Are you among the many rhapsodizing about the new photo-sharing apps? Each service enables you to easily find, edit, and share photos faster than ever. The tech media’s firestorm of comprehensive reviews, especially for Google Photos were remarkable for empowering you to better enjoy photos. Yet, everyone has omitted one of the biggest challenges in photography. Photography is about sharing and preserving experiences. However, when it comes to the Internet of Things for photography, it is more about recent experiences and things like, the food you ate last evening, or random snaps of events and instant happening you come across; what about all the analog photos of the past?
Services like Google Photos, Facebook Moments and Apple Photos enable everyone to easily edit and share photos. More than ever, pictures are being shared across all social media platforms and especially using the popular #TBT (ThrowbackThursday) searchable hashtag. Yet, even with the vast increase of photos shared online, estimated at more than 1.8 billion pictures each day, something is missing.
There are two kinds of photos in this world: digital and analog. The photos you can easily organize and add to the popular photo-sharing and cloud storage services mostly consist of recent digital pictures from mobile devices-but what about all those analog and print photos? Are they so easily left out?
According to ScanMyPhotos.com, the average household has about 5,500 analog snapshots-which means generations of photos are quickly fading away from the ravages of time. The powerful social media storytelling platforms will be mostly devoid from this entire history of treasured nostalgic memories.
Google Photo’s high performance and powerful way of storing pictures in the Cloud are partly overshadowed by the 3.5 trillion analog snapshots that need to be digitized. This challenge for the photo-sharing and cloud storage services is being solved.
The time has come to make digital copies of our analog photos, and upload them to the photo-sharing and cloud storage service of our choice. This will not only ensure these photos are preserved, but it will add a complex layer to the influx of photos we’ll see shared across social platforms.
Analog pictures are being lost to time. All those generations of nostalgic memories need to be digitized, especially in today’s all-digital world. If you have a few pictures to scan, use the camera on your mobile device, or a few more, a home scanner will do. But, for very large quantize use a photo scanning service. This goes for 35mm slides, film negatives and those 1990’s canisters of APS film. Those are otherwise impossible to digitize and upload without a photo digitization specialist.
