Managing our digital lives

There used to be a time when photography was easy. Digital photography has changed everything. Technology has given us many more options and overall made digital photography more enjoyable. The benefits are obvious. Immediate feedback and ability to take as many photos as you wish are just two benefits that immediately come to mind. Most people in my generation (generation Y) have become so used to the immediate feedback to the point where they must always see the photo right after it is taken. Heaven forbid the photo was taken from your “bad side”.

Nothing is free
An initial cost analysis may lead one to think that digital photography is less expensive than traditional photography. I strong disagree. Digital photography has more options and more options mean more complexity. The immediate costs to take one photo or 100 photos are the same. Yet, the post processing costs are not free and they have become increasingly “expensive”. They require something much more valuable than money: time. Post processing costs include all of the time and energy required to transfer, organize, edit, categorize, share and backup those photos. I don’t know about you, but these costs have become increasingly burdensome for me.

Sharing
All of my friends are taking photos as well. Of course, I want those photos. Then I have to integrate those into the photos I took and start all over again. Oh yeah, then my friends want copies…copies that I must make smaller because the original photos are too large for email. They could download them off my flickr site one at a time (which again took time to upload to). But honestly, what normal person has time for that?

F#@K, I lost everything!
I’m betting there will be a large portion of my generation that will have their photos (read: memories) erased due to viri, hard drive crashes and other crazy reasons like "ransomware". I’ve already seen family and friends lose their data far too many times. An informal survery of my friends revealed that approximately 75% don’t have any type of backup. This is crazy. I don’t know about you, but losing my music, photos, videos and documents would be like losing part of me. I would probably cry.

Preserving these memories is already challenging and will become more difficult as the amount of data increases.There must be an easier way to manage this process from start to finish (end to end) and I must find it…fast. Please email me if you have any suggestions. If not, perhaps this is a business opportunity. Maybe I just gave you the best business idea ever. Invite me oven when you are an internet billionaire.

But first, immediately backup all of your files. You’ll thank me later.