Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

This is going to sound corny but those "X years ago on this date" features of Amazon Photos and Google Photos are a great trip down memory lane for me. Even cornier, I really enjoy the Timehop app. It does a decent job of tying memories from Tweets, Facebbook posts, Foursquare check-ins, and photos together.

I don't think I've ever thought "boy, I sure wish I took less photos back then". I have thought the opposite.

There is one exception. Whenever I fancied myself a photographer and took a zillion photos of motorsport races are a slog to get through.

View on HN

> I don't think I've ever thought "boy, I sure wish I took less photos back then". I have thought the opposite.

I have come to realize that the vacation itself is only part of the fun. Reminiscing about the vacation afterwards, and reliving those emotions, in the long run might be more relevant to my life than the trip itself.

Photographs help me capture a moment to remember it by. They also often portrait an idealized version of the event, perhaps highlighting the beautiful, and disregarding the troublesome. And frankly, that is as it should be.

> There is one exception. Whenever I fancied myself a photographer and took a zillion photos of motorsport races are a slog to get through.

For me, the solution is editing. Quite often I only "keep" a small handful of pictures of dozens or hundreds I took. ("keep" in quotes, as I backup everything. One time a relative died and one of my discarded pictures was the last one taken of them. I was glad I hadn't deleted that "bad" shot.)

And secondly, I keep a private blog and yearly photo books with the most memorable pictures, which acts as a second level of editing. It is a lot of work, actually, but we don't have any books we hold more dearly. And our friends and relatives love them, too.

Google and Facebook and Amazon, however, do not need to see my pictures, thank you very much.

>I have come to realize that the vacation itself is only part of the fun. Reminiscing about the vacation afterwards, and reliving those emotions, in the long run might be more relevant to my life than the trip itself

Provided that there has been a vacation, and experienced in its time too.

Because for many it's experienced as a hurried rush from one "mandatory" place to visit to another, and endless picture taking, posting, and not living in the moment.

It's true. There is a balance to be struck between living the moment, and capturing it. The former is much more important in my book. After all, the purpose of a vacation is to get rest, and experience new things.

It might also be worth noting that there are different kinds of photography. On vacation, I mostly practice "documentary" photography, that happens in the moment, without disrupting things.

For me, photography is also a way to enhance my appreciation of a moment. It forces me to be present and reactive, in a way I tend not to be otherwise. But I recon that this might be very different for other people.

I totally hate them. I have very beautiful photos of funerals. I have very beautiful photos of places I was mugged. I have bad memories which are initiated by good photographs.

There is a huge assumption that a memory is something positive because a photo looks nice.

I would really like this to be significantly more overtly optional. I would have preferred the investment in time to make 'do a panorama from these images' instead of an AI which makes a panorama IF IT FEELS LIKE IT but I cannot command.

I never really thought about it too much but your post made me think. I also have photos of bad/negative memories but I think overall I really enjoying seeing the photos from the happy times and the photos from the bad remind me of things or make me think and don't tend to ruin my day. Overall, I like the feature but I totally see where you are coming from and its not great the AI just sends you these memories basically randomly, not sure how to do this without curation (still prone to error or magic all knowing AI (more scary really).

I've had the same thing happen too. I will say that I have taken some final pictures of my pets at the vet before they passed away. I did take the pictures for a reason at the time. When those pictures come up it is sad, but in a perverse way, it helps me viscerally remember my beloved pets. This is all a part of life and what made their existence with me special.

Last week Google's AI thought it would be fun to create a silly photo reel of my dogs capering about. It then happily mixed in photos of them dying at the veterinary office, all set to whimsical music.

I hate this pseudo-cutesy zero-context crap so very, very much.

Oh my god, lol. I'm sorry

Yeah, I feel you. As soon as these features started to get traction, I knew this would happen. Certainly some people have had much worse experiences than you. Mental issues can also intensify reactions to memories.

The worst part is that it's unsolicited. At least have the courtesy to ask.

It's a given that the algorithm will not understand how each individual picture will affect you. Even a real not-you human would struggle. You're either "in" for the whole memory-lane ride, or not at all.

There's no wrong answer; for some people the past is more painful than joyous. Personally, I'll take the occasional jarring bad to get the bountiful reminders of the good. Or maybe it's just my personality to take more pictures of happy things.

So.. I just checked and both Google and Apple Photos do NOT allow you to disable memories. Everything is on by default, but you can disable notifications, specific dates and faces, but you can't disable it altogether.

