Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

[Besk]

I had hoped that the above might have been accompanied by something out of the smilies that represents what we in the U.K. called "tongue in cheek " as it was in that vein it was said by me

It was in the kind repartee in which Matt and I often correspond with each other

pentaxuser

I really appreciated what you said - and learned from it. Didn't think of smilies/

 

[Kodachromeguy]

There is little point in worrying about the longevity of your photographs beyond your own lifetime. Even if your work does survive you, a couple hundred years is the most you can hope for.

The time scale is a valuable point. The first generation of offspring knew and met the people in family photographs. The second generation may or may not know the grandparents and distant cousins/uncles/aunts in the family pictures. By the third generation, the connection is tenuous. Many people I have met have no interest in genealogical matters.

Cultural photographs (households, the car, the shop) have some historical value. But again, many family members have little interest. They barely care that mom and dad visited Rome in 1980 and took 300 snapshots (or, even worse, that dad visited Paris in 2015 and took 3000 digital photos).

I have slowly looked through my dad's many negatives from the early 20th century. Honestly, many show picnics and gatherings of unidentified people. The clothing and expressions are vaguely interesting. But I have to reduce the stuff cluttering the house. I have tried to find his negatives that show cities or topics that might interest people outside of the long-deceased participants:

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2025/11/from-archives-huntington-west-virginia.html

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2014/01/recovering-and-rebuilding-athens-in-1953.html

 

[Don_ih]

After all, the sun will eventually expand and consume our planet, and at that point nobody's work will remain!

Everything anyone alive knows about will be completely forgotten long before that happens.

 

[Besk]

The time scale is a valuable point. The first generation of offspring knew and met the people in family photographs. The second generation may or may not know the grandparents and distant cousins/uncles/aunts in the family pictures. By the third generation, the connection is tenuous. Many people I have met have no interest in genealogical matters.

Cultural photographs (households, the car, the shop) have some historical value. But again, many family members have little interest. They barely care that mom and dad visited Rome in 1980 and took 300 snapshots (or, even worse, that dad visited Paris in 2015 and took 3000 digital photos).

I have slowly looked through my dad's many negatives from the early 20th century. Honestly, many show picnics and gatherings of unidentified people. The clothing and expressions are vaguely interesting. But I have to reduce the stuff cluttering the house. I have tried to find his negatives that show cities or topics that might interest people outside of the long-deceased participants:

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2025/11/from-archives-huntington-west-virginia.html

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2014/01/recovering-and-rebuilding-athens-in-1953.html

I would love to see some photos of my great grandparents in their younger years. Or my great, great grandparents. All for naught if they exist but are not identified.

For example: I have a candid photo of my grandmother when she was 21 years old. It shows her personality. The photo dates from 1911.

 

[albireo]

I would love to see some photos of my great grandparents in their younger years. Or my great, great grandparents. All for naught if they exist but are not identified.

For example: I have a candid photo of my grandmother when she was 21 years old. It shows her personality. The photo dates from 1911.

Yes!!

I'm really not on board with the various cynics going all 'nobody will care about us or our pictures when we croak'.

I was thinking that our capability or interest in remembering our family history is tied, as far as I'm concerned, to available photographic technology and its relatively short time frame of existence - and not to interest. It's not that I wouldn't want to know how my distant, and very distant, ancestor looked like, in fact I would love to! It's that there was no photography back then, and they were probably not royalty, so no painting remains

My uncle last year unearthed a rare family picture of his great grandmother and her family. It was a family studio portrait, late 1800s photography, orthochromatic emulsion of course, so everyone looks 'ancient' with those dark lips. Some SOLID mustaches (the men, not the ladies, at least in the picture). Also as I believe it was customary, nobody smiles, and everyone including the babies is wearing their best dress. The two boys, toddlers, are wearing cute skirts! Everyone looks so serious. This is interesting, but I'd love to see them in their daily routine.

