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If you used a digital camera in the early 2000s, there's a good chance whole chapters of your life have been erased. A generation of photos has vanished on broken hard drives and defunct websites.
For my 40th birthday, I asked my friends and family members for one gift: pictures of me in my early 20s. My own photo collection from that era – roughly 2005-2010 – is devastatingly scarce. There's a blank space somewhere between my albums of printed college photos and my Dropbox folder of early motherhood snapshots. All I could find from those years was a handful of low-res pictures of me in a bar doing something weird with my hands.
As for the rest? Long gone, thanks to a dead laptop, defunct email and social media accounts and a sea of tiny memory cards and USB drives lost in the shuffle of multiple cross-country moves. It's like my memories were nothing more than a dream.
It turns out I'm not alone. In the early 2000s, the world made a sudden and dramatic transition from film to digital photography, but it took a while before we landed on easy, reliable storage for all those new files. Today your smartphone can zap back-ups of your photos to the cloud the second you take them. A lot of pictures captured during that first wave of digital cameras aren't so lucky. As people hopped from one device to another and digital services rose and fell, untold millions of photos vanished along the way.
There's a black hole in the photographic record that spans across our entire society. If you had a digital camera back then, there's a good chance many of your photos were lost when you stopped using it.
Even now, digital files are far less permanent than they seem. But if you take the right steps, it isn't too late to protect your new photos from the same oblivion.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of digital photography. The first digital camera was an awkward hulking device that looked more like a "toaster with a lens", as inventor Steve Sasson tells the BBC. It was decades before they became a viable consumer product, but everyone I knew had a digital camera in the early 2000s.
We took thousands of photos and shared them in online albums with names like "Tuesday night!" or "NYC trip - part 3". Surely someone in my orbit had these photos 20 years later? When I asked, it turned out very few did. They all had the same issues I did. How could there be so little to show from such a snap-happy era?
When we look at our relationship with photos, 2005-2010 feels like a microcosm of the Information Age. It's an entire lifetime of innovation, disruption and access distilled into a five-year blip on the timeline of human history.
The year 2005 was a good time to be a digital camera. That year, the digital boom wiped out the sales of film cameras, according to data from the Camera & Imaging Products Association (Cipa), an industry trade group. Fierce competition drove down the price of basic point-and-shoot digital cameras low enough for an impulse-buy. The cameras' quality improved rapidly, giving some consumers an excuse to upgrade their point-and-shoots once or even twice a year.
Consider this: for a century, personal photography was a slow, deliberate process. Taking photos required money. Every roll of film offered a limited number of pictures. And if you wanted to see your pictures, you either had to spend time developing the film or pay a lab to do the work for you – and then repeat the process if you wanted copies.
Starting around 2005, however, every single one of those guardrails came flying off faster than you can say "cheese". Soon, consumers were collectively churning out millions of digital photos a year. But what felt like a time of photo abundance was actually a moment of extreme vulnerability.
"[Consumers] didn't know what they didn't know," says Cheryl DiFrank, founder of My Memory File, a company that helps clients organise their digital photo libraries. "Most of us don't necessarily take the time to really figure out new technology. We just figure out how to use it to do what we need to do today… and figure the rest out later."
People didn't know it at the time, DiFrank says, but there was no "figuring out the rest later".
Except a few snapshots, the photos from my early 20s may be lost forever (Credit: Serenity Strull/ Julia Bensfield Luce)
The average consumer's memories were spread precariously across a smorgasbord of first-generation portable tech that was susceptible to loss, theft, viruses and obsoletion: cameras, SD cards, hard drives, memory sticks, Flip Cams, CDs and a tangle of USB cords that worked with some devices, but not with others. At the same time, laptops were starting to overtake desktop computers for the first time ever. People were able to store and view photos exclusively on their laptops, a device that, unfortunately, was also easier to break or misplace.
Digital camera sales exploded in 2005, peaked in 2010, and then promptly fell off a cliff, according to the CIPA. Apple's iPhone launched in 2007, and soon mobile phones completely disrupted the nascent digital camera explosion. Consumers were quick to embrace the photography trend, often without pausing to safeguard the pictures we'd already taken.
The pain of lost photos is personal for Cathi Nelson. In 2009, her desktop and back-up external hard drive were stolen from her home. In the absence of accessible cloud storage at the time, she lost a big chunk of her family's memories forever. It's ironic, given that Nelson makes her living helping other people save their disappearing photos.
That same year, Nelson founded The Photo Managers, a membership organisation for professional digital photo organisers. By then, people's photo collections were already so unruly that it sparked an overwhelming demand for professional help, she says. "People are drowning in options, in technology, and in data," Nelson wrote in a white paper detailing the problem.
Members of The Photo Managers help their clients with the 2005-2010 "Black Hole" all the time. "I see it over and over again, the whole digital 'black hole' thing," says Photo Manager member Caroline Gunter. "There was a period from the early 2000s to 2013 where it was very difficult for people to get organised and photos were lost."
Nelson, Gunter and other Photo Manager members say they pull pixelated baby photos from Nokia flip phones, recover pictures from sleeves of photo CDs and go to battle with customer service at online photo album websites like Snapfish or Shutterfly. "Our members always say it's the one job they do that people cry when they return everything back to them," Nelson says.
At the exact same time, there was another seismic change underfoot: free online photo sharing. We not only had the ability to generate millions of photos, we could share them with every person on Earth – in a way that felt far more permanent than it really was.
In 2006, the social media platform MySpace was reportedly the most popular website in the United States, and for many, it became a default photo sharing and storage service. But the reign of MySpace was short-lived. Facebook launched in 2004, and by 2012 it boasted over a billion users. Soon, MySpace fell into obscurity, and countless photos and other digital memories were left behind.
In 2019, MySpace announced that 12 years' worth of its data was wiped out in an accidental server crash. The company said "any photos, videos and audio files" posted before 2016 were gone forever, a whole generation of pictures lost to time.
MySpace wasn't the only hub to store your photos, however. Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish, pharmacy chain Walgreens and many more went all-in on internet photo services. Customers got free online photo galleries, and the companies could generate revenue through prints and gifts. At first the model was a huge success. Shutterfly, for example went public in 2006 with a high profile stock offering that brought in $87m (worth about £46m in 2006).
The rest of the story is for the history books – and business school case studies). Kodak, for example, declared bankruptcy (though the company re-emerged sometime later). Shutterfly acquired all the photos in Kodak EasyShare Gallery, but my own experience shows that wasn't good news for my pictures. In order to transfer my photos from Kodak EasyShare to Shutterfly, I needed to "link" both accounts, a task I never completed despite multiple emails from Shutterfly urging me to do so. The company's marketing emails promised customers that Shutterfly would never delete them. Sometime later, I logged into my account only to find that the photos were archived and inaccessible.
A spokesperson for Shutterfly says that my story is not unfamiliar, and that the company tried its best to help customers with the Kodak transition. But, unfortunately, some photos became unrecoverable over time.
Shutterfly still has some of other pictures, but the company won't hand them over. According to the company spokesperson, you can't access, download or share the photos in Shutterfly storage unless you buy something once every 18 months. I can use those pictures to create a product like a photo calendar that Shutterfly is happy to sell me, but I can't have my files unless I make regular purchases. It almost feels like my memories are being held hostage.
"What people don't realise is that one of the biggest expenses for online businesses is storage," says Karen North, clinical professor of communication at University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. "There was so much excitement about new technology that there was no real attention – and certainly no public attention – on the need for a sustainable business model."
In the 2000s, the cost of digital storage was dramatically higher than it is today. Offsite cloud storage for businesses was just starting to emerge at the time, and many companies had to build and operate their own servers – a massive expense. Consumers were churning out millions of digital photos, but in the long term, online companies couldn't afford to store them, North says.
"In the early 2000s, the belief was that if you put it up on the internet, then it should be free," North says. "We were all living our 'second lives' for free. Gmail was free. Now you look back on it, and you think of how a small subscription fee to Kodak – or any of these sites – could have protected our memories."
Instead, customers are now paying a different price: all those photos that were speedily uploaded and shared (but not printed nor backed-up to an external hard drive) in the years around 2005-2010 are gravely compromised.
"We're so awed by all this [stuff] being given to us for free," says Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester Research. "Nobody asks questions like, 'Where does this go from here and what happens in five to 10 years?' We totally lost all of our critical thinking skills because we were so dazzled by the free internet."
Today's photo storage solutions can feel more permanent, but experts like Nelson say the same risks still apply.
"Psychologically, people didn't understand the difference between digital data and an actual physical photograph," says Nelson. "We think we're seeing an actual photograph. But we're not. We're seeing a bunch of numbers." You can hold a picture in your hand, but data is one click away from oblivion.
"It's all about redundancy," says Nelson. "We're much more at risk than we were when photos were just printed." If consumers over-rely on the cloud, the fate of their photos is in the hands of a company that could go bankrupt or decide to delete all your photos. "Or my example of an external hard drive being stolen, which I thought was the ideal backup," Nelson adds. "So that's why redundancy is key."
The Photo Managers ascribe to the "3-2-1" rule of photography storage. By this logic, you should always have three copies of every photo. Two stored on different media types (such as in the cloud and on an external hard drive), and one copy stored in a sperate, physical location (like an external hard drive stored at a family member's home). It's the best protection against faulty tech and natural disasters.
I learned that message the hard way. Today, I save all photos sent via text or email to my device, which is backed up automatically to Google Photos. Once a month, I back up Google Photos to my external hard drive.
It's also a good idea to edit your photos every day. Feeling like you have a manageable amount of photos means that you're more likely to feel in control. "The volume [of photos] right now is so insane," says Gunter. "The curation aspect is the one that's getting people in trouble, because people don't have time. They just keep snowballing the mess."
As for my 40th birthday, I collected a few gems I had never seen before. Me with an impossibly short haircut, the weird futon we couldn't sell and abandoned on the sidewalk, the tilework of a long-gone bathroom, huge unnecessary purses. I even uncovered a grainy flip phone video of my dog that captured audio of a friend saying he had a crush on "this random guy", the same guy he ended up marrying 15 years later.
Here's one thing we know now that we didn't know then: social media companies, or any online service for that matter, may not be reliable stewards of our photographs. We are the only ones who can take true ownership of our memories and mitigate the risks associated with it.
