Preserving cellphone photos
Future historians will either ‘drown in pictures’ or won't be able to access them
Did you take a bunch of great pics this summer, only to leave them on your phone?
Personally, I haven’t printed a photograph since 2011. Many of us just don’t bother with it anymore.
That being said, photographs are important records and provide significant documentation of the past. One hundred years from now, will this period in our history be looked upon as having a black hole of information? Are albums and scrapbooks and photo prints a thing of the past?
Edward MacDonald, a professor in the University of Prince Edward Island history and classics department in Charlottetown, points out that people today are living in a world of images.
“More photos are being taken than ever before in our history as people use their phones to document almost everything about their day, from the routine to the momentous,” he says.
This, however, presents unique problems for historians.
The first is the sheer enormity of surviving photos that are saved on cellphones or exist posted on the internet.
“When photography was invented in the 19th century, photographs were precious family artifacts, carefully archived in family albums (even if the family failed to record who exactly was being depicted). And the carte de visite became both a social tool – a visual calling card – and a souvenir,” says MacDonald.
The invention of the pocket camera, he says, “greatly multiplied photography's reach that created documentary records that historians prize and puzzle over.”
Future historians will have to cope with one of two possible outcomes: “They will either drown in pictures or changing technology will mean that the trillions of photographs being taken on today's phones will become completely inaccessible," MacDonald says.
Archives today are already dealing with similar issues of teleological obsolescence with respect to sound and moving image recordings.
“We may face the same problem with today's cellphone photography. And history, of course, like archeology, is always written from what's left and can be recovered,” he says.
Today's albums and scrapbooks' appearance and essence have also greatly changed. They are generally electronic.
“People share photos by sending them across the internet, not by printing them. One of the purposes of the scrapbook and photo album was to share. The sharing can now be done across time and miles with new technologies,” says MacDonald.
And then there's the aspect of preservation.
“The other purpose of albums and scrapbooks has always been to preserve," he says. "And here, there may be hope for the continuance of the old-fashioned versions of those records.”
MacDonald uses the analogy of e-books, pointing out that they have not done away with hardcopy books, much to some observers' surprise.
"Perhaps the same human desire to have something tangible, something you can hold in your hands and touch, may encourage some people, at least, to maintain printed copies of the images they take in such abundance," he says.
“If they constitute a minority and electronic photo collections are lost to time and technology, then history will be skewed, but then, that won't be anything new, will it?”
HUMAN NATURE
Wolf Hackel, who lives in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley says he took a lot of photos this summer.
“I’m always taking lots of pictures. I haven’t managed to transfer my photos off my phone for this summer yet, but I do save them to my computer and then to an external hard drive regularly every few months or so," says the Kentville resident.
He does this to secure his photos just in case anything happens to his phone.
Hackel also likes to do regular photo maintenance.
“I regularly go through the photos on my phone and delete duplicates or bad photos I don’t want or weren’t taken well (low light, etc).”
This makes it easier to manage the photos later, it's less confusing and will take less time to transfer them off his phone, he says.
“I don’t think albums or prints are a thing of the past; in fact, I had some of my phone photos turned into real photos just this winter around the holidays using an online app. We like to hang up photos around the house, so this is a great option to have.”
Hackel expresses concern at seeing real photos disappear but says he isn't too worried as he knows that people desire older technologies, evidenced with today’s resurgence of vinyl records and audio cassettes.
“People want to have something they can physically hold in their hand,” says Hackel. “I think it’s human nature."
FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHER
Like Hackel, Harlene Wiseman from Greenfield, N.S., always takes lots of pictures.
“I share a few to Facebook and some to private people or groups of family and friends. I call myself the unofficial official photographer of the family," she says.
Most of Wiseman’s images are now on Amazon photos, which she likes because she can put them in digital albums so they're easy to find. And like Hackel, she stores some of her older images on a removable hard drive.
She disagrees on one point, though: Wiseman thinks scrapbooks and physical albums are a thing of the past.
Because we are all so bombarded with images on a daily basis, she feels this results in images not having the importance they may have once had.
“When you had to buy the expensive film, decide if the shot was a worthy investment, take the film to be developed and pay for development when going to pick them up, the photos seemed more precious," she says.
"Don't get me wrong, I love taking pictures to remember something or someone in my life, but I snap as many as I want because each one doesn't cost a certain amount and I can delete unwanted ones."
And she isn't worried that something will be missing for future generations who don't have physical family albums to flip back through.
“I'm not concerned about the loss as this house has a lot of photo albums that rarely get looked at," she says. “I think we look at the digital ones more, to be honest.”