What do you do with your digital photos?

[tvp2003]

Aside from backing them up (or perhaps uploading to a cloud) in order to preserve them, what do you do with all of the awesome (and perhaps not so awesome) photos that you've taken over the years? Do you ever take the time to go back through them, and try to remember the awesome thing that prompted you to take the photo in the first place?

Back in the day it was fairly commonplace to make digital prints; do people even do that anymore? Of course, before that, taking your film to a photo place was the only way to see your photos (I'm dating myself now)...

[Tron_fdc]

My wife just had hard cover albums made from our last holiday using some online service. They turned out great.

[Geraldsh]

When every click cost a dollar to get developed more thought went into each picture and more effort went into preserving them. Now I can click 100 times and have nothing worth saving. Last Christmas the grandkids discovered a box of old black & white photos from my childhood which intrigued them for an evening.

[Fuzz]

I make a yearly calendar for family and friends, and a few years ago printed a bunch and framed them for around the house.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by Tron_fdc

My wife just had hard cover albums made from our last holiday using some online service. They turned out great.

My wife does this for the highlight photos each year through shutterfly. They always look great. The regular prices are absurd, but they always go on sale 50% off plus unlimited free extra pages a couple of times per year.

[Brendone]

I put all ours on my Synology server (back up our phone pics there as well), then used the photos app facial recognition and tagging to create and share conditional albums with family and friends. My Dad digitized all his old slides and negatives as well, so my library is massive, but I can create an all sorts of combination albums, like me and my sister, etc that go back to when we were babies, or my wife and I on vacations or camping, etc.

[topfiverecords]

We have a digital frame on the counter at the entry to our kitchen and I should probably update it more often. Really need to get a wifi one like I got for my parents so I can just add them direct from the phone and not a tedious USB stick. First world problems.

On occasion my wife wants to turn me looking for a specific picture into an hour long scroll back reminiscing through the backup gallery.

[bc-chris]

i put my favourites into a folder on my computer and it cycles thru them as a screen saver

we also have a 'digital picture frame' that we throw pics on

our absolute favourites we get large prints of and frame them for around the house

[timun]

I have a few backed up on a hard drive, but you know what I really do to manage them?








I don't take photographs anymore.


And I don't feel bad about it at all. After visiting family in DC in 2014 and being harangued by twits scrambling for the best selfies they could muster in front of the statue in the Lincoln Memorial, while I and a handful of others quietly observed from afar and read the inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address and his inaugural address carved into the sides of the building, and after being sent a link to an Atlantic article called "The Facebook Eye", it all just clicked: the obsession with taking photos is ####ed.

The tail of Facebook documentation has come to wag the dog of lived experience.

I firmly believe that. People spend more effort mindlessly snapping photos than just living for the moment. I have a handful of photographs from that 2014 trip, including a pretty cool shot from the top of the steps at the Lincoln Memorial looking east toward the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool, but I mostly sent them to a handful of family. Otherwise, I don't share them.





Probably not the answer you were looking for, but...

Spoiler!

[SutterBrother]

Nothing. I just have them.

I imagine its the same thing my decendants will do except they won’t have them.

It’s much like flipping through old family photo albums. I don’t do that either.

[powderjunkie]

Extensive slideshow presentations with detailed narration about my wonderful experiences that mean waaaaay more to me than anyone in my audience.

[tvp2003]

Some good ideas — we’ve done the custom calendars the last few years for grandparents at Christmas time.

Originally Posted by timun

Probably not the answer you were looking for, but...

Spoiler!

Haha — I think you raise a great point that’s worth discussing (and is relevant to the original post). The notion of experiencing something versus “documenting” it (I use quotes because 95% (?) of photos that people take probably aren’t even worth keeping). I’m guilty of it sometimes but consciously try to avoid doing it — especially taking crappy videos on my phone if I know there are probably much higher quality ones on YouTube of the exact same thing.

