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> When I die, all my pictures and thoughts and work will be lost on my personal laptop. It isn't encrypted, but my family wouldn't know how to get past the OS password. The age of perusing the belongings of dead people is past, for better or worse.

It's an interesting thought that I have entertained as well, but at the same time, we have so many pictures/documents nowadays that virtually NOBODY is going to go through your files even if they can get access to them. We used to live with a few rolls of photo films used per year and maybe dozens of letters written, now we have thousands of emails every year, thousands if not dozens of thousands of pictures every year, there's too much noise in the data to make it worth trying to find anything relevant.

As for photos, I know that I personally print out photo albums of the most worthy trips, and my guess is that this kind of stuff will remain, somehow, longer than the digital files.

Digital files' issues is not just about the format they are saved on. Will we be able to read IDE hardrives 100 years from now ? How about SCSI ? How about the formats we use nowadays ? Will the be completely obsolete and potentially unreadable 100 years from now ? How about the OS, file systems we will use ? There's really no way you can predict anything to cover all the "wrong" things that can occur in a long time from now.

100 years from now, technoarchaeology grad students will be writing jpg parsers in Z# because nobody can figure out how to compile the old ones on quantum CPUs.

>there's too much noise in the data to make it worth trying to find anything relevant //

Sounds like a challenge to a group of hackers, no?

I was interested in the algorithms used by Facebook for their anniversary video clips they did a few months back. Likes and other indicators obviously were used. I changed my profile pic as part of a gag and their algo picked up on that as an indicator that it was important to me - though it was actually the least important of my profile pics. There was also a joke post that got lots of likes from acquaintances that was wrongly promoted as the most important. Others videos worked pretty well though.

I'd think some linguistic analysis along with indicators like numbers of emails exchanged would allow a corpus to be gleaned that had potential to represent one's [email] life quite well.

Similarly with photos, images with the most members of family or those that have been viewed most often ... etc. ...

There's probably already a "life digest" app around somewhere that one can run against a user account.

I can imagine in the future a personal computer (like in Her) saying things like "your dad visited this area, here are a few of the photos he took" when you go on holiday or something.

I'm just thinking about things like public records and archives for a start, personal images and data is another problem.

I actually put a lot of thought into these issues. http://mrgris.com/blog/2013-03-27-survivorship-in-the-digita.... My solution is way too complex for a lay-person, though.

> My solution is way too complex for practical use, though.

That looks really interesting. I may actually put this to use.

Very interesting. Not sure I would go to all that for after I'm gone. But it sounds like a cool way to make some sort of puzzle activity for friends. :)