What did they eat?
How did their drinking glasses look like?
How did the curtains look like? Were there carpets in the house?
How did the women look like when not posing for a formal portrait?
Did my great-great grandma have blue eyes like my grandma? Curls? How did she smile? Did she wear rings or jewellery?
What did the toddlers play with? Did they fight with each other?
Did people hug each other or kiss each other?
What did they do on their holidays, if the idea of 'holiday' existed?
Did they have pets? I know my grandma's family bred horses, how far does this trade go back?

I think someone 200 years from now, or 300 or 400, will have a blast looking back at some of the family pictures we're making right now, provided we strive to make them available to them.

Keep taking, and safeguarding, those family snapshots, they could be truly valuable documents for someone, one day.

 

[Don_ih]

I'm really not on board with the various cynics going all 'nobody will care about us or our pictures when we croak'.

I don't think anyone who says that means the family snapshot kind of photos. Everyone knows most people like to see photos of their younger selves, of their siblings and relatives - still living or dead. Those are of personal significance.

I'd say a great many people here, though, have a large number of photos that would be of no personal significance to anyone other than the photographer. The exception is if the photos can be sold - and most cannot. Well, someone may pay a hundred dollars for a lifetime's worth of negatives.

A large collection of Grant Haist's photos, negatives, notebooks, etc., has been for sale for years for $45000.

 

[albireo]

I don't think anyone who says that means the family snapshot kind of photos. Everyone knows most people like to see photos of their younger selves, of their siblings and relatives - still living or dead. Those are of personal significance.

I'd say a great many people here, though, have a large number of photos that would be of no personal significance to anyone other than the photographer. The exception is if the photos can be sold - and most cannot. Well, someone may pay a hundred dollars for a lifetime's worth of negatives.

Ah OK Don - sounds like I had misunderstood - thanks

 

[albireo]

But actually @Don_ih I wonder how far 'out' of the family context we'd have to go for our interest to fade. It's probably a little further out.

For example those Grant Haist negatives you linked to - I could see how some of those could be of interest to me if I had some shared cultural or local ties to at least some of the places and situations depicted.

So probably you're right - other people won't care too much about our photos but I'd still argue that if we're depicting a shared history, place, culture, perhaps long gone places. and some of the public can somehow personally relate to at least some of what we show, they might find our work of interest.

For example I am endlessly drawn to Atget's pictures of old Paris, partially because I find the opportunity to essentially see a snapshot of how a European city would have looked like from the late middle Ages to the XIX Century fascinating,

 

[Don_ih]

I'd still argue that if we're depicting a shared history, place culture, perhaps long gone places and they can somehow related to some of this, they will find our work of interest.

That's true, if they can get over the fact that there are likely tens or hundreds of thousands of such photos to sift through. It's difficult enough to sort through your own photos, let alone someone else's - especially if they're on a stack of removable hard drives or dvds or just a pile of negatives. We already know what most people think of film negatives (they're garbage).

The likelihood is people will keep prints but not bother much with anything else.

I bought a box of camera stuff from an auction about ten years ago. In it was a stack of negatives that, when I looked through them, I could tell were photos from a high school. I got curious about the guy and scanned the negatives (and there were a lot). I found out what high school it was and found a facebook group where a lot of people in those photos were posting. I joined the group and made a few posts - got lots of responses. I uploaded all of the photos to a Flickr account and posted that anyone interested could look though and download any they wanted. I don't think any were downloaded.

Most people aren't as interested in photography as most of the people here.

 

[pentaxuser]

I can't speak for your relatives but mine and my wife's relatives of a generation or two back from our generation had the habit of losing or throwing out negs and keeping one print as if that was the most important item. So in that sense, pre-digital people certainly hastened the destruction of memories

pentaxuser

 

[albireo]

Fair points. And depressingly, I wonder if in 300 years time humans will even be able to tell authentic old images apart from scenes imagined by whichever AGI will be ruling us.

 

[stevenje]

I do not worry about the images that I have taken is the past, I just look forward to the ones I am about to make.