I am glad I have lots of photos of my kids growing up — it goes so fast that it’s hard for the brain to keep up. I find even just flipping through old photos is fun — looking at them on a screen is good but just isn’t the same.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by timun

I have a few backed up on a hard drive, but you know what I really do to manage them?



I don't take photographs anymore.

I'm somewhat similar. Phones are awesome...I take plenty of photos, but don't really worry about quality. When I'm having a nice experience I'll document it, but the 3 seconds it takes to click a couple shots is part of my process to stop, breathe, ground myself, and be present in the experience.

Hard to describe, but it's kinda like, hey - I've now got a photo of this moment and if I ever look at it I'll connect to the feeling I'm about to have. If a situation prompts the notion for a photo, then it's exactly the time to stop and be present for a moment.


Also my kids are really cute and grow too fast.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

I monetize them by creating NFTs and selling them.

[FurnaceFace]

I do a few things:
I post stuff up on IG for family and friend to see. They like to see photos from our trips and this is the easiest/fastest way.
I also have a web site (using SmugMug). It’s a bit more permanent and lets me post galleries for specific things. Friends/family can view these if they wish.
I do a yearly calendar as Xmas presents.
I have also printed a collage of images from a trip. I saw this years ago in a magazine, the photographer printed a poster size print made up of various 3x2 inch sized images. These worked out really well.

Photography is a hobby for me. I like the process of taking pics and of “processing” them. I enjoy looking for the little things and taking the usual travel shots from a different angle. It makes travels and experiences richer to me.

I do agree with timun, people need to put the camera down a little more and just experience things and not just chase the same thing everyone takes. Like the people who pose holding the Eiffel Tower or holding up the tower of Pisa. They may think it looks cool, and grandma might like it, but it’s so over done. It’s not original or imaginative when everyone is doing it.

Photo books are a good concept. A photographer I like on YouTube recently did a video about his experience. His view was you wanted to create a story with the images in the book. I like this idea as it would make the book more interesting.

[MoneyGuy]

We’d recently did a 100-day trip to Hawaii, south seas and Oz. I plan to buy a wifi-enabled digital frame to show them and build albums but I’m two trips behind.

Related: I need an external device to store my photos to get them off of my iPhone. Anyone use an SSD drive or have a better solution? We’re traveling to Iceland and I need to free up space.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by MoneyGuy

We’d recently did a 100-day trip to Hawaii, south seas and Oz. I plan to buy a wifi-enabled digital frame to show them and build albums but I’m two trips behind.

Related: I need an external device to store my photos to get them off of my iPhone. Anyone use an SSD drive or have a better solution? We’re traveling to Iceland and I need to free up space.

I think cloud storage is better than physical media for that application. I keep ours in Google drive, and then you can search them using Google photos in all sorts of ways. Ie date, location, a description of the picture, etc

[fotze2]

Just get a new computer.

[DoubleF]

I give them to my wife who then makes occasional slide shows.

I've seen how nifty a Samsung The Frame TV is. I would consider a 30-40" TV just for photos and then have it display sorted photos. Other digital frames and using tablets suck. I don't like them.

Lots of the photos suck. My wife takes a thousand at a time and chooses the ones that work rather than learn how to take good photos and learn to be easy to photograph well.

I joke at times that people take photos on their phone to attempt to prove they were somewhere, because just like phone numbers, we ain't got room to keep that informational #### in our heads. It's a place where you dump excess information that you don't want in your head but want to be able to pull when needed.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

I think cloud storage is better than physical media for that application. I keep ours in Google drive, and then you can search them using Google photos in all sorts of ways. Ie date, location, a description of the picture, etc

Yup. iCloud or Google photos work well.

Just don't rely on that being the only copy of the photos. If something happens to that data, it's gone. Use an external drive to make redundant back ups at regular intervals and for the love of god people, test redundant back ups every few years to make sure it's not ####ed and corrupted or lost whatever.