Google removed certain permissions from the App Store version.
I bit peculiar and specific but came to mind and may save some person's geotagging.
Not sure to follow. My Nextcloud app on Android doesn't require location permission. And its job is not too geo-tag photos (that's for the camera app instead), but rather to sync whole files.
The automatic sync function of the Nextcloud app ends accessing the photos in a way that doesn't include the location metadata of the photo. So the file it puts on your Nextcloud server does not have the location metadata.
https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14409
Fortunately (I think?) the auto-upload seems to become unreliable in general so people are more likely to notice that funny things are happening.
I'm in the middle of a similar project but using a mirrorless camera with a macro lens and a repro stand.
I second most of this, but would like to offer a different opinion about triage. In my experience, doing the triage often takes as much time as digitizing the slides. "Mindless" mass digitization where I just optimize for throughput has been a good strategy for the collections I've worked on.
Instead I'm more careful of what I choose to post process after I digitization. I haven't been throwing much away yet, I usually just don't process the stuff I don't find interesting. Storage is cheap these days.
I thought that was a strange approach, too - I'd have thought it'd be far quicker to cull post-scanning. Plus, then you have the whole catalog digitized in case someone else wants to come along and make different editorial choices later on.
My dad took thousands of photos of us over the years. His big rule: every photo should include some family, and some landscape.
These points are also useful for your own photo library. Forget about your relatives going through your stuff after you die, that doesn't matter. But which of the hundreds of photos you took over the past few years would you look at again?
Right, it's the same kind of pictures mentioned in the article. Life happening. The kids helping you cooking, mom goofing around, the family hiking etc etc.
It's not the landscape, some flowers, fireworks, a beach usually. What you care about are people and the moments you spent with them.
I wish I had more videos of my kids when they were very young. That is what they seem to me the most interested in right now.
> I remember Pop telling me how much cheaper Ektachrome was (compared to Kodachrome)
gone are the days when ektachromes are considered the cheaper options.. now they are one of if not the most expensive 35mm format films
How do you guys organize your photos to give to your kids one day? We just have too many photos and videos. I like it, but I try to make some form of a library that has the best photos of each year/vacation/birthday, etc.
There is no need to see 50 photos of each vacation or birthday, but it's nice to see 3-5 and have the ability to dig deeper if you want to.
I take a ton of photos. I cull probably 80%. The remaining ones are all pretty good/interesting/meaningful. I end up with maybe 1000 for a year, then pick maybe 100 of those to make into a photo book for the year, which is what the kids actually look at.
Also: Try to give everyone the same good camera. I gave my girlfriend a pro iPhone very early in the relationship, anticipating tons of photo taking, and it paid off. The phone could capture any moment, even challenging ones and very easily share it with her family and me.
This is excellent, though modern cameras (let’s be real, phones) tagging photos with timestamps and geolocation obviates a few of the recommendations.
iPhone handles face recognition as well. Also memories provide automatic collections of note, taking into account view and sharing patterns.
I suspect the process of making photos meaningful and surfacing gems will continue to improve.
So yes, take certain kinds of photos but more than anything capture photos (and video) in highest possible quality when it doesn’t disrupt experiences.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a self-hosted photo app that pushes to commercial cloud storage behind the scenes intelligently (I.e. I don't want thumbnails stored there etc) and which can use a local GPU for person-identification, scene identification etc.
My startup idea is to put all those rules into an AI-engine and feed it my photo collection.
Just kidding..! But damn, a lot of my photos are of the scenery...
I need to do this with the giant pile of Polaroids I found in my dad's closet. For me it hasn't been any technical or logistical barrier, just an emotional one. I know I need to do it before something happens to them that makes me regret waiting, but I just haven't had it in me yet even after two years.
> I bought a heavy-duty slide scanner to help me process the images. It’s a Canon CanoScan 9000F. I like it, in case you’re shopping for an affordable unit; in particular, I do not loathe the built-in software, which sets it apart from other scanners I’ve used.
I hope this is not unwelcome as it is admittedly tangential to the actual topic of this post, but this line makes me want to throw out an unsolicited recommendation for VueScan from Hamrick Software: https://www.hamrick.com/
I am not affiliated with them in any way aside from being an extremely happy customer. Easily the most value I've ever gotten out of a piece of shareware, perpetually licensed, supporting Windows, Mac, and Linux. I got into it to revive a '90s scanner whose software wouldn't work at all on modern computers, and I've come to prefer it over all OEM software even on my newer gear. Truly the great equalizer that makes the hardware features the only things which matter.
I currently use it with a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL (when I want CCD+CCFL scanning and/or large-format scanning) and an Epson PerfectionV700 (when I want CMOS+LED scanning). It supports the film/transparency scanning features of both if you have the appropriate expansion lids. Here's a random screenshot from my shots folder, not of transparency scanning but it's what I have on me. It does have a lot of built-in cleanup options which I use with about a 50:50 mix of cleanup in Photoshop CS3. I especially like its built-in debayering https://i.imgur.com/xfBwZq8.png
> Include the photographer. I have few pictures of my father, because he was always the guy behind the camera. When he did ask someone to take a picture it was always posed, such as “Mom and Pop standing in front of the Grand Canyon.”
In my experience as a frequent traveler of the US West, it's rare now to even be asked. For me probably fewer than five times. I don't know if people these days feel uncomfortable asking due to how damaged and low-trust society has become thanks to those who need us all to hate each other so they can stay in charge, or if people have just been out of the habit for so long that they never had that example and thus don't even think of it.
