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Comment by totetsu | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the future of archiving will not just involve keeping exact digital copies of everything but instead of keeping AI models trained on large amounts of data that we would otherwise throw away or never know how to use. Recently I saw a family throwing away all the photo albums of their deceased relatives that nobody cared about anymore and I thought sure maybe those photos of those peoples lives an now irrelevant to sentimentality but they are a key into a time and place in the latent image space. We should be collecting all this stuff to compress it into datasets.

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> Recently I saw a family throwing away all the photo albums of their deceased relatives that nobody cared about anymore

This kills me.

And yet I have boxes and boxes of photos and slides of relatives I never met, many of whom died before I was even born. I feel some obligation to keep them. So they’ve been with me for decades, moving from house to house, a ball and chain of sorts. Will my young son care about it? I don’t know. Why do I feel obligated to keep them? These people lived lives as full as and rich and as real as mine and yours. And the only memory of those lives is in some old photos that in some cases names can’t even be identified.

Such is life. Everyone has their own lives to deal with that they can't be bothered with old stories.

That's why I'm so glad my grandfather wrote a book about his life when he was in his late 60s. You'd think it would be boring, but his life as an immigrant to Canada from Finland was fascinating, and he only included the interesting bits. The book is only about 150 pages of easy reading, and even people who barely knew him have enjoyed it. So I'm quite confident that he at least will be remembered by his descendants.

A couple of years ago I even digitized it into a website, which makes it so easy to share among the family.

I likely won’t ever get around to building this, but I feel strongly a genealogy/family media focused web app would be so useful. Scan and upload old photos, maybe have ai upscale and clean the, up, let your family tag the various old people in each photo.

I have started asking my family to give me all of the old physical pictures we have so I can scan and upscale them. But then there’s no good place to share and tag them all for a large family.

Sites like https://geni.com would allow you to upload and trash photos

One common issue is the images alone are rarely sufficient to tell a story, so you need to collect their context before the owner is gone.

One interesting bit is generalisable knowledge can be inferred from old pictures, but that'd be mostly relevant for specific events, or very old pictures.

Although I guess vacation pictures from e.g. the post-war period could be useful for ecological studies, if their location is known. Things like indoor christmas pictures, less so, even though from an emotional perspective they were undoubtedly dear to whoever took them.

There must be at least a dozen of these. The hard part seems to be getting people to scan and upload the photos, and then getting others to tag the people (and not being bought by Ancestry.com). One that seems to have hit a critical mass is https://www.wikitree.com/ - it has some interesting features I haven't explored yet, like 'free spaces' https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Free-Space_Profile

Funny thing is the article mentions machine learning as one of the consumers of the digitized books. Maybe some of the money going to machine learning now may actually contribute to preserving original source material.

I am not sure it's going to help the accuracy concerns already dogging this tech to mix in centuries-old texts.

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