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Comment by UberFly | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder just how much like this gets thrown away through the generations.

What survives is sometimes just by sheer luck. In the Acropolis Museum, there are a few reproductions of sketches on display by Jacques Carrey, a french artist who happened to visit Athens in November 1674. The Venetian's siege of the Acropolis in September 1687 famously destroyed a large section of the South side. Without this artists sketches, we would have no record of these lost parts of the frieze.

... and the lost MicroSD cards grandma has been holding onto for you.

We will leave next to nothing.

I went back to printing photos on a regular basis.

It is relatively easy to select the best and edit photos every other day on vacations or at home for printing. It is however a major PITA to do that for hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. Thus I am still too lazy to have a look at those 20 years gap where the only pictures I took were digitized and are stored on a hard drive and remote backup.

My ex and I had a wonderful tradition of collating all the photos we'd taken in a single year, and making a printed album of it. It's a fantastic ritual to let you appreciate the good moments.

I would print more photos if I could find a printer that didn't actively hate me. Even the ink tank one I got turned out to have non-replaceable waste ink sponge with an internal counter that will brick the unit long before it wears out.

Color Laser. Rumor is that HP-M254DW is great b/c it's before a lot of E15N has taken place (enshittification... we should numberize it!). I got mine used off Craiglist nearing 10 years ago and it's been a pretty serious workhorse, along with pretty decent "trash" picture output.

I say trash b/c home printed photos on regular paper are never going to compete with your local CVS/Walgreens prints (which I do batches about 2-3 times per year, putting them in letters / christmas cards).

...but if I'm willing to wait for really good prints, I've had a great experience with "PersnickityPrints" who I tried after a local pharmacy print shop gave me an envelope of my wedding prints where some of the fancy B&W ones showed ~2mm chromatic aberration (hence: all the photos were misaligned / mis-calibrated).

Persnickity basically says: "you take the photo, we print the photo!" ...no auto-redeye reduction, no trying to make the colors pop, and they calibrate their machines at least once per day as opposed to once a month or whatever the generic pharmacy places do.

1) Color Laser for "tossable" printouts. 2) Walgreens + Mobile App for "5 copies to send in letters" (pick up in ~1hr, ~$0.20 per print, often less). 3) Persnickity for 8x10's, custom paper, cards, or if I'm planning ahead. (~$0.40/print, modulo shipping, etc).

I have a canon Selphy for 10x15 format as well as a Kodak Mini Shot Saqure "instant camera" that I really use as a printer for square polaroidlike photos from the smartphone. I also own a Fujifilm Instax Wide and an old Polaroid 600 that I converted to rechargeable batteries so that I can buy the slightly less expensive I-Type films. Between the Polaroid and the Instax, I take an average of maybe 2 instant pictures per week, maybe more during Christmas period or if I have family visiting me. Sometimes pictures that I don't keep but just gift to friends I am meeting with. All in all 2 pictures per week is just around 100 pictures. 2 packs of 10 Instax Wide cost me around 20€, a pack of 8 polaroid I-Type is much more expensive, around 17€ but I don't think spend more than 150€ a year on those anyway. Both printing with the Selphy/Kodak and taking instant pictures is expensive compared to bulk printing at a shop or online but in my opinion it is worth it and is still better than forgetting about those photos or even not taking them in the first place. I tend to think it is still less money wasted than if I was smoking.

One of the last Polaroid picture I took was of a little girl playing with her mom. Her husband told me several week later that it had become a bookmark that he has pleasure rediscovering everytime he grab his current book. Sometimes the smallest but meaningful gifts are the nicest.

For holidays, special events, whenever I have more than a handful of pictures to print or if I want bigger format I am doing it through the local photo print shop or online.

Brother has been pretty good with ink. Even allows 3rd party.

I told my [family member] this for years she should edit her digital photos. She said, no, my 40k pictures are a retirement project. Then I said <<you'll be overwhelmed by that many photos>> and actually I was wrong.

AI photo stuff massively improved, and all her bad photos were very easy to sort in Picasa and bring down to a reasonable 5k or so photos to put into albums over few years of retirement.

Of course Picasa is one of Google abandoned projects...

I'm still sore about Picasa. while it was great to use, it lost a few years of photos that I hadn't backed up outside the service. Figured it was online and safe.

> Figured it was online and safe.

That’s a contradiction in terms.

Always been frustrated that this abstraction became so commonplace. It's not even like there's ever been a time in history where 'online' meant 'safe and reliable'. Marketing always wins out, I guess.

The cloud is just someone else's computer.

Print photos degrade over time, if you want them to last you'll need to preserve them in an additional way.

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