Younger generations and memory keeping

I have a horrible memory and blocked out most of painful teenage years. I wish I had more photographs of that time because I don't remember any of the good times.

I agree it will be a challenge for this generation to keep track of everything due to the vast number of photographs they take. Plus, I read somewhere most of those photos get deleted and are never printed or saved.

As long as people still continue to print hard copies, websites crash, hard drives fail, etc etc. I have way less hard copies of my photos from my teenage and young adult life compared to what my parents have.

Experts have said that in the short term the current trend to imaging all of our life means there is more out there. but the long term, say 100 years from now there will be fair less in past generations. Social media gets abandoned (myspace anyone?) passwords get forgotten so that info is no longer available to the account owner, programs that can show the images change so the old formates get outdated (who still has a floppy disc drive?). If someone passes away unexpectedly all of their online memoirs are locked unlike the print age where the family would find albums of photos, handwritten diaries and such that could be passed on.

My dil used to take an develop film pictures. Now she snaps them with her phone and never does anything with them. I asked her for some pictures a while back and she said she had a new phone and only had a few on it. Old phone and pictures are gone

Maybe just the act of taking the photo, writing the caption and posting it online will help them to remember. But they don't just take a "roll or two of film" a year. They take, delete and share thousands of photos. Taking photos of every single meal & flower, 47 selfies in a row is going to be a lot of useless information in your memory.
Even if Instagram is around in 15 years you could have thousands just on that one site alone and there is no organization there so how would you ever scroll through and find something if you wanted to look for it? Yes I've also heard the "no I can't send you that photo it was on my old phone/tablet and it's gone now". I don't know anyone except scrapbookers that print photos anymore. Then they are often printing all their pictures and are overwhelmed by them all.
I think a nice balance would be review your year and "print a couple rolls of film". So print 50 pictures a year so you at least have a paper copy but not so much that you are overwhelmed with the volume.

  Thatta Girl!  Mine gives me digital copies so I can do with as I please but your DD goes the extra step!

For this reason I have one piece of paper stashed that has all of my login/pw to everything. The only person I've told the location to is my Mom.

No. I think one aspect is that now people just take phone photos and really do not commit events/times to memory. Maybe on a subconscious level they think " I can always look at the photo on my phone, so I do not need to live in the moment or make the effort to recall and give the event any extra reflection ". I find myself doing this and then realize what I am doing and take the extra minute or two to reflect and become more mindful of what is going on in my life and not depend just on devises to build memories of my world. Unfortunately I feel many young ones are going to lose a lot of their memories due to their dependence on technology with minimal face to face communication and truly experiencing and being in the moment.

Great question. I'm not sure. When I go to download my photos (we organize by month and year folders) some months I don't have any.

Because I don't scrapbook anymore, I think I take less photos, in general.

As for FB, I rarely post pictures of myself on there. My DH posts some of us from time to time.

I don't know anyone under the age of 40 who prints photos or puts them in frames. They don't seem to care about saving all those photos they take. I had a coworker, as an example, who had ALL of her kids' photos on her phone. No back ups. No prints. The phone died, the photos were lost. She shrugged. Seems typical.

I love this commercial for Canon printers. It addresses the use of Facebook as a substitute for printed photos. It's funny.

Commercial

My mother-in-law used to own a photo processing lab. I would get all of my photos printed for free. Dream come true until she went out of business. Even she doesn't print photos anymore, she just stores them on her phone. You would think she would have learned how to back up her photos because her previous phone was stolen and she lost all of her photos.

I still print my photos and I'm awaiting the return of Costco's photo web site.

Maybe I'm not the majority, but I'm in my thirties, print my photos, frame them, and scrapbook.

All hope is not lost.

I think this generation will definitely record more moments big and small then my parent's generation or even I do but having said that I still wish sometimes for the days of film and camera where you were so excited to see what pictures worked and in some cases didn't lol but more then that back in the day we actually put them in albums for the most part. Now with the digital era all our "memories" are on a screen or on a social media site or ugh on our phones.

I miss the days of sitting around and looking at photo albums and I think this generation will for the most part miss out on that part of growing up and reminiscing too.

I was going thru my digial photos on picasa the other day and I was like hmmm I have no photos after Jan of this year and then I remembered that is when I got a smart phone and now that I have that I don't even dig out my fancy Canon Rebel Digital camera and I have yet to put my photos from my phone on to at least my laptop.

Digital has its advantages and I guess social media does too but ugh I have 1000's of photos on picasa that will probably never see the light of day as a hard copy photo ugh.