If you used a digital camera in the early 2000s, there’s a good chance that entire chapters of your life have been lost forever. Generations of those photos have disappeared into broken hard drives and old and defunct websites.
For my 40th birthday, I asked friends and family for one gift: my photos from the early 2000s.
My own collection of photos from that era – circa 2005-2010 – is extremely sparse. Somewhere between my student photo albums and my Dropbox folder of early motherhood photos is a large funnel.
All I’ve managed to find since then are a few low-resolution photos of me at a bar doing something weird with my hands.
And the rest of it? Some of it disappeared long ago on a now-defunct laptop, some of it in old email and social media accounts and in a sea of tiny memory cards and USB sticks lost in numerous moves.
So my memories became something of a dream. It turns out I’m not alone.
In the early 2000s, the world made a sudden and dramatic transition from film photography to digital photography, but it took a while before we created a simple and reliable storage for all those new files.
Today, your smartphone can back up your photos to the cloud as soon as you’ve taken them. Many photos taken during the first wave of digital cameras were less fortunate. As people moved from one device to another and digital services rose and fell, countless photos were lost.
There is a black hole in the photo archive that encompasses our entire society. If you had a digital camera back then, there’s a good chance that many of your photos were lost when you stopped using it.
Even now, digital files are far less timeless than they seem. But it’s not too late to protect your new photos from the same kind of oblivion.
This year, digital photography turns 50 years old. The first digital camera was and clunky device, more like a “toaster with a lens,” as inventor Steve Sasson told the BBC. It took a decade before they became a viable consumer product, but by the early 2000s everyone I knew had a digital camera.
We took thousands of photos and put them in online albums with titles like “Tuesday Night” or “Travelling to New York. Part 3.” Surely someone in my circle had these photos 20 years later? But when I asked, it turned out that very few people did. All had the same problems I had.
How is it that so few are left from the heyday of digital photography?
When we look at our relationship with photography, 2005-2010 seems like a microcosm of the information age. A lifetime of innovation and revolution was squeezed into a five-year period.
Digital Revolution
2005 was a good time for the digital camera.
According to the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), the digital boom that year led to the disappearance of film camera sales. Stiff competition drove down the prices of basic digital cameras so much that they became an impulse buy. Camera quality improved rapidly, prompting some consumers to upgrade their compact cameras once or even twice a year.
Imagine if personal photography had been a slow and deliberate process for a century.
Photography required money. Each film had a limited number of shots. And if you wanted to see those shots, you had to spend time developing film, or paying labs to print, and repeat the process all over again, and suddenly you wanted copies.
Since about 2005, however, that slow process has literally vanished into thin air. Soon every digital camera owner would be able to create millions of digital photos. But what seemed like a time of photo abundance was actually a moment of extreme vulnerability.
“We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” says Cheryl DiFrank, founder of My Memo. Ry File, a company that helps customers organise their digital photo libraries.
“Most of us don’t have to take the time to really learn new technologies. We just figure out how to use them for what we need to do today … And we plan to figure out the rest later.”
Photo by Serenity Strull/Julia Bensfield Luce
The average consumer’s photographic memories are scattered across a huge assortment of first-generation portable technology: SD cards, hard drives, flash drives, flip cameras, compact discs, and a plethora of USB cables that worked with some devices but not others. These portable devices were easily lost, damaged by viruses, or outdated.
At the same time, laptops first began to supplant desktop computers. People began to store and view photos exclusively on their laptops, but they were also easy to hack or lose.
Digital camera sales spiked in 2005, peaked in 2010, and then dropped rapidly, according to CIPA.
Apple’s IPhone came out in 2007, and it wasn’t long before mobile phones completely obliterated the explosion of digital cameras. Consumers quickly jumped on the new trend without thinking about protecting the pictures they had already taken.
The pain of losing photos is personal for Kathy Nelson.
In 2009, her desktop computer and backup external hard drive were stolen from her home. Due to the lack of cloud storage available at the time, she lost most of her family’s memories forever. Ironically, Nelson makes a living helping others save their photos.
