For my 40th birthday, I asked my friends and family for a gift: photos of me from my early twenties. My collection of photos from that era—roughly 2005 to 2010—is terribly sparse.
There’s a blank space between my albums of printed college photos and my Dropbox folder of snapshots from my early years as a mother. The only thing I could find from those years was a handful of low-resolution photos of me in a bar doing something weird with my hands.
And the rest? Left behind by a dead computer, inactive email and social media accounts, and a sea of small memory cards and USB sticks lost in the chaos of multiple international moves. It’s like my memories are nothing more than a dream.
Turns out I’m not the only one. In the early 2000s, the world experienced a sudden and dramatic transition from analog to digital photography, but it took a while to find easy, reliable storage for all those new files.
Today, your smartphone can send backup copies of your photos to the cloud as soon as you take them. Many photos captured during the first wave of digital cameras were not so lucky. As people switched devices and digital services rose and fell, millions of photos disappeared in the process.
There is a black hole in the photographic record that extends throughout our society. If you had a digital camera back then, chances are many of your photos were lost when you stopped using it.
Even now, digital files are much less permanent than they seem. But if you take the right steps, it’s not too late to protect your new photos from the same oblivion.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of digital photography. The first digital camera was a huge and impractical device that looked more like a “toaster with a lens”, as its inventor Steve Sasson explains to the BBC.
It took decades before they became a viable consumer product, but everyone I knew had a digital camera in the early 2000s.
We take thousands of photos and share them in online albums with names like “Tuesday Night!” or “Trip to New York – part 3”. Surely someone in my circle had these photos 20 years later? When I asked, it turned out that very few had them. They all had the same problems as me. How could there be so little from a time so full of photos?
When looking at our relationship with photos, the period 2005-2010 is perceived as a microcosm of the Information Age. It’s a lifetime of innovation, disruption, and access condensed into a five-year span in the timeline of human history.
The digital revolution
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The year 2005 was a good time to be a digital camera user. That year, the digital boom devastated sales of film cameras, according to data from the Camera and Imaging Products Association (Cipa).
Fierce competition lowered the price of basic compact digital cameras enough for them to be purchased on impulse. Camera quality improved rapidly, giving some consumers an excuse to upgrade their compacts once or even twice a year.
Consider this: For a century, personal photography was a slow, deliberate process. Taking photos required money. Each roll of film offered a limited number of photos. And if you wanted to see your photos, you had to spend time developing the film or pay a lab to do the work, and then repeat the process if you wanted copies.
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However, starting in 2005, all those barriers collapsed in the blink of an eye. Soon, consumers were producing millions of digital photos a year. But what seemed like a time of photographic abundance was, in reality, a moment of extreme vulnerability.
“[Los consumidores] “They didn’t know what they didn’t know,” says Cheryl DiFrank, founder of My Memory File, a company that helps clients organize their digital photo libraries. “Most of us don’t take the time to fully understand new technologies. We just figure out how to use them to do what we need today… and we figure out the rest later.”
People didn’t know it at the time, DiFrank says, but they couldn’t “figure out the rest later.”
The average consumer’s memory was precariously dispersed across a wide range of first-generation portable technology, susceptible to loss, theft, viruses, and obsolescence: cameras, SD cards, hard drives, USB sticks, Flip Cams, CDs, and a tangle of USB cables that worked with some devices but not others.
At the same time, laptops were beginning to surpass desktop computers for the first time in history. People could store and view photos exclusively on their laptops, a device that, unfortunately, was also easier to break or lose.
Digital camera sales skyrocketed in 2005, peaked in 2010 and then plummeted, according to Cipa. Apple’s iPhone was launched in 2007, and soon mobile phones completely revolutionized the nascent digital camera explosion. Consumers quickly adopted the new photography trend, often without stopping to protect the photos we had already taken.
The “black hole”
The pain of losing photos is personal for Cathi Nelson. In 2009, his computer and backup external hard drive were stolen from his home. In the absence of accessible cloud storage at the time, he lost much of his family’s memories forever. It’s ironic, since Nelson makes a living helping other people recover their missing photos.
That same year, Nelson founded The Photo Manager,” a membership organization for professional digital photo organizers. By then, photo collections were already in such disarray that there was a huge demand for professional help, he says. “People are overwhelmed by options, technology and data,” Nelson wrote in a white paper detailing the problem.
Members of The Photo Managers help their clients with the 2005-2010 “black hole” constantly. “I see it over and over again, the whole digital ‘black hole’ thing,” says Caroline Gunter, a member of the group. “There was a period, from the early 2000s to 2013, when it was very difficult for people to organize and photos were lost.”
Nelson, Gunter and other members of The Photo Managers say they recover pixelated baby photos from Nokia flip phones, recover photos from photo CDs and deal with customer service at online photo album websites like Snapfish or Shutterfly.
“Our members always say it’s the only job they do where people cry when they get everything back,” Nelson says.
At the same time, another radical change occurred: free online photo sharing. Not only did we have the ability to generate millions of photos, but we could also share them with all of humanity, in a way that seemed much more permanent than it really was.
