Time to Gather Your Go Bag Photos Before It’s Too Late
- Bryon
- Sep 8, 2024
- 3 min read
September Is Save Your Photos Month
September is Save Your Photos Month. It is a reminder to take stock of the digital photos on your computer, your phone, and in the cloud as well as the physical prints on display or stored in albums or boxes in various locations in your home. With the convenience of cellphone cameras, our collection of photos is growing exponentially.
Below are interesting statistics regarding the explosion in the number of digital photos:
In 2024, an estimated 1.94 trillion photos will be taken worldwide.
Globally, we capture 5.3 billion photos daily, or 61,400 per second.
The average American takes 20 photos per day.
There are approximately 14.3 trillion photos in existence.
Smartphones account for 94% of all photos taken in 2024.
Google Image Search indexes an estimated 136 billion images.
14 billion images are shared daily on social media, with WhatsApp leading at 6.9 billion.
According to our 2024 data, the average user has around 2,000 photos on their smartphone.
Google reports that its Android devices take 93 million selfies per day, and in one poll, 18-to-24-year-olds reported that every third photo they take is a selfie.
If we are taking an average of 20 photos per day, we are adding approximately 7.300 photos per year to our collection. And that number will only grow each year.
To help individuals manage their photo collection, The Photo Managers was formed in 2009. Members of The Photo Managers help individuals tackle the task of organizing and preserving their photos from the search for photos to the organization, storage, and backup of their photos in digital format. The founder of the organization, Cathi Nelson, has written an excellent guide, Photo Organizing Made Easy: Going from Overwhelmed to Overjoyed, that provides DIY guidance for the entire process from gathering, sorting, scanning, saving, curating, and archiving all of your photos. Even with the help of a professional photo manager, it will be a major, time-consuming project.
I recommend an alternative first step before trying to tackle all your photos.
Imagine you are facing an evacuation order due to an approaching wildfire or storm. You are prepared to leave but you have five minutes to grab your 25 to 50 most precious photos.
These are your Go Bag photos. Which photos would you grab?
Take the same approach to preserving your digital photos stored on your phone and accessible on iCloud Photos or Google Photos. Select the most precious photos and download them for safekeeping. Because iCloud Photos and Google Photos are not backup tools, you should not depend upon these services to safeguard your important photos. You are one hack of your individual account or even the Apple or Google network away from losing a lifetime of memories. In addition to malicious cyber attacks and ransomware, the recent CrowdStrike software update that crashed Windows computers around the world highlights the vulnerability of major computer networks. You need a true backup of your photos.
Start gathering your go-bag photos. Do not fret over your selections. The goal is to identify about 50 important photos and then take steps to preserve and share them. This way you will understand the full process including the final step of sharing a small, curated photo collection with family and friends. I am confident that you will want to add to the collection and you will be motivated to search wider for photos that will be meaningful to you and others. For most people, tackling their entire photo collection at once is overwhelming. I recommend this incremental approach. You will fully appreciate the value of selecting, preserving, curating, and sharing important photos.
In subsequent posts, I will discuss how to save, backup, and share your printed and digital photos.
Telling the stories associated with the photos is very important. You may want to consider a life story legacy video to document your or a family member’s life journey. Many of your go-bag photos are the photos that would be used in a life story legacy video.
For more information including sample videos, see my website at LifeStoryLegacyVideos.com. Feel free to contact me. We can schedule a time to talk about the process.
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Regards,
Bryon
Life Story Legacy Videos: Capturing Personal and Family Stories
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