What happens to our photos when we're no longer here?

Yes, I wonder about this sometimes too. Who still looks at my photos. Friends of ours make a yearbook, for themselves or for their children. That is certainly an idea, even if it is just to look back at the beautiful hikes or holidays you took that year.

In a world rife with the narcissism of influencers and content creators, this article is a breath of fresh air. Putting things into perspective, more people should do that.

Interesting that you write about that. Because of the large number of photos I take, both as a hobby and for courses, I have arranged all my photos by YEAR in Lightroom and also by event. Because I always I photograph in RAW, that's a lot of gigs and partly for that reason I process it as follows. All my photos are arranged, namely: the better and interesting photos get 5 stars (and remain stored in RAW). The rest (the majority) is converted to jpg after selection. The 5-star ones are selected for top photos and get a FLAG. Regardless of the year, I can then immediately and always retrieve my best/nicest photos. In addition, I also use keywords. I make clear how my "shoebox" works and then it's up to the next of kin. PS: Sorry that it's a bit extensive.

Rgds
Joop Otting

For my six grandchildren, I make a book every year. Then they have at least something. Their parents mostly only take phone photos. I hope they will look back on it with pleasure in due course.

I still make printed photo albums (annual albums and holiday albums) of the best photos, which I select in Lightroom and then save as JPGs on an external SSD. I also keep these photos in a shared folder in OneDrive. My RAW files are on a separate SSD. Over the past 2-3 years I have become much stricter about keeping them. I now delete less good photos immediately. I really do still browse through those albums sometimes and see the evolution over the years. It is also fascinating to look back at what your house, your garden, your surroundings, and yourself looked like a few decades ago.

Maybe those databases are also so large because we take far more mediocre to bad photos than we used to. At my former photo shop, you were allowed to select the photos you wanted to keep and pay for. I also remember a time when I was still a school student with little pocket money, when I first had 35mm contact prints made and then selected what I did want to have enlarged. This year I made a little photo book for the first time with the photos of my best memories of 2024. And besides that, my heirs still have my photography website where my the results of my photography hobby are posted and which could serve as a guide if they wanted to dig up one or more photos from the archive where they have the maximum resolution. Whether they will do that? I don't think so. But I had a fun hobby for decades.

I have my PC connected to the television, and I only save the most beautiful photos on it. They are then shown in the screensaver when it turns on. The old digitized photos of my grandmother and grandfathers are also included, so you shoot through your own life and through the lives of my family. from 2023 to 1990 to 2022, etc. It is also nice to watch the slideshow during coffee, so I regularly come across old memories.

Ps my photo show now contains almost 50,000 photos and these are only the beautiful ones or those with a memory.

I make videos on DVD from video recordings made during holidays. And in addition, a slideshow of a selection of holiday photos, also on DVD. You can make a slideshow with Lightroom and also with Adobe Premiere Elements. These DVDs are therefore also suitable for the next of kin.

This month I turned 65 and I was lucky enough to also take photos of our queen Máxima this month for the major local newspaper. Many photos are now on my PC that no one will ever see again. But there are more 'unique' photos like that from years ago. Nando brought up this subject now and coincidentally I also had to think about it myself this month. Maybe it is important to let your next of kin know where you have stored all the photos and how they can view them before they put the PC out with the bulky waste in the event of your death. And maybe it is also useful to make 1 folder containing all the photos that matter, with the best photos from each year! Thanks for posting this subject and now I still have to put my own ideas into practice, haha

will we still be able to connect a usb in a few years?

I have been making photobooks of my (photo)trips for years, they are tangible for my (grand)children, and are in my bookcase.