In 2006, the social networking platform MySpace was the most popular website in the United States and, for many, became the service of choice for sharing and storing photos. But his reign was short-lived.
Facebook launched in 2004 and, by 2012, had more than 1 billion users. Soon, MySpace fell into oblivion, leaving behind countless photos and other digital mementos.
In 2019, MySpace announced that 12 years of data had been deleted in an accidental server failure. The company claimed that “all photos, videos and audio files” published before 2016 had been lost forever, an entire generation of images lost to time.
However, MySpace was not the only center for storing photos. Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish, the Walgreens pharmacy chain and many more opted for online photography services.
Customers got free online photo galleries, and businesses could generate revenue through prints and giveaways. At first, the model was a resounding success. Shutterfly, for example, went public in 2006 with a high-profile public offering that raised $87 million.
Lost forever
The rest of what happened is left for history books and business school case studies. Kodak, for example, declared bankruptcy (although the company resurfaced some time later).
Shutterfly acquired all the photos from Kodak EasyShare Gallery, but my own experience shows that it was not good news for my photos. To transfer my photos from Kodak EasyShare to Shutterfly, I needed to link both accounts, a task I never completed despite multiple emails from Shutterfly urging me to do so.
The company’s marketing emails promised customers that Shutterfly would never delete them. Some time later, I logged into my account and discovered that the photos were archived and inaccessible.
A Shutterfly spokesperson says my story is well-known and the company did everything it could to help customers transition to Kodak. However, unfortunately, some photos became unrecoverable over time.
Shutterfly still has some photos, but the company does not release them. According to a spokesperson, photos stored on Shutterfly cannot be accessed, downloaded or shared unless something is purchased every 18 months. I can use those photos to create a product like a photo calendar that Shutterfly is happy to sell to me, but I can’t have my files unless I make regular purchases. I almost feel like my memories are kidnapped.
“What people don’t understand is that one of the biggest expenses for online businesses is storage,” says Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. “There was so much enthusiasm for new technologies that no real attention—let alone public attention—was paid to the need for a sustainable business model.”
In the 2000s, the cost of digital storage was considerably higher than today. External cloud storage for businesses was just beginning to emerge at the time, and many companies had to build and operate their own servers, which was a huge expense.
Consumers were producing millions of digital photos, but in the long run, online companies couldn’t afford to store them, North says.
“In the early 2000s, it was believed that if you put something on the internet, it had to be free,” North says. “We all lived our ‘second lives’ for free. Gmail was free. Looking back on it now, you think about how a small subscription fee to Kodak, or any of these sites, could have protected our memories.”
Instead, customers now pay a different price: All those photos that were quickly uploaded and shared (but not printed or backed up to an external hard drive) between 2005 and 2010 are severely compromised.
“We’re amazed at all this stuff they’re giving us for free,” says Sucharita Kodali, a retail market analyst at Forrester Research. “No one is asking, ‘What will happen in five or ten years?’ We completely lost our critical thinking because we were dazzled by the free internet.”
Today’s photo storage solutions may seem more permanent, but experts like Nelson say the same risks still exist.
“Psychologically, people didn’t understand the difference between digital data and a physical photograph,” Nelson says. “We think we’re looking at a real photograph. But we’re not. We’re looking at a bunch of numbers.” You may have an image in your hand, but the data is one click away from disappearing.
How to protect your photos
“It all comes down to redundancy,” says Nelson. “We are at much greater risk than when photos were simply printed.” If consumers rely too much on the cloud, the fate of their photos is in the hands of a company that could go bankrupt or decide to delete them all.
“Or my example of stealing an external hard drive, which I thought was the ideal backup,” adds Nelson. “That’s why redundancy is key.”
Photo managers adhere to the “3-2-1” rule for photo storage. By this logic, you should always have three copies of each photo: two stored on different media (like the cloud and an external hard drive) and one copy saved in a separate physical location (like an external hard drive at a family member’s house). It is the best protection against technological failures and natural disasters.
I learned that message the hard way. Today, I save all the photos sent to me via SMS or email on my device, which is automatically backed up to Google Photos. Once a month, I back up Google Photos to my external hard drive.
It’s also a good idea to edit your photos daily. Feeling like you have a manageable number of photos means you’re more likely to be in control. “The volume [de fotos] It’s crazy right now,” says Gunter. “Photo selection is what’s getting people in trouble, because they don’t have time. “They just keep accumulating clutter.”
As for my 40th birthday, I received some jewelry I had never seen before. Me with an incredibly short haircut, the strange futon that we couldn’t sell and abandoned on the sidewalk, the tiles of a bathroom that no longer exists, huge and unnecessary bags. I even discovered a grainy video of my dog recorded on a flip phone while a friend was heard saying she was in love with “some random guy,” the same guy she married 15 years later.
There is something we know now that we didn’t know then: social networks, or any online service, may not be reliable guardians of our photographs. We are the only ones who can take true responsibility for our memories and mitigate the associated risks.
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