I take a lot of pictures. I am old enough to have spent thousands of dollars on film and photo developing over three decades, from my late single digits up until about the age of 35. While I was an early adopter of the iPhone in June 2007, my film photos trailed off almost four years before that, when I purchased my first digital camera of any quality. Without the expense of film and developing, the number of photos I have taken has vastly increased, but I have printed very few.
I have become obsessed with backing up my digital photos, however, and copies exist on our iMac, a backup drive attached to the iMac, my iPhone, my iPad, Apple’s iCloud service, and Google Photos. Many, of course, are also on Facebook (though, for a variety of reasons, I don’t consider that a reliable backup). My current count of digital photos is 53,874, and that’s after a recent effort to clear out thousands of duplicates, near duplicates, and misfires.
I go through periods when I force myself to quit snapping photos of significant events or of places that we visit so that I can live entirely in the moment, but those phases never last. While I always try to strike a balance, there’s a reason I am an obsessive photo-taker (though hardly a photographer, since that implies a level of skill that, alas, I’ve never developed). My photos are my visual memory. My aphantasia,...