this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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One of the things I find interesting on the Internet is how often people's first reaction to a thing is to take a photo and post it. It provides good content sometimes (like this one is funny) but I've just never thought like that
Seems like you're someone that enjoys living your life, not recording your life.
I have friends who get upset that i don't take enough photos while hiking, camping or paddling. I always tell them they are welcome to come and experience it themselves instead.
One of the most amazing experiences as an adult is going back through pictures of people doing things. My friends, my family. I sit with my wife and kids and we tell stories to them about our youth, they ask questions about them. The most amazing experience is showing them those pictures and seeing their amazement that their old parents were once young men and women.
There is nothing wrong with not posting those for other people, but pictures of people have a way helping you visceraly remember the emotions of that event.
You're not wrong at all, that's just a different perspective on pictures.
I'm with you, but I think there's a happy medium. Like, I don't need to take pictures of the food I get at a restaurant or a selfie at every single place I go. But I've always enjoyed looking back at pictures of people I know or am related to living their lives. I'm older and my parents are both dead. They took a lot of pictures on slides, and I recently scanned them - about 1000 pictures - to jpg. So many wonderful pictures, some I've never seen.
But even then, my mom took a bunch of pictures of trees from the car window while they were on a driving trip. Completely unremarkable.
I’m so glad that several years ago (my mid 20s) I got into the habit of taking selfies sometimes. I’m never going to be that young again, and when I want to see what I looked like young it’ll be too late to go take a quick pic.
It's funny, I've always looked taking pictures, and I'm old enough to have started well before digital. I love looking at the old pics, but since I took most of them, I'm not in very many. Kids are grown, I'm almost retired, and I think the family only recently realized there aren't many pics of me.
I completely get that. I really enjoy when one of my friends who enjoys photography comes along. She is great and catching people in the moment when they don't even know she's watching. She captures some of the most genuine and beautiful pictures of her friends.
I'm not as good at capturing those moments in pictures, especially if I'm alone. My strengths are getting people to beautiful places and leading the adventure to those moments.
I consistently don't take enough photos when I go to cool places, and then I feel bad because its hard to describe just how cool the place was to my friends or family
My last couple cross-country road trips with my son had very few pictures. The stuff that happened without photos were where we had too much fun to care about doing photos. Most of the photos were special landmark pictures we took so his mom wouldn't get mad.
relevant xkcd
If by relevant you mean not at all, sure.
the comic is about living your life vs. taking photos of your life
edit: live -> life
No, the comic is very clearly about pointing fingers at people who claim its better to live your life vs recording it. I've made no such claim, I think both ways are fine as long as the person is happy.
Which means your 'relevant xkcd' just isn't.
well it's relevant!
No, it wasn't.
???
It turns out that habit is quite a life hack.
I rarely (every 1-2 yrs) post personal content on any social media platform, otherwise just direct album shares with specific people. HOWEVER getting into the habit of just snapping pictures of stuff that might be useful later (or interesting, important, etc) has become an extremely flexible and low-effort form of documentation, journaling, note-taking, and CYA.
Examples:
It has just been an endlessly useful habit.
Also handy for things like "where was this plugged in?" And "what's that sticker I can't quite read on the back of this bulky thing I can't/don't want to move
Also, "where did I park in big parking areas (e.g., theme parks)?"
Yeah you're totally right about pictures as documentation. I do it a lot but you seem to be even better than I am. Curious -- do you have a good system for keeping pictures like that searchable or organized? That's my only issue with it, is that sometimes those can be hard to dig back through
I usually just lean on the local auto-tagging and OCR of the photo app, but sometimes if I take a pic that I suspect I’ll reference a lot, or just want it to be easy to find quickly even if I’m high or concussed or whatever, I’ll add a handful of likely keywords as custom tags.
My recommendation, however, is to favor delayed organization. While you may spend more time later digging to find the thing, it’s a good bet that (1) most things won’t need to be found i.e. most front-loaded effort would be wasted, (2) everything can actually still be found even if it occasionally takes a little longer, and (3) on-device image recognition and automatic cataloging tends to improve over time making everything more searchable retroactively.
I am old. I have enjoyed life. I have no photos. I have memories though lots and lots of memories.