If most people like it, fine to leave it on by default I guess - the growth team has to get promoted some way. But at least let me disable it.

If find the notification from Apple a bit alarming in a Black Mirror kind of way:

"You have a new memory"

I just checked Google photos and you can disable people or dates, as well as notifications (on Android).

Worth mentioning that even with People disabled, it'll still produce 'Spotlight on You' sequences, and if you search for a person, they become fair game again for future photo collages.

There’s no valid reason I can see for “Photos” to send you notifications at all. I mean, 10 years ago did we provide our email/phone number to our DSLRs or paper photo albums? No, and we’ve ended up just fine.

Disable that crap entirely. Same goes for a lot of preinstalled apps - News, Music, Game Center (why does that one still exist?), etc.

On the other hand, aren't you a bit weird for taking the photos back then?

You're getting downvotes for saying it, but I had the same thought. If I'm getting my camera out it's because I want to take a photo of something I want to remember or see again. Never once have I thought of taking a photo of my pets at the vets, and most especially not when I took them to be put down.

All people grieve differently. For some it may make perfect sense to try and capture those last moments with a beloved companion even if there are happier moments to look back on and even if those last moments may later be too unbearable to ever look at again (but also too important to simply delete).

Your comment and the one you replied to can be read as "you're weird and you grieve wrong", which is extremely rude and unsymapthetic given the context. It's also entirely orthogonal to the complaint that these features should be opt-in or allow you to opt out. That complaint is entirely valid but questioning the decision to capture sad moments suggests it's not.

Thank you for saying this.

Yes, but would you like to have a choice, when to look at these photos? Imagine that someone buys a bottle of alcohol. Should he not have an option not to drink it, even if Alexa says he should?

Surely you understand that photography serves a vast number of purposes, and not just 'fun'?

Other people also loved my dogs, and giving them a final photograph to say goodbye to helped them. I also have photographs of tax documents, graves, medical issues, and, yes, lots of fun things as well, all of which serve their purpose. No one (except for Google's AI) would think they all belong in the same bucket to pull from.

I have two young cats, and Google Photos already makes featured memory things with them in it. I've been seeing the older one in the "1 year ago" memory slot a lot during the past 4 months, and the younger one should start joining him there in a month or so.

Hopefully they'll be with me for many years to come, but of course they will eventually pass away. I take a lot of photos of them, and I know after they pass, they will show up in these "X years ago" memory slots frequently enough that I will be unable to look at theses memory things at all. It's depressing to think about. I can't imagine how people who have a spouse who has died (or, god forbid, a child who has died) deal with these sorts of unexpected, unplanned, unwelcome reminders of who they've lost.

And beyond that, I've have 10+ years of photos in there... I often see ex-partners show up. Fortunately it doesn't bother me that much, but I can imagine it could be really uncomfortable for many people.

On the flip side, I really do love the innocuous trips down memory lane this sort of thing gives me all the time. But it would be so easy to completely ruin the experience if the wrong photo shows up.

My son died 10 years ago at age 21, my dad died 3 years ago. There's also a couple cats and a dog who have died along the way.

I LOVE seeing Google photos rotate in pictures of them in this type of thing. It brings back great memories and I always smile. To me, this is better than having them stashed in a printed photo album that I never look at or in Google Photos album that I never look at.

While this isn't the same reaction I have, it makes me happy to hear that at least someone is enjoying these things, and I say that sincerely. My condolences for your loss.

I'm 100% with you here. I hate Apple, Google, Facebook trying to surface memories for me. I'm happy to look at the pictures on my own via their services but I really want those recommendations and "You 1 year ago" and stuff like that off for myself.

This exactly.

My honeymoon photos (divorced now), photos of friends to whom I no longer speak, regardless of the circumstances... photos of pets that died, ex girlfriends who you were sure was the one... all just add a pang of sadness to my day. Forgetting things is mercy.

My best friend died about 10 years ago. She still has a facebook account because when you die suddenly you don't get to settle your affairs. At least a few times a year I'm reminded of my memories of her, or its her birthday.

Or even just seeing how stupid I was and the dumb things I posted, is a bit painful :-)

"No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget. The things you're most afraid of have already happened. The shutter is clicked. The flash goes off and they've stopped time, as if just for the blink of an eye." - Sy Parish One Hour Photo (2002)

To anyone in this thread not liking these features, for good reasons, and are unable to avoid them.

