It sounds like you needed a healthy correction from too much sharing and organizing, but just a few shots will be treasured.
Having thousands upon thousands of images to look at does not make it better.
It's nice to have a couple from each year maybe, but the huge amount of pics we have today is just ruining the experience and value of the pics somehow.
As they are stored somewhere digital on a device or cloud makes them also somehow less accessible even though technically they are more accessible. If they lay around in an album on a coffee table or a book shelf makes them more visible. It makes it also a nice way of talking about the pictures with friends or relatives when someone pics up the album.
I do this. And I look over these pictures to get a sense of what their life was like. And where they lived. I found a small book of photos of my great grandfather and his family and they really made me happy to see.
We might not want to look at photos right now. But photos aren’t everyday items, they are long tail items. They are used infrequently, but when they are used, their impact is great.
Just because I don’t want something right now doesn’t mean I’ll never want it. Or that someone important to me won’t want it.
Hell, I wish I had home movies of myself with my parents as a toddler/child that included audio. All our home movies were on soundless 8mm film.
Might be cultural or even a me thing though, I grew up with a grand-aunt that loved talking about how they survived the winter every year.
Sounds super cool for them, of course, we have been born to early for this, so from our perspective we still shouldn't give a dam. As probably we won't be ghost behind checking how they enjoy that portal to the past.
Then I would look at the metadata to see what geolocations and dates reveal hai vacation patterns.
Finally, I’d just randomly browse through to see what he was up to.
I wouldn’t do it all the time, but I’d definitely spend a few hours over the course of my life looking through them.
I’d love to see what random life was like from 1910-1950.
Thats the key. You would be tired in a while if there was tens of thousands of photos of your grandparents.
You never know - I had some contact with people gathering old photos and post cards or people trying to piece together what a particular part of the town or their home village looked like say 100 years ago and surprisingly little information is sometimes available.
Couldn't we alternatively just use AI to identify the most interesting ones or ones with specific people we want to see?
I’d go through them an hour at a time.
if i look at my brothers kids, their phones will be full to the brim with 1000's of photos of them. we have whatsapp groups filled with their photos.
i wonder how interested they'll be when they're 40 to see these photos. perhaps a few, but all of them?
We do, I really would like to have waaaay more photos of my parents, grandparents and of myself when I was younger.
That's why I take pictures of my children frequently so they will have that what I do not.
Now that you have 40000 selfies with silly faces and 25000 pictures of burgers it's going to be way less interesting
Then on a weekly basis I delete all the duplicates/failed shots/boring photos.
And then on a yearly basis I select the ones 10-50 photos that evoke the best memories and emotions.
Those 10-50 are the ones that I print and put in a separate album in the photos app to look at regularly. The rest I store “just in case”.
We may need to revise the 100 picture limit because as the family grows it's getting a bit long for one sitting :^)
Picking 1 photo per week could be a good base to aim for. A slice of daily/weekly life.
Then perhaps a few more photos for each special event where lots of folks get together: birthdays, holidays, births/deaths, weddings, graduations, etc.
Probably end up with <100 photos, and if you print US 4x6/EU A6, probably fit in one album.
Photos are incredibly devalued now.
That's why it's important to document your house and your town (all of it, not just the glamorous bits), rather than travelling to exotic locations to take photos like some lame "influencer".