;)
My daughter loves looking back at home videos of the family. So embarrassing, so beautiful, so many little things about their personalities that would otherwise be forgotten.
Just a few hours ago I was checking backups and stumbled into a nest of folders that had some more home videos in it, and of my son just being his quirky little kid self. Gives my life meaning, shows me I did stuff ok.
Here's a practical example of it coming in handy: back in university I moved to another city for an internship and took some framed photos I had on my walls. When I moved back into my parents' house when the internship was over, the nails were still in the walls and I wanted to hang them the same way I had before but couldn't remember which photo went where. So I went into my Google Photos, typed "photo frames," and was able to find pictures in my library with the framed photos in the background, and piece together which photo went where to get everything back to where it had been before.
Yearly, we create printed photo albums that we look at regularly and show to our kids.
But all this only works after lots and lots of hours of manual work filtering the photos.
Still, over the last 15 years or so for two people we have way more than 100k photos stored on the NAS.
If I don't have any real reference points, its hard to measure things. Its hard to improve things you cannot measure. And sometimes it just feels good to help remember the good times with people no longer with us.
The thing is also to delete photos you don't want to keep long term. Most of my photos are only synced when I am on my local wifi, so until then having a good hygiene of deleting badly taken photos right after taking them.
Having said that I have recently started (late december) to do a weekly printing session of my key moments of each weeks. Well there have been weeks in january and february I didn't print anything. I sometimes only have one or two photo per day/event but since I put the date on the notebook next to the photo and keep all other photos it helps me find back the whole event if I want to see them all. I am using smaller photo format than 10x15cm, mostly zink 2"x3" adhesive photos and kodak instant print 3"x3" from instant cameras that have a printer function.
I should blog about that.
But you're right, otherwise I would never have time to dig back into old photos.