I've started keeping an eye out for groups of people posing for photographs, especially when they are visibly families vacationing with kids, and I will ask them if they want a group shot if I read them as amenable to it. Some people say no, even once in a while aggressively so, but the acceptance rate is incredibly high and it makes me happy to be able to give them those memories. It probably helps that I am visibly non-threatening in a privileged way that society does-but-should-not enable, and that I'm usually carrying a chonky mirrorless camera on a strap so people are less likely to think I'd steal their phone lol
> Even though I spent much of my childhood writing letters, there is only one photo of me with a pen in my hand — and that was taken by a friend at summer camp. Yet my friends and family all recall me with a book or pen within reach. My father never captured that essential part of who I was.
It's interesting to see the way the human mind works here. We take photos on vacations and of unique events due to their novelty making them feel like something that can't be re-experienced, and we don't photograph the day-to-day activities because they are so familiar to us while we're in those stages of our lives. Turns out it's the other way around: the Grand Canyon will always be there, and the people won't :/
> Crop photos closely. My father took a lot of photos of “Mom in front of a pretty vista” but in the long run I care more about Mom’s expression than the expanse of mountains in the background. Thanks to iPhoto I can zoom in, but a lot of detail is lost.
These days when we're all digital and not paying per roll of film, I take both. Zoom with your feet. It doesn't have to become an overwhelming number of photos — just two. Tying back to my earlier comment, when I offer to take a photo for people I usually tell them I'm going to take one of the scene and then walk forward and take one more. I did this just two weeks ago for a very appreciative family at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History at Kirtland AFB. One wide landscape shot of them where you can read the building façade and tell where they were, and one tight portrait shot of just them :)
I don't know, I never really cared about photos other people take, and I neither did I show my photos to other people. When I die, there will be nobody left to care about any of the photos I took. I guess I'm just not a family type
Strangely, the thought that my porn collection will be dumped is more unsettling
Many years ago, I built http://legacy-labeler.com so people could label their photos for posterity. It's admittedly clumsy, and nobody uses it.
I wonder what will happen to the photos we take today, if they will "bit rot". The HDD and cloud storage wont last forever, maybe 20 years if we are lucky, or until someone stops paying the monthly fee. Meanwhile these films have lasted for 40+ years.
This is a good point. I have a backup strategy that includes cloud and offline HDDs, but at some point, when I'm not around to keep it all running, it'll probably just be family getting them off my laptop.
I should probably look at writing to bluray at some point.
I got hold on a bunch of classic PC games that where 10+ years old and lots of the CD's had data errors, so I wouln't bet on disc burning although plastic can last a long time so it has potential, maybe a startup idea, burning family albums on special bluerays that will last a long time =) also the lasers get old as well, so there might be difficult to find a working blyeray reader 50 years from now, but just like the environment it's not our problem right now :P
"Whereupon, three days after my father formally retired in 1988, he died in his sleep."
There's a deep point here about approaching life as it pertains to all the things we say we'll do after we retire.
Memento mori
I'm scanning in my family slides and right now I'm scanning in when my dad was in the Vietnam war. The shots of the Vietnamese and the town are fascinating.
> Take the best quality photos you can. Your grandchildren will appreciate it
Really resonates! Any photo taken could become a priceless window into the past for future generations
Worth mentioning photoprim, if you maintain photos on local hardware, nas, etc.
https://www.photoprism.app/
Meh, not too fond of it. Great concept, but poorly executed. E.g. there's automatic people tagging based on faces it recognizes, but no way to tag additional people that it missed.
Maybe it will get better in time, but for now it isn't really helping me organize my pictures.
there's this wisdom I read a long time ago: "there's millions of photos of the Grand Canyon. There's only one or two photos of the Grand Canyon with you in it."
I really wish people would stop using medium.com. There is no real benefit, it is so easy to host a website and Medium keeps paywalling content that other people have written.
My advice? Never take a photo again. Only video. Video is so much more powerful for re-experiencing memories.
I've been doing both for the last decade+
I have a daily cron job that shows me the entries for this day in past years (i.e. all Jan 27 entries).
Yes, videos are more fun to look at.
But people don't have the patience to watch more than a minute or two at a time. They can quickly scan 20-30 images and focus on the interesting one(s). But if they see 10 videos, they'll start a few, and after a number of seconds start "seeking" forward to see if there is something interesting.
Or they'll watch the first 1-2 videos completely, and skip the rest.
So take both types!
I strongly disagree. Photography can tell stories which videos can't (and vice versa).
For example, compare at this image: https://i.imgur.com/pmfMUYc.jpeg
To this video containing the same moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdsVO7HaJg
Look at the player's emotion in the image. What he feels in that split-second, the look in his eyes, gets lost if you just see the video.
Look at the out of focus area. The boys in the top-right hugging, the older couple in the older couple in the top-left who can't believe their eyes, the other players reacting to the home run.
Look at the bat, suspended in mid-air with no motion-blur. The object which kicked off the celebration completely frozen in time. Everyone in the photo is looking at where the ball went, but the player is looking at the bat.
TL;DR: Because it (generally) takes much longer to look at a photo than it does to actually create a photo, there's a time dilation that goes on. You can freeze a single moment, and then take the time later to absorb everything which goes on in it.
I'm not talking about 1) professional journalism or 2) sports. I'm talking about casual family day-to-day stuff.
Says David Lynch as John Ford [0]:
When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mAyNNBOdns&t=2s