"Recently, I used Apple Photos to revisit the photos I took during the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday. There were some gems in there-memories I'd like to preserve forever. But there were even more images I regretted saving in the first place. You already know the ones I'm talking about. The near-duplicates of other, better photos. The blurry misfires. The shots of people with their eyelids drooping or mouths agape. The ones I accidentally took of the floor when my thumb slipped."
"Of course, all of this is an artifact of the age of digital photography. For me, that began in the spring of 1999, when I bought my first digital camera. Freed from film and developing costs, I could take as many photos as I wanted (or at least as many as my memory card would hold). They quickly piled up on my hard drive in a way that had no precedent with printed snapshots."
"As nice as it is not to lose images by accident-which I did all the time pre-smartphone-the 111,582 photos I currently have stored in Apple Photos, most of which I took with various iPhones, include vast quantities of dross. I'm spending $10 a month on 2 terabytes of iCloud storage to store them, but the cost isn't the issue. It's the mental tax I pay every time I have to dig through bad photos to find the good ones."
Digital photography and smartphones enabled taking and storing vastly more photos without film costs, resulting in large personal archives. Many images are duplicates, blurry shots, or accidental captures mixed with treasured pictures. Cloud syncing prevents loss but leads to clutter: 111,582 photos stored in Apple Photos include substantial low-quality material. Paying for additional iCloud storage addresses space but not the cognitive load of locating good images. AI-based apps such as GoodOnes began appearing in 2023 to sort and identify the best photos, aiming to reduce manual curation and alleviate the mental tax of photo management.
Read at Fast Company
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