For the last several years, thanks to social media, people have valued photos for the attention they immediately garner when shared. The value of a photo as a piece of history, or a memory, while once primary, has been mostly relegated to a relative afterthought.
When barriers to sharing were far higher, in the days before social media, much more of the aggregate value of photos came in the form of long-term memory aids for people or within small groups and families.
I recently started using Google Photos. The service ingested hundreds of thousands of my images over the last two decades. With some impressive machine learning, a well-executed product, and impressive technical infrastructure, what the service gave me back was a magical and powerful new view of my own past. It was the best product experience I have had in years.
The experience convinced me that the next generation of big personal data coupled with AI and a smart product will shift the aggregate value equation for photos back toward permanence. We are on the cusp of bringing photos as meaningful history back into style.
What that means is that the next battleground between companies like Facebook, Snap and Google won’t be over access to just shared photos, but over what value can be provided from a person’s photo history.
The Magic of Google Photos
I am late to the game on Google Photos. Friends have been telling me how great it is for a long time. But with reasonably developed patterns for storing and exploring my photos, I didn’t take the time to engage until the birth of my son pushed me to look for better solutions for storing memories for him.
I expected a trustable cloud storage solution for a few hundred gigabytes of storage and reasonable apps for uploading and syncing off all my devices, ideally with the ability to get rid of duplicates. This alone is no small feat, and one which most others have stumbled at in one way or another. Google delivers on this as you would expect they would as a technical powerhouse.
What truly blew my mind, however, was how, digesting my entire catalogue, Google gave me legitimately new and amazing views into my own past that I found valuable and personally meaningful.
The product’s ability to identify people, places, and things accurately makes all sorts of historical cuts come to life that are otherwise hard to piece together. Seeing every photo of my now-wife back 15 years to our first date is, while somewhat expected, still magic in execution. So is being able to easily get a view of every photo across many years at the home I grew up in in New Jersey, or just skiing photos over a decade with certain friends. You can see a history that was always there in new and powerful ways.
There is also real value in product features like stitching together series of photos into compelling animations. This might sound gimmicky, but taking a series of photos of a person taken in relatively quick succession and pulling them together into an animation gives a viewer a different and richer picture of the emotion in a memory.
Google Photos represents how great technical infