RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: chiddicks on Wednesday 29 November 17 16:54 GMT (UK)
-
With todays modern technology and the advent of social media and sites such as Facebook, twitter, Instagram etc, is the traditional photo and old fashioned photo album a thing of the past?
My happiest memories from childhood are looking at the old family pictures from a bygone age. That is what first interested me in finding out more about my family.
Will today's generation keep up those traditions or will it just all die out to media profiles and memory sticks???
Am I just trying to hold onto the past two much??
Is the Photograph finally dead? https://chiddicksfamilytree.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/is-the-photograph-finally-dead
let me know what you think
-
Funny you should mention that today of all days, early this morning I was searching the internet to see if I could find a picture of my gggreat uncle a cricketer born in 1814. Sure enough I found one and due to search engines all named photographs on the internet will be archived in a similar way in the future.
I would therefore assume that except for a few printed photos of special occasions the majority of future pictures will be digital.
This has advantages and disadvantages.
There will be more chance of finding named photos in the future but rather than turning the pages of a photo album we might be turning the pages of a digital album on a TV linked to the internet.
Any unnamed images such as thoses identified by numbers will be lost "for ever" when split from the original data set.
However all photos will be available practically anywhere in the world.
Therefore changed rather than a thing of the past.
Cheers
Guy
-
Great topic - I'm 34 and so (I think) I'm young enough to upload my pics to my instagram account and also old enough to remember LOVING going through my nans photo albums when I was little.
I do hope people still have albums - I do. I take photos on my phone (camera not so much these days), upload them to my laptop, save them to an online photo site, and send off for the prints to then put in my albums.
The only "downside" I find is that as I take 1000s of pics these days as it's so so easy on your phone (don't have to remember camera, or only take how many is on film etc) I have ended up with 12 albums alone of my daughter growing up. My son who is 11 months old has already filled 2 albums! All my childhood pics fit in one!!
Lisa
-
But what about all the photos hanging around in boxes and old envelopes with not a sign or mention of what or who or where they are.
I think we all have a share of those.
-
But what about all the photos hanging around in boxes and old envelopes with not a sign or mention of what or who or where they are.
I think we all have a share of those.
... and that is just as relevant with digital photography, whether it's camera or phone. It's so easy (and costs nothing) to take hundreds of images, but whilst the phone or SD card stores date and time, it does not automatically store names and locations.
If we are not careful our families will inherit digital shoeboxes just about as useless as the cardboard ones we've inherited.
No the photograph is far from dead, but it still needs work to preserve its usefulness.
-
Some really good points here and all relevant to my original post.
I also use modern technology and the various social media sites to post pictures etc, but the nostalgia of looking through an old album cannot be replaced by a Facebook album for me.
Don't get me wrong, to send a picture thousands of miles to family is a wonderful gift of the modern era and to Skype family members when you are apart is such a wonderful thing.
Sugarbakers makes a really important point, we are even less to tag or identify digital pictures than we are old black and whites, lesson for us all there.
I accept that we need to embrace modern technology and the digital age will not go away, I am just mindful of losing the nostalgia of looking through old albums forever.
-
As others have commented there is nothing nicer than thumbing your way through an old family photo album....wish I had some!
I just have 'a box full' of my parents old pics with hardly any of them telling me who, where, what they all are!
These days its very easy to create photo books on the computer that you can add as many pictures to as you want and write information next to them too... this is the modern way to capture imagines of loved ones for the next generations to look through...
The advantages of modern photo books is that they can hold far more pictures and take up less space than the old fashioned photo albums of the past.
At least my grandchildren will be able to look at old and modern pictures of their mother and our family.
There is room for both but we need to move with the times.... personally I wouldn't post any pictures anywhere on social media I still want them to be kept private and just for family.
Caroline
-
Last Christmas I gave my 2 grown up children and my Grandaughter 2 Empty Photograph Albums each, each with photos of them on the day they were born, and those from the years that followed. (I had always dated the photos and added locations and/or names of others that were in the photo when I had them developed), but never got around to putting them in albums! 😂
I had actually intended to make up the albums myself, with their details and notes, but I ran out of time, got lazy and decided they were by then - old enough do it themselves!
I just love REAL photographs - even the old tatty ones. It's been lovely, and I feel blessed to have been fortunate enough to have had so many wonderful restorations done by the amazing team of restorers here on Rootschat! So because of their skills and the exciting clever digital work done by them, I am now able to see all my "real" special family photos, now proudly hanging on the walls in my home, along with some I had taken myself and printed off myself!
So a huge thank you yet again you wonderful restorers! YOU ARE DA BOMB!!
-
Whenever I ask my family for photographs I am told to look at various social media websites of which I am not a member and don't wish to be. When my parents were alive I made a point of having extra prints done for them.
Nowadays they hand round phones with a tiny smeary screens which don't give you a chance to study them. They say they will email them but never do!!
rayard.
-
Yes, most of my friends cannot seem to grasp that I do not and will not have a "Facebook" account!
-
Whenever I ask my family for photographs I am told to look at various social media websites of which I am not a member and don't wish to be. When my parents were alive I made a point of having extra prints done for them.
Nowadays they hand round phones with a tiny smeary screens which don't give you a chance to study them. They say they will email them but never do!!
rayard.
I sympathise with you rayard!
The best thing to do is to get your family to create a calendar for you as a Christmas present that has lots of photos of your family on them... then you can enjoy them all year round and you have a nice record (if you have grandchildren) to keep! I love the one I get given annually and will treasure them for ever more.
Caroline
-
My son who is 11 months old has already filled 2 albums! All my childhood pics fit in one!!
You are going to have a storage problem. What happened to the paperless office - did it ever exist? :D
-
The way the technology is developing with facial recognition algorithms, I wonder how long it will be before all photos are automatically named as you take them. You might even be able to search the internet for other photos of the same person just from the picture, without a name. Probably possible already if you know what you''re doing :-\
-
! [/quote]
You are going to have a storage problem. What happened to the paperless office - did it ever exist? :D
[/quote]
I may need an extra bedroom just for photos ;)
-
What happened to the paperless office? Pure fiction! With the inception of the fax machine and the computer worldwide paper consumption actually went up. And for those worried about chopping down trees to make the paper; in the UK at least, paper is only made from trees specifically planted to make paper from. If all paper was to be made from recycled products the trees wouldn't be planted in the first place.
To get back on-topic; I think that, in future times, "paper" photography will be seen as hardly any more than a blip in technology. Rather than getting sentimental about the "loss of a tradition", remember that photography Was only invented in the 1850s and started to die out around 150 years later.
-
Mike175, that is so true. I use Google Picasa for organising my photos. It is very out of date now, but the facial recognition is so very good and I am yet to find anything better. It can recognise various young nieces and nephews as they grow older and their faces and hair changes, and sort them accordingly, even with hats or (sun)glasses on.
It is amusing when it tries to identify a face on poster on a wall in the background. It once highlighted a picture of what looked like a nun, which I was SURE I hadn't taken. On zooming out I saw that it was a lady in medieval dress at a falconry display I had visited. Another false one was Keith Richard on a Radio Times cover on the table behind some inner guests.
Martin
-
Such technology won't need to look at any of mine. I can't think of any with people on them. If there are, I usually clone them out and the only known 'photos of me are on my passport, my driving license and my bus pass.
One thing people might ask in the future is why some people spent so much time photographing themselves.
-
Thanks for the calender suggestion Caroline.
My father used to take black and white photos and develop them in his shed. It was magical to see the faces appear in the developing dishes!!
rayard.
-
As a corollary of this, the age of the handwritten record may be dead. My grandmother had a diary, wrote letters, had an address book with birthdays marked in it. These were very valuable when I was researching her family.
For my daughter, everything is online: Facebook, Instagram, etc. You might think that "the internet is forever", but any online record lasts only as long as someone wants to save it on a server.
-
I recently saw a missing person photo released by police with an instagram filter on it, piggy ears, nose, Betty Davis eyes.
-
After reading all the posts, something just occurred to me.
How many of us will finally pass away not leaving details of where on the internet we have stored our photos or the user names/passwords to get at them. They could be lost forever. At least in the days of the "box of old photos" we would eventually find them when clearing the deceased relative's house.
Just a thought :-\
-
Some really good thoughts and ideas here, I certainly hadn't considered the online "life`' of an image being limited to the life expectancy of the server or its storage capacity. I wonder if others have?
Have we all got back up copies elsewhere? are the the images tagged who's who? I know thats certainly something I will now have to look at myself.
-
Such technology won't need to look at any of mine. I can't think of any with people on them. If there are, I usually clone them out and the only known 'photos of me are on my passport, my driving license and my bus pass.
One thing people might ask in the future is why some people spent so much time photographing themselves.
😜😜👍👍 The selfie generation is alive and well!! ;D ;D
-
No matter what the technology you use - if you want photos to be available for future generations then make good quality prints (using good quality archival ink/paper) - label and store them properly.
The same applies to your research - otherwise you are completely reliant on your descendants having the interest, knowledge and time to access the information, store it and keep it updated as formats and storage technology changes.
When my father died he left some important family research .... on floppy disks. Less than a decade old, yet we still had to hunt around to find the technology to read them .... I suspect in another decade or two that would not be possible (or extremely expensive).
In my previous career we had some computer data from the late 1980s that was stored on large format disks - but even one of the world's biggest IT companies couldn't access them (no working drive still existed that could read them).
-
I think I overcompensated with taking photographic records of everything, having quite a minimal record of own childhood ... hence drawers full of photos and umpteen files now in digital!
Always made a point of at least dating back of photos after one school holidays trying to sort the few mum had in a chocolate box and although her memory was sharp, surprising how hard to try and get it right when some time has lapsed, even with names and places when they seemed familiar at the time.
Husband does a lot of photography too, we both try to keep up with our sorting and storing. I can print out a few at home but it's not that economical with the inks, so save a selection of family ones on a stick to take in to a printing outlet when they have good deals. It is quite a mission to keep up with copies for others as well but do try to deal with it asap or too easy to overlook :)
-
I would sincerely hope not - there is a clarity to an old black and white photo that cannot be compared to the modern digital photo - to some even an 3D effect and a feeling of real nostalgia.
The advantages and disadvantages are many.
Photographs of old are seldom copied into digital form to be kept somewhere just to be found on the net by some unsuspected relatives years later.
Old photographs boxed then put away to just then head for the bin or skip usually following a bereavement along with negatives - just how many times have we seen that?
Yet with Digital - GPS that now comes with most new cameras can give you time and location - sent with seconds to most places in the world - no worries about leaving a legacy to those that want it.
Without the net just how would our research be done as it is today, information send via the net and sometimes photographs.
It is all down to the person who owns them to see that photos are filed up and logged for future generations, no matter what form they are taken in, or so be it . . .
-
is it a generation thing though? Are the teenagers today going to be as enthusiastic about recording and. saving images as we are?
-
is it a generation thing though? Are the teenagers today going to be as enthusiastic about recording and. saving images as we are?
If they're interested in taking so many as some seem to do on their phones, perhaps they will choose to select a few in hard copy for keeps :-\
Professional wedding photography and baby photography is still big business, our adult children have several lovely framed images in their homes of those occasions.
Also there are various regular offers for digital print books which they have used several times, for a selection of memory photos of weddings or trips etc, quite inexpensive for what they are.
fb offer a social book one as well, a timeline of popular postings ... I received one last Christmas from one daughter, it's done rather well and covers a few years, think she does an annual one just to save on actual prints.