Sorry to hear about your Nana and Papa. I lost my own this past year and can relate.
You bring up an interesting point though - the idea of an electronic shoebox. The problem for someone like me, who stores a lot if not all of their photos on smugmug is that, should I disappear, most would have no access to the originals anyway.
I think it's less the digital shoebox of xxthousand photos we keep around - I think it's more the photos that we eventually do "process", even if process only ever really means print out and turn into a physical "product".
The photos people will first go through will be the ones in the photo albums, the picks, the physical record we left behind. The digital diary will come later. In a sense, you get the best of both worlds - that reverence for the events of a person's life when you go through those physical pictures, and the "whole story", repeats and all, when you stumble upon their shoebox.
Of course we could play with the definition of "digital negative" to include almost all digital photos, and that the produced photo is the actual product. In this sense, often you'll find a photo album full of collages and the like made from the select pictures - and the negatives in the back.
I view my digital shoebox much in the same way - full of negatives, and attached to the physical photo album I'd have on shelves or my coffee table.
And as an aside: stumbling upon a person having taken 20 shots of a leaf can be boring or irritating when you want to see something new - but there's probably a reason that person took 20 shots of a leaf, some trait you may want to remember, or made that person who they are. Hopefully anyone with a very large digital library though will have selected "picks" for people, or utilized the "stacks" functions becoming more common these days, to make it easier on viewers.
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You bring up an interesting point though - the idea of an electronic shoebox. The problem for someone like me, who stores a lot if not all of their photos on smugmug is that, should I disappear, most would have no access to the originals anyway.
I think it's less the digital shoebox of xxthousand photos we keep around - I think it's more the photos that we eventually do "process", even if process only ever really means print out and turn into a physical "product".
The photos people will first go through will be the ones in the photo albums, the picks, the physical record we left behind. The digital diary will come later. In a sense, you get the best of both worlds - that reverence for the events of a person's life when you go through those physical pictures, and the "whole story", repeats and all, when you stumble upon their shoebox.
Of course we could play with the definition of "digital negative" to include almost all digital photos, and that the produced photo is the actual product. In this sense, often you'll find a photo album full of collages and the like made from the select pictures - and the negatives in the back.
I view my digital shoebox much in the same way - full of negatives, and attached to the physical photo album I'd have on shelves or my coffee table.
And as an aside: stumbling upon a person having taken 20 shots of a leaf can be boring or irritating when you want to see something new - but there's probably a reason that person took 20 shots of a leaf, some trait you may want to remember, or made that person who they are. Hopefully anyone with a very large digital library though will have selected "picks" for people, or utilized the "stacks" functions becoming more common these days, to make it easier on viewers.