That same year, Nelson founded The Photo Managers, a company that helps organise her photo archive. By then, she says, people’s photo collections were so out of control that professional help was in huge demand. “People are drowning in opportunities, technology and data,” Nelson described the problem.
Members of The Photo Managers n help their clients with the black hole of 2005-2010.
“I see it over and over again, this digital black hole,” said Photo Manager member Caroline Gunter. “There was a period from the early 2000s to 2013 where it was very difficult for people to organise their archives and photos were being lost.”
Nelson, Gunter and other Photo Managers tell us how they retrieve “pixelated” photos of babies from Nokia cradles, recover images from photo CD envelopes and have real battles with customer service at online photo album sites like Snapfish or Shutterfly. Dark Age
Another seismic shift took place – not only were we able to share photos with everyone on Earth.
In 2006, MySpace became the most popular photo-sharing service.
It didn’t last long in 2004, and by 2012, MySpace collapsed, taking countless photos and other digital memories with it. In 2016, an entire generation of images was lost.
But MySpace wasn’t the only place to store photos. Kodak, Shutterfly, Walgreens and many other companies made a big bet on online photo services.
Customers got free online galleries for their photos earned money from photo printing and souvenirs. Initially, this model was a huge success. Shutterfly, for example, went public in 2006 with a high-profile IPO, raising $87 million (about £46 million at 2006 prices).
But shortly afterwards Kodak declared bankruptcy (although the company was revived shortly afterwards). Shutterfly bought all the photos from the Kodak EasyShare gallery, but I, for one, never managed to transfer the photos, and after a while they just disappeared.
A Shutterfly spokesperson says my story is not unique and that the company is doing everything it can to help customers switch to Kodak. But unfortunately, some photos eventually become irretrievable.
In the 2000s, the cost of digital storage was much higher than it is today. At the time, external cloud storage for businesses was just starting to emerge, and many companies had to build and operate their own servers, which was a huge expense.
“In the early 2000s, the perception was that if you put something on the Internet, it had to be free,” North says. “We were all living our virtual lives for free. Now that you think about it, you think about how a small subscription fee to Kodak – or any of these sites – can protect our memories.”
“Psychologically, people didn’t understand the difference between digital data and an actual physical photograph,” says Nelson. “We think we’re seeing a real photograph. But we’re not. We’re seeing a bunch of numbers.”
You can hold a photo in your hand, but its data can be forgotten with a single click.
How to protect your photos
“We’re taking a lot more risk today than when photos were just printed.” With consumers relying entirely on the cloud, the fate of their photos is in the hands of a company that could go bankrupt. Delete or decide to delete all your archives.
“Or my example of the theft of an external hard drive that I thought was the perfect backup,” adds Nelson. “That’s why the key is to have extra copies.”
Photo managers follow the “3-2-1” rule of photo storage. By this logic, you should always have three copies of each photo. Two are stored on different types of media (e.g., in the cloud and on an external hard drive), and one copy is stored in a separate physical location (e.g., on an external hard drive at home). This is the best defence against faulty hardware and natural disasters.
I learnt this from my own bitter experience. Today, I save all the photos I send in chat or email to my device, which is automatically backed up to Google Photos. Once a month, I back up Google Photos to an external hard drive.
It’s also a good idea to edit your photos every day. Feeling like you have a sufficient amount of photos means you’re likely to feel more confident.
“The volume of photos right now is just crazy,” Gunter says. “And people just don’t have time to organise themselves, and the clutter is growing.”
For my 40th birthday, I’ve managed to collect some jewels I’ve never seen before.
Me with an incredibly short haircut, the odd mattress we couldn’t sell and left on the pavement, long-gone bathroom tiles, huge unwanted bags.
I even found a grainy video of my dog’s cot with my friend’s voice in the background. He says he fell in love with “one guy,” the same guy he married 15 years later.
But now we know one thing for sure – social media or online services can be unreliable guardians of our photos after all.
Only we ourselves can take real responsibility for our memories and keep them safe.