I sympathize. Now, have it your way, take back the control by using your computer with software you can control. You are currently playing in someone else's garden, by their rules. That might have been enjoyable for a while, now just leave, your not at home.

Never my dumb photo viewer and my dumb file manager hurt me / tried to outsmart me with this kind of unwarranted behaviors. Just take an external storage drive, put your photos in there, ensure you make backups and done.

Don't let someone else / big corporations with motives not aligned with yours control you. Control your life!

And your relatives will also thank you for the increased privacy for them. It might be a bit less convenient but the peace of mind you gain is invaluable.

These "someone else's computer" sentences are very concrete.

This was a very minor reason in the grand order of reasons, but it played into why I finally left Facebook a few years ago. It's not like I was using it as a photo manager. I'd only uploaded six photos ever and had been a member since 2004. But as I was sitting in the hospital recovering from my third spine surgery in 16 months, unable to even walk, and they throw me a photo on my timeline "hey, remember just 5 years ago when you could summit a mountain?" Yeah, I remember. It felt like they were kicking me in the face exactly after I'd already fallen down.

I did turn the feature off once they let you, but it doesn't do a user much good to throw new features like that in their face and then let them opt out after you've already insulted them.

My story is less interesting, but I also remember quitting Facebook when it started to taunt me with photos of a past relationship that I wasn’t completely over yet at the time.

Stuff like that has to be common. Did the “growth hacking” cynics who design these features not realize the harm they cause, or is the generated “engagement” still worth it in aggregate despite a few lost users?

You can also... Disable these features in Google Photos. Why are you being so dramatic over one feature in a photo app?

I love automatic backups, being able to view on my phone or computers, being able to search by person/location/thing

I wouldn't know, I never entertained the idea trusting Google to host my photos, but this whole thread where people are seemingly hurt by the software they use felt very cringy to me. It's very much not normal.

And of course it's not about just this feature. My comment is more general than that. I took excuse from this one example to encourage people to take back control on their computing because it seems important to me.

I'm am being so dramatic about this because this whole situation where people do not control anything feels alarming to me.

I understand that you like convenience. If it suits you, whatever floats your (and many people's) boat, I'm no one to tell you what to do. Of course Google is convenient. That's one of their strategy to build their monopoly.

I would not rely on Google for the backups, though. There are enough stories about people loosing access to their account over Google's whims. So that part is not solved, you still have to handle that, or pray but I'm not sure it really helps.

I did. The sw developer is implementing surface features from Google photos including "your timeline" and "memories" because of requests for feature parity, disregarding basics like EXIF date handling/correcting, and album structure/nesting.

Another suite I like isn't doing that, but suffers from low funding and hobby time burden.

I always hated the Facebook "On this date" stuff in my feed. If I want to look back, I'm perfectly capable of doing that by myself. Once the announced they would allow you to set sensitive dates so it wouldn't remind you of the day you lost a loved one or similar, I just told it every date from 1/1/1900 to now was sensitive and bingo, no more "feature". Of course, I've now found a more effective solution, which is to stop using Facebook.

Yeah I agree, to a degree, I really like the "for you" section in the iPhone Photos app. It makes that stuff offline on the phone (I don't use iCloud), I like that. Often is reminds me of nice times and makes me feel good. But there is indeed that one photo where the kids were about to have a big argument and I got (too) angry and that photo is in 5/10 movies the phone makes, there is no option to say "ignore that photo" and I don't want to delete it. It's a big bummer. A bit more control would be nice.

Yeah, these X years ago photo memories are cool.

When I use my DSLR, I try to take a lot of photos with the intention of picking a few good ones later. These sit in storage and I usually don't see them again. As you said, it's a "zillion photos" of subject X.

When I use my phone, I generally try to take a photo here and there. But I don't need to take as many photos (vs DSLR mode).

What is a slog is when I try to take a "zillion photos" of something with my phone. It really adds noise pollution to my phone's photo album. Also, I don't like having a bunch of iPhone Burst mode photos. It really takes makes looking through my photos cumbersome and picking the "best" one to keep is a chore that nobody wants to do.

I've looong wished for this simple feature: just group similar photos automatically. Barely requires AI. A simple clustering by time and histogram would probably have an acceptable error rate.

Finding the best one though is a harder problem, even for a human.

But it’s amazing that phones and computers don’t have built-in software that _helps_ to find the best one.

Helping you find the best one quickly means you spend less time “engaging” with the product/service. Not in the developer’s best interest at all.

For us older folks, that feature is “dead people of the day” and honestly, I could do without it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com