6 Comments

Why delete when you can archive? Most of the costs of maintaining a digital stockpile are fixed, so not much more expensive to keep everything rather than just some things. You never have to browse the archived items, but they are always available for searching and mining. And someday soon I think you will be able to unleash AI on this massive pile of low-yield memory ore to refine out some precious nuggets.

Expand full comment

In principle, I'm arguing for organizing it more than for deleting specifically; deletion is just how I personally approached the problem. That said, the benefit of deletion is simple: it dramatically reduces risk of data leaks, online extortion, etc, while the price is minimal (basically, giving up on that "maybe AI can do something nice with it one day" possibility).

Expand full comment

Google marketing agrees with you!

https://one.google.com/mariekondo

Expand full comment

I always struggle with the length of family videos. It's hard to balance between them being boring and loosing important details.

Regarding photos we usually order physical printouts once every few months.

Expand full comment

Yeah, that's why I try to keep the individual takes and the entire video short. Less of a "here's everything we did", more of a "here's how it felt to be there".

Admittedly, it's a different challenge if you're catering to specific expectations, like "officially" documenting a family event.

Expand full comment

By the way, an interesting problem on these timescales is media preservation. I lost many of my early photos because I didn't plan ahead for device failures, botched migrations, or the demise of online hosting services - all of which is inevitable when talking about the timescale of 2-3 decades or more.

I recommend keeping local copies of all media in their original format (i.e., prior to resizing / recoding / upload), and putting one a backup on properly-labeled and organized offline media, such as an external hard drive.

Expand full comment