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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

I inherited similar boxes of thousands of unorganized photos when my mom died. I threw them all away. They weren’t meaningful enough to her to organize, and they meant even less to me.

My lesson is I don’t take photos. I realized long ago that I never look at them again.

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I've read lots of bizarre stuff on HN but this one really takes the cake.

I'm not even going to argue coz something tells me it's going to be futile.

Bots, or people who think like them.

I think the vernacular nowadays is NPCs.

There’s nothing to argue about. If you like taking pictures and enjoy looking at them later that’s great. I don’t. I have maybe 10 photos saved on my phone over several years. I never look at old photos or albums. Certainly not going to spend tons of time organizing thousands of old photos that I didn’t even know about and that had just been sitting in boxes for 30 years.

Not OP, but I also don't like taking pictures nor do I ever keep any.

I just don't like thinking about the past and the feelings they often bring up. Whether that's guilt over not talking to relatives that have passed, or the sadness from remembering how a good relationship ended badly, or even the good times that my current life doesn't allow to continue because people have gone their separate ways.

I don't know if it's healthy, maybe, maybe not. But it lets me go through the days a bit easier.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to take photos (or keep other people's photos around) if that's not your thing. Other relatives and descendants who are into family history and genealogy might find those photos very interesting, possibly even priceless, so instead of doing it for yourself you might want to consider doing it for them.

I love taking photos and realised I had this problem so I spent some effort setting up a server that delivers a random (biased in various ways), labelled photo from my (huge) collection on demand via http, with parameters for size etc, and then set up some rpi based photo frames (using old monitors) that show a random photo every 30s, and similar for desktop background on all the computers in the house. Now I feel like I'm familiar with all my photos. I also have a simple web-based UI that shows the history of the last few dozen photos fetched so if one catches my eye I can find it easily, and a way to tag photos to include them in the "random" rotation more frequently.

I bought Google Photos for my dad, and so often he'd point out a picture that it showed him. That encouraged me to get it - it's such a simple thing, but getting a 'memory' every day is really so sweet.

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