Equating Pictures to Memories

Sal and I are that weird elder millennial generation. We knew the before times, but ultimately grew up with modern equivalents of technology. 

We played outside without cell phones or GPS. We would disappear for hours at a time and our parents just assumed we'd be back in time for dinner. 

But the moment we got a car, we were handed a cell phone, never to truly be off grid again. For the most part, technology has been a huge benefit. Not needing to memorize your route and bust a giant atlas out on the hood of your car when you're lost is a blessing. 

Having the internet in your pocket anytime is mostly a benefit. Can't count how many times I've been at a bar trying to come up with an actors name. Popping open IMDB gets the answer immediately. The downside to that is my memory is crap because I don't actually have to retain information. 

But today I want to talk about one of the most prolific changes, photography. 

I remember clutching my disposable camera, trying to line up the perfect moment, perfect shot. You had no idea if you captured it. The dial would roll over to 12, 13 pictures left. You'd start hording which moments to capture as if the perfect moment would only arrive after you were out of shots. This always ended with you having 3 pictures leftover that you'd burn on random pictures of pets or shelf full of collectables. You only had that one roll of film, so you had to be choosy. 

And then you'd pay more than the disposable camera to drop the film off at Walgreens to have it developed. 

Three days later, you go back to Walgreens, tear open the little envelope, and hope to god the pictures turned out. 

Alternately, you'd have someone like my dad. Huge heavy bag with a great camera and several lenses. You'd have extra rolls of film locked and loaded like a gun clip. 

You're out enjoying Elephant Rocks and you hear that unmistakable sound of film being rolled up when it was time to change it. 

I've been thinking about this lately as I'm scanning in all of my physical photos so that I have digital copies. I'd say about every 5 to 10 pictures are so blurry, you can barely tell who the outline is, but you kept these pictures. Like this picture. Contextually with the pictures around it, this is someone's first communion cake. Without the context of the other images, you can barely tell it's a cake you're looking at. 

And the most insane human thing we do is move the pictures from house to house because attached to this blurry 4" X 6" glossy piece of paper is a memory. 

Now memories are counted in megabytes. Anytime I'm taking a picture with my phone, I snap 10 quick ones so I can pick the best. Inevitably someone will be blinking or have an unsightly fold under their chin, but it doesn't matter, because I have 9 others. And the 9 bad pictures are in better definition than I ever got with a film camera. 

And who the hell cares if I have 9 bad pics. Storage is cheap. Until Google tells me it's time to do some cleanup, it might as well be an unlimited storage account. 

Well, Google did tell us to do some cleanup recently, and I found myself staring at these duplicate digital pictures and having a hard time deleting some of them. Somewhere in my brain these all exist as physical photographs and there's a part of me that is worried I'm erasing a draft of a memory. 

Do I buy an external hard drive? Download all of these images to have a backup? When is the right time to do a backup? Will Google someday tell me that photos are going away like so many of their products?

These fears are unfounded. Unless there's a catastrophe and Google's servers and all of their backups get lost, I will have access to at the very least, download all my photos. In the case that Google ceases to exist without warning, we have larger problems, like a nuclear blast or asteroid. 

So today, I will continue to horde. Sometime in the future, maybe my 90s brain will stop being a blocker to cleaning up my digital library.