 

[retina_restoration]

Fair points. And depressingly, I wonder if in 300 years time humans will even be able to tell authentic old images apart from scenes imagined by whatever AGI will be ruling us.

Never mind 300 years from now! That is a problem right now.

 

[Don_ih]

mine and my wife's relatives of a generation or two back from our generation had the habit of losing or throwing our negs and keeping one print as if that was the most important item.

Yup. Into the photo album or frame. The negatives may have hung around long enough to get mixed in with old newspapers and junk mail - then tossed along with them. I couldn't find any negatives in my parents' house - in spite of a comprehensive search. Even better about a lot of the prints: my mother opted for the 3.5x5 print option when getting the 126 film developed (which is a square format) - lots of oddly cropped prints.

 

[Kodachromeguy]

Keep taking, and safeguarding, those family snapshots, they could be truly valuable documents for someone, one day.

Excellent reasoning. I'll admit that I'm on the cynic spectrum of this conversation. If you want to safeguard pictures for your descendents, they better be film and/or paper.
Update: they better have some labels, especially date and place.

 

[koraks]

Keep taking, and safeguarding, those family snapshots, they could be truly valuable documents for someone, one day.

Yeah, those can be entertaining, amusing, valuable and/or interesting for whatever reason.
Too bad I have zero interest in making them. Fortunately, some of my family members are more snap-happy and wave phones and cameras around on birthdays etc.

 

[pentaxuser]

Yup. Into the photo album or frame. The negatives may have hung around long enough to get mixed in with old newspapers and junk mail - then tossed along with them. I couldn't find any negatives in my parents' house - in spite of a comprehensive search. Even better about a lot of the prints: my mother opted for the 3.5x5 print option when getting the 126 film developed (which is a square format) - lots of oddly cropped prints.

I suspect that when the negs were new they were rightly seen as just ordinary and not worth much but a print was kept because they might occasionally look at it. A neg was of much less value as you or anyone else couldn't look at a neg and get any benefit from so doing

Unfortunately thoughts of preserving negs for future generations never entered their heads Probably each generation looks at the present in the same way

pentaxuser

 

[Don_ih]

thoughts of preserving negs for future generations never entered their heads

The only reason to keep negatives that people knew of was to order blow-ups or reprints - things that were hardly ever done.

 

[MattKing]

Unfortunately thoughts of preserving negs for future generations never entered their heads Probably each generation looks at the present in the same way

Perhaps, but my experience tends to support instead that those earlier generations tended to want to save everything they could, in the remote chance that what was saved would one day have use.
Ask anyone who has ever had to clear out their parents' home after they passed!
On the subject of cultural heritage saved, I do remember my father commenting on more than one occasion that if he never had to see another home-made Super 8 movie of the Kodak Hula show in Hawaii he would be quite happy.
Of course, if you spend a quarter century as the customer service manager at a Kodak Canada Kodachrome/Ektachrome processing laboratory, you might expect some amount of repetition in your customer's experiences.
The show:

 

[warden]

I simply chose not share any prints I make for the reasons I mentioned and furthermore because I consider most of my pics to be private within a small circle of friends and relatives only and largely of no interest or benefit to others.

apparently @pentaxuser was a key witness in a case involving conspiracy to spread English humour, using long, convoluted sentences that lack sufficient punctuation

I will say this pentaxuser I do appreciate your longstanding participation here If we do eventually learn that you were all along a Vivian Maier-style prodigy and yet all you shared with us was words we will be very disappointed Indeed It's not every day after all that one is in the presence of greatness

 

[multivoiced]

Wow, memories. My very first travel abroad was Paris in 2001. I carried an Olympus digital point-and-shoot. Can't say if those images are saved anywhere.

 

[Wallendo]

One problem with old family photographs is that analog photographs, although extremely archival in many cases, cannot be losslessly duplicated. There is only one negative. If the originals fall into the hands of someone who doesn't like to share or doesn't take care of the materials, that information is lost.

Digital allows multiple perfect copies to be made, but the files are likely to be lost among the millions of files littering our hard drives and smart phones.