A Sea of Pictures

We live in a sea of pictures. In the course of an average day, a social media user sees a steady stream of snapshots of vacations, the irritating guy on the bus, cute expressions babies and toddlers make, dinner, the sofa the dog destroyed, and lots of selfies. Social media and mobile devices have given us the ability to rapidly document and share every nuance of our lives with friends and family, and I admit I enjoy seeing images from people who are important to me.

How much is too much, though? At what point do we transition from images that connect to images that overwhelm?

InfoTrends forecasts that people will take 1.3 trillion digital photographs in 2017, and 87% of those will be captured with mobile devices (that's 79% for phones and 8% for tablets). In 2010 the total number of images was 0.35 trillion. Oh, and these numbers exclude professional photographers, by the way.

Photo technology has become so ubiquitous and simple that we've lost what is most precious about photography - connection. Digital files have become less valuable and more disposable because they lack connection. The Professional Photographers of America (PPA) reported that 67% of people stored their photographs only digitally. About 70% of people no longer create or maintain photo albums and more than half haven't printed a single photo in the past year.

When was the last time you printed photos or created an album to share? Of the last 100 pictures you've taken, how many of them are meaningful to you? How are your capturing the stories that go with those photographs?

We are in danger of losing this generation. We are losing our connections with our past and leaving behind very little that is archival. Digital storage is not archival - technology changes so rapidly that storage methods become outdated after a few decades and the devices that once read and stored those files are no longer available. Museums keep things in hard copy for good reason.

One of my favorite parts of visiting my grandmother is looking through her photographs. She displays many in her home and keeps even more in albums. It seems she remembers every little story associated with those photographs, and she is a tremendous resource for our family's history. I don't remember all the stories she tells, and I certainly don't tell them like she does.

I am on a mission to build bridges to history so families can cross to the other side together, any time they choose. These stories are important, and they are almost gone.