Digital dust: Most Americans don't clean out their camera roll

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: Smartphone ubiquity means a camera is always within arm's reach, and their digital nature allows users to snap photos and videos without reservation. But what happens to these memories after they've been captured? In most instances, they are never looked at again.

According to a recent survey from Mixbook, most people (80 percent) have pictures or videos on their smartphone that they haven't looked at since the day they took them. Half of the nearly 2,000 Americans polled said they do nothing with the photos and videos on their phones. Fewer than one in three people said they send images or videos to friends or family, and only 17 percent post them on social media.

The average American has more than 3,100 pics and videos stored on their mobile device, and 55 percent said they feel overwhelmed by the amount of media they have accumulated.

What people most often take pictures of is equally as fascinating. Many camera rolls are littered with photos of pets and family members. In states like Alabama, California, Georgia, and Oklahoma, photos of scenery reign supreme.

Given that digital cameras aren't limited by the same constraints that hampered film users, it's no surprise that duplicates are quite common. Mixbook found that 63 percent of people have taken multiple pictures of the same subject but never bothered to analyze the shots and delete the worst examples.

As Google once said, photos are more than just pixels. Memories fade but the pictures and videos you capture with friends and family last a lifetime.

Photos and videos are the closest thing we have to time travel, a way to freeze a moment in time. We often don't realize what we have until it's gone, and photos and videos fall into this category. If the subject or event was important enough to pull out your phone and take a picture of it, you will likely want to revisit it at some point in the future.

What I'm trying to say is, make a backup to minimize the risk of losing those memories forever.

Image credit: Camera by Screen Post, Camera Roll by Kerde Severin, Family by Askar Abayev

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99053-digital-dust-most-americans-dont-clean-out-their.html

 

[Neatfeatguy]

I back up my pictures about once a month. I save them to multiple storage drives. I don't really delete pictures off my phone that often. Out of maybe 100 pictures taken, I might go back through and remove 10-15% of them that aren't worth keeping.

I like having the small video clips of my kids kept on my phone, I watch them from time to time. Those, too, are backed up once a month and stored on multiple storage devices.

None of my stuff goes to the cloud. I keep my pictures for me and my family, not for some big corporation to keep on their servers.

 

[Underdog]

But hey! Don't those corporations need to know what you had for lunch? People that refuse to put their whole lives in the cloud just arent' playing by the rules.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

3100 pics?

Amateurs.

 

[Zordon]

Google photo's backs up automatically if you allow it.

 

[trgz]

And be aware that the backed up images you can grab from Google (if you do that sort of thing) might be more compressed than the originals on your phone (if you've got the freebie version) - I checked earlier this week and was surprised how good the compression was for those snapshots I'd taken on my phone

 

[nismo91]

I kept an offline copy of my pictures and videos and categorize them in yearly manner on two separate HDDs. on average I took about 2500pics every year, but sometimes it can be much more if I'm travelling often. zero picture gets uploaded to my onedrive or googledrive. only pictures get uploaded to sharepoint are my work related pictures. I don't give a damn if they look at those pictures tbh.

I also keep last 3 years of pics on my phone, so that means I have about 10.000pics on my 4-year-old 256GB phone and still have more than 100GB left. pictures don't take too much space, 4k60 videos on the other hand...

According to a recent survey from Mixbook, most people (80 percent) have pictures or videos on their smartphone that they haven't looked at since the day they took them.

I guess this is inevitable. we all could have few pictures of things that we take for safekeeping. for an example I'm sending something for repair, I'd take a picture of the serial number just in case I need it.

 

[Puiu]

I also need to clean my photos... but I need a few hours to do it properly.

 

[fb020997]

I always delete all the useless pics from my phone. I also do an iTunes Backup every couple of weeks, and every year I download every pic to my PC and delete them from my phone. I don’t really need to do the last part, since I have 80+ of 128gb free, but it’s a tradition that I do since my first smartphone (16GB iPhone 4).
Also, no iCloud Photos for me. Why would I pay for it, when I already have all the pics on my PC (and backupped to another drive too)?