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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

> It's not like we today pour over the images that exist of our parents and grandparents.

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.

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Suppose instead your great grandfather had an iPhone back then and you now had access to his library of 10s of thousands of food pics and random selfies in bars, on vacation, etc. Would you still be as excited?

Oh my god, yes! I would love to not only understand my great grandfather as a real life person but also to have context of the world in which he lived.

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.

I'd go through them faster for sure but absolutely. Things changed so much in the last 100 years, even just the car pictures would be super cool to see.

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.

Me? Even more so. I’d feed them into iPhoto and separate out photos of people and common things.

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.

I never thought about that, but honestly that sounds super cool, imagine our grand grand children 300 hundred years from now, if somehow they have access to our cloud images they can basically check out how their ancestor fully lived their lives, a true door to the past.

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.

It's cool conceptually, but I think for family I haven't known, for family I have known and is aging/deceased that would make me pretty sad so I probably wouldn't use it.

> I found a small book of photos

Thats the key. You would be tired in a while if there was tens of thousands of photos of your grandparents.

If there was more material, you could do more with it - create a model of their house using photogrammetry. Create panoramic images if the pictures intersect. Try to spot interesting historical details that might not have seemed significant back then, etc. :)

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.

Then you can go to sleep and keep looking when you aren't tired.

Couldn't we alternatively just use AI to identify the most interesting ones or ones with specific people we want to see?

It’s not like I have to look at them all at once. I wish there were 10,000 photos.

I’d go through them an hour at a time.

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