We’re at a point in history and culture when normal social discourse means conversations may include topics like minimalism, decluttering, and made-up concepts like ‘stuffocation’ and ‘stuffidemics.’ And while we might think about going room by room through the bulkier tangible things we keep to declutter our lives, you know what else threatens to bury us? Photographs.
Historically, photographs were the domain of professionals who we posed for and who captured beautiful artistic photographs. We didn’t have a lot of them. It was a lot more expensive, so each one tended to mean more to us.
Now we’ve gone from photos being treasured moments and memories to a proliferation that started back in the 50s and 60s and vastly accelerated with 35mm film—remember all those double and triple prints you’d get so you could distribute them to all your friends and create albums that are now decaying? Maybe you don’t remember who is even in them and half are blurry or badly composed anyway.
And now DIGITAL photos! We take an estimated 5.3 billion photos daily worldwide. Think about that! This is where we’ve done ourselves a disservice because we’ve lost the story thread – why any one of those photos matter. Regular folks like us don’t want to sift through “metadata” on a photo to understand why it matters to us, when we took it, where we were. This is not a pleasant experience.
And the ease of digital also undermines us as we declutter and organize our homes, where if you follow the advice of old, “Take a photo, and let the stuff go,” now that means that photo is very quickly 20 back, 140 back, 1,000 back on your phone. You’ve totally forgotten you took the photo and never shared the story or done anything to remember why it mattered to you.
You may also be interested in A Virtual Impossibility: Keeping Up with All My Digital Photos.
Artifcts and Curating Your Photo Collection
Today when we tell people to clean up and curate their photo collections to something meaningful, we have a truly daunting and growing task in front of us. Even for those photos from the 60s and 70s this is a problem.
While many people won’t have a lot of photos from that time, the photos they do have are very likely housed in shoe boxes, photo albums, or scrapbooks. One day, when our co-founder Ellen Goodwin was working through one of her parents’ scrapbooks, “Because it’s falling apart and needed to be digitized,” she paused to take a picture of a black and white photo of her mother playing tennis. “I took the photo because my immediate thought was, ‘My mother does NOT play tennis.’ It might as well be a Halloween costume.” Ellen’s daughter caught her taking the picture and was confused, “Why are you taking a picture of that? Who is it?”
So here we go – one generation removed, and the story is gone; a second generation removed, and it’s become someone’s genealogy project or fodder for an AI-powered facial recognition tool. Who is that in the photo?
One generation removed, and the story behind the photo is gone; a second generation removed, and it’s become someone’s genealogy project. Who is that in the photo?
Your Three-Step Photo Curation-to-Story Formula
We know we can do better than to store our photos and cross our fingers that they stay safe and stay relevant. We can curate our photos, the best of, seminal moments, works of art. We can marry those photos with their stories through Artifcts, because a picture is NOT always worth 1,000 words.
Ellen often shares an example of this based on a subset of photos of her daughter. “I literally have more than 1,000 photos of my kid swimming. She’s been at it for more than half of her lifetime, on three different club teams and now a high school swim team, too. But there’s that ONE picture where she’s flexing her arms and smiling up at me in the stands because she just got her first USA Swimming BB time.”
It’s one of the favorite photos she’s Artifcted. It includes a video of the swim from that day and the story. Ellen acknowledges, “My daughter being 14 years old may not appreciate it now, or even in another 14 years, but she will someday, and it will be here in Artifcts, easy to share, and in a bite sized story format that is within our ever-shrinking attention spans.”
Use this formula to simplify your photo-to-story process so you, too, can make progress on capturing what matters most – the stories behind those photos.
1 - CURATION. You guessed it, start with curation. We live in a bite-sized world with bite-sized attention spans. This is reinforced by research, too. Miller’s Law says that that short-term memory is limited to seven items, plus or minus two. Hedge your bets and go with five items, like the five photos and/or videos you can include in a single Artifct to tell a story.
Besides, achievable goals support habit formation. If you want to make progress in culling through those digital photos, do not try to boil the ocean. Pick a few, Artifct them with a story, and call it a day. Don’t take on an entire memoir at once!
2 - CONTEXT. To avoid getting twisted in knots over what to say about a photo, simply start with something true, e.g. who took the picture?
If you move on through the five Ws like they taught you in grade school, one W, one memory, will unlock others. For example, true story of asking a mom about a wooden cat that’s a piece of decoration:
Mom: “Oh, well, that’s a cat.”
Daughter: “Thanks, Mom, I can see that. Where did it come from?”
Mom: “I carved it. I was 16, and it was part of a wood shop class I took.”
Daughter: “Wood shop in the 60s? For GIRLS?!”
Mom: “Yes. And actually it was the first year the boys’ and girls’ schools were combined. There was a boy who was jealous of my cat and stole it. It took a while to get it back.”
And on and on it goes!
3 - SHARING. Myths, legends, fireside tales, they live on in the sharing. And sharing a story is not the same as telling a story. Telling is unidirectional. Were they really listening, were they ready to hear it, and will they then take on its meaning and value?
You may also be interested in Storytellers, Beware!
Curating Your Photos Often Delivers Unexpected Insights
Now, don’t get us wrong, just because we do not want to look at metadata on a photo to try and remember why it matters or to share the story behind it, does not mean that we think metadata is useless. Quite the opposite. Your own phone can instantly sort and search your collection.
And through sorting your photos quickly, you can then more easily move on to curation. And that’s where the insights begin to flow. We asked Ellen for three things she learned about herself when she paused to sort and curate her digital photos. Here’s what she said:
Swimming is life. Well, this one was not a surprise exactly, I knew I had a lot of swimming photos. But I was surprised I didn’t have more. I discovered an extreme dropoff in volume once Artifcts existed because my habits changed. While sitting and waiting at swim meets, I almost always (a) cull swim photos I don’t want and (b) create relevant Artifcts.
My feet have been places. I had to laugh at myself when I realized just how many photos I have taken of my own feet, wearing shoes, standing in some place I thought was interesting. Thankfully, with metadata, I know where some of those places were when I cannot otherwise remember or figure it out from the picture. And it makes for a great series to share with friends for a laugh.
Inspiration is everywhere; I want to be inspired. More than any other theme I can discern from the pictures I take is the magic of finding inspiration in just about anything. Do you pause to take pics of interesting patterns and shapes in nature? What about beautiful color combinations in a random mural on the street? Lines in a book, art on a cover of a magazine, a setting in a TV show?
Inspiration can come from anywhere, and it’s amazing that digital photography makes it possible to keep it all close at hand.
For an extra boost in your photo-to-story efforts, download our free checklist for photos here.
Happy Artifcting!
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Click on the image to view the Artifct, one of many irreplaceable items of this family's history.
