New York – For her 30th birthday, while she was still pregnant, Lindsay Nie received from Mom an album filled with her baby and childhood photos.
She enjoyed the trip down memory lane – recalling, for instance, the wooden slide she had in her room and the way she used to play on it. But she also noticed many gaps in the collection, in some cases months or even a year in length.
So after Nie gave birth to Amber last December, she was determined to leave a better record, a daily diary through imagery.
She slips her Canon PowerShot SD450 digital camera into a diaper bag anywhere she goes and has snapped more than 6,500 photos in nine months.
“I grab it all the time, if she’s just doing something really cute, maybe playing with a toy or grabbing a shoe in a shoe store,” Nie said. “I don’t really delete any. Years from now, I want to remember the bad face she made” – not just the smiles.
Thanks to cheap and easy-to-use recording devices – digital cameras, camcorders, camera phones – today’s kids are forming the most documented generation ever, as parents, relatives and friends capture forever the first, second and hundredth smile.
The challenge will come in managing all the data and making sure they get migrated and cared for along the way.
“There’s going to be little escaping the embarrassment that comes with having that many baby photos and videos,” said Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “On the other hand, what a great thing for this generation to have.”
The research company InfoTrends estimates that 67 percent of U.S. households had digital cameras last year, up from 42 percent in 2004.
Today’s children will get a glimpse tomorrow of what everyday life was like – how their parents dressed, what furniture and paintings were in their homes – not just during birthdays and special occasions when past generations were more apt to pull out their film cameras and pose in their best outfits.
“With digital you can just keep on taking to get the one you want,” said Amy Short, a nurse in East Alton, Ill. “I definitely take a lot more of my son of just everyday, laying around or sleeping or just little things.”
But all this documentation may carry a price if parents, in spending so much energy creating and preserving a digital archive, fail to enjoy living the moment.
And will future generations even have time to look through stacks of CDs containing tens or hundreds of thousands of photos, and even if they do, will individual memories become less precious because there are so many?
What if disk drives fail or software formats change, rendering photos unreadable by tomorrow’s computers? Will CDs even work? Think of those reels of 8mm home movies with no projectors for viewing them.
“If you look at your parents’ or grandparents’ belongings, you can find old negatives … and negatives are still reproducible,” said Greg Miele, a Bethesda, Md., father of two, ages 9 and 17.
“Yet if you have a hard drive fail on your computer, it’s all over. It’s a huge risk to maintain your photographs in a digital medium.”
After two years of shooting digital, Heidi Grunwald has started returning to film, overwhelmed by the prospect of cataloging all the photos too easily snapped.
“It’s taking a lot of enjoyment out of photography,” said the mother of a 9-year-old. “I find myself not even using the camera, thinking that if I take photographs of this school event, I’m now going to have to spend a whole week processing them.’
Many parents acknowledge their kids may never want all the photos, but they say they’d like to have them available just in case they want them – particularly as they become parents themselves.
“Now that I have children of my own, I would love to see baby pictures of me to see if my daughter looks like I did, what characteristics I share,” said Thea Jankowski of Saint Charles, Ill.
Avoiding common storage stumbles
There are several steps you can take to avoid a digital disaster and keep the memories alive.
Keep backups at multiple locations: If you don’t have a home computer, don’t rely solely on your office machine. You may lose them should you lose your job. Even at home, keep copies on an external drive, CDs or DVDs in case your computer’s primary disk drive fails. Consider an online backup service in case a tornado, fire or other disaster hits your home.
Manage your CDs and DVDs: Don’t rely solely on discs. A scratch might kill the image of your baby’s first walk. Make multiple copies, and migrate data to a new set of discs every few years. Be aware that computers decades from now might not even have drives for reading CDs and DVDs.
Know the limitations of online storage: Don’t rely solely on any one service, because a site may disappear without warning. Keep in mind that a photo-sharing service isn’t the same as online backup. Many free ones restrict access to the original, high-resolution version of photos needed for quality prints. Some, including Eastman Kodak Co.’s EasyShare Gallery, require you to make annual purchases to keep photos online.
Migrate your data: As you change computers, bring files to your new machine right away – before the old one breaks down. Open files on your new computer to make sure you have the necessary software.
