I started taking photos and videos of my life and family about 25 years ago. I have them as a screensaver on this computer. It brings me happiness to look back on those photos after many years. I have over 180gigs worth of media compiled.
Timeline of storage
- Originally, I just had the photos on a drive on my local computer.
- In 2005, I used an open source tool called jAlbum to create an album online
- In 2008, I switched to Picasa, which I loved
- Picasa was bought by Google and shut down in 2016
- In 2015, Uploaded everything to Google Drive
- A few years later, I switched to Microsoft OneDrive
Recently, Onedrive has been experimenting with reading my photo directory and making albums. I am not sure how well it work.
Worries about the future
From the timeline above, you can see how much the technology has changed. Storing local in my house to the cloud has been the biggest change. AI is changing every technology, so I am unsure how that will evolve.
Many people just take photos and let them store in iCloud or Google Photos. I really like storing things by year and month in folders. The Ui to find photos has never been great.
I am worried that people are going to lose their photos as technology changes. It is a lot of work to transfer many gigs of data when companies change their pricing or new options become available. I really don’t know what people do to ensure continuity.
Plus, if you have a family, do you share the photos? Who has access to add? My kids may have kids one day. Is there a way to share storage as an extended family? There are so many questions that I feel don’t have good answers.
One thing that is really annoying is that my new iPhone does not let me pull the photos off to a windows machine. I have tried over and over, and it will just not connect. This means uploading to onedrive is a major pain.
All in all, I think it’s a rough situation and is only going to get worse. What if there is an apocalypse? How will I see my photos then?
These are the things that keep me up at night.
Whatya think?