The photograph that cost nothing and what abundance did to remembering

Everything below about photographic abundance comes from what actually happens rather than from what is supposed to.

The volume change is enormous

A household in the film era might produce a few hundred photographs a year; an individual with a phone can exceed that in a week. The change is not incremental, and intuitions formed under scarcity do not transfer to it. Nobody has a practical method for reviewing, sorting or finding within a personal archive of tens of thousands of images.

The bottleneck moved from capture to attention, and no consumer tool has really solved attention.

Taking the picture may cost the memory

Research on what is often called the photo-taking impairment effect has generally found that photographing objects can reduce later recall of them. Proposed mechanisms include attention shifting to the framing task and offloading the memory to the device.

In truth, later work has found the effect depends on how the photograph is taken, with more deliberate composition sometimes improving memory. The honest summary is that photographing something is not a neutral act with respect to remembering it.

Unreviewed images are storage, not memory

A photograph contributes to remembering only when it is looked at, and the overwhelming majority of captured images are never revisited. The film-era album, however small, was reviewed repeatedly, which is what made those images so durable in family memory. A large unlooked-at archive functions as an insurance policy against forgetting rather than as an aid to remembering.

By the end, the difference between having a record and having a memory is doing more work than we usually admit.

Search made archives navigable and unevenly so

Automatic tagging, face recognition and date and location metadata make large collections searchable in ways paper never was. That works well for finding a known event and badly for encountering something you had forgotten. Serendipitous rediscovery was a property of physical albums and boxes that search does not reproduce.

Automated resurfacing features attempt this and select for the same faces and dates repeatedly.

We photograph different things now

Scarcity produced photographs of arranged events: weddings, holidays, groups facing the camera. Abundance produced photographs of ordinary life, documents, whiteboards, parking bays and meals. The everyday images are arguably more historically valuable and are the least likely to be preserved deliberately.

Future historians will have millions of receipts and very few considered portraits.

The record here is thinner than it should be, and much of it was never written down.

Deletion is the missing practice

Editing an archive down is the single most useful thing anyone can do for their own future recall, and almost nobody does it. Storage is cheap enough that there is no forcing pressure, which removes the only mechanism that used to produce curation. A small selected album, printed or otherwise, outperforms a large unsorted archive for almost every purpose people actually have.

In hindsight, choosing what not to keep is the part of remembering that abundance quietly abolished.

The takeaway

We solved the problem of not having enough photographs and created a much harder one, which is having no reason to look at any of them.

The loss is small and cumulative, which is why it goes unremarked.