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Comment by mario_kart_snes | Hacker News Reader

I went on a trip 10 years ago and took lots of photos. Most of them I cannot remember what it was or what was the significance. Since then I make sure to always have a person (myself or travel companion) in all photos because it helps remember what we were doing - having a person in the photo prompts the memory for some reason.

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That's actually what I would add to the original article.

Regarding photos of monuments and natural scenes, I can always just go to Google and find better pictures of that than I can take myself, but photos of PEOPLE and what I experienced there, is where personal photos shine.

A photo of Niagara Falls: meh.

A photo of Niagara Falls with my wife: Gold.

I'd recommend taking fewer pictures and just enjoying where you are and absorbing it all yourself rather than through the screen on a device. The lower number of pictures will be of higher significance to you. I relate it to taking handwritten notes in lectures.

Obviously everyone enjoys things in their own way, but I really feel like people miss out on what's going on around them because they are so worried about capturing it and posting about it right then an there.

I get your take, but I somewhat disagree. I have just come back from a 2+ week trip to Italy and every day I had my camera glued to my hand. Looking a the world with the desire to capture the shots allows you to see the environment in different way. You see the lighting, angles, details, emotions etc that I'm honestly not sure I would see otherwise. The nature or even the number of photos don't matter, but I love taking photos as a way of "absorbing it all".

I definitely agree. I cringe thinking about how little I didn't want to be in photos in the past or that I took pictures without anybody I knew in them as a frame of reference.

I had some solo road-trips in college where I took photos with nobody in them, and the most important thing to me was the order of the photos. I can still look at them and put together where I was and what I was doing, what I probably ate that day, etc.

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