Sometimes I’m scrolling through the photos app on my phone and I see a thumbnail of what looks like this ultra modern and minimal kitchen or studio and I’m like to myself where was I when I took that photo but after I squint long enough I realize it’s just an image I swiped from some glossy online architecture magazine and for a fraction of a second I feel completely and utterly bummed out.
That ever happen to you?
I have 37,375 “items” (I’m not sure why I’m surprised that that’s the term Apple’s designers settled on) in my photo library. Make that 37,376 because I just had to take a screenshot of that nice round number and insert it here.
RIP Andre Braugher
At one point I was considering importing all the images from my visual inspiration folder into my iCloud Photo Library. These are all the JPGs and image files that I’ve hoarded or inherited over the past 15 years. It may well have doubled the number of items in my photo library.
Chris Butler has a good post on building your own reference library.
I should import the photos from our old digital cameras we used on vacations and special occasions. I have a bunch of them saved on an external hard drive, in folders with names like ‘My Pictures’, ‘CANON_101’, ‘CANON_101 Copy’.
I should finish my family photos project that I technically started in 2017.
I should take the last few exposures on that old Olympus Stylus Infinity I bought off eBay so I can take the roll of film to get developed at that little spot down the road. I have some of the first ever photos of M on there.
I used to have this little Canon digital point and shoot. I remember it was like the size of a pack of playing cards, and it had this gold-champagne coloring. I’ve always assumed that all the photos I took with it were saved in a folder somewhere on my hard drive. But I have this wriggling feeling there’s an SD card floating around somewhere with memories I’ll never remember.
I know for a fact the photos on my old iPhone 4S—probably everything from 2013, maybe part of 2014—are gone. Well, at the very least they’re trapped on the phone’s hard drive. At some point that phone just died on me. Relatively speaking, this wouldn’t have been all that long after iCloud debuted. And needless to say, none of the photos from that time were synced.
You know, I’ve even gone so far as to get an estimate from a special data recovery company to get those photos back. It would cost me a small fortune—four figures—and there’s a chance it might not work.
How much would you pay to rescue your memories?
By some curious coincidence, earlier today I was listening to a song called “The Picture” by Elbow. Here’s part of the chorus:
But there is a picture
Lost in the ether
Chewed to corruption
By the binary oceans
Guy Garvey’s lyrics are a big reason Elbow has been my favorite band over the better part of the last decade. They’re literary and poetic, and they conjure up such vivid imagery in my head.
And pictures are worth a thousand words. If only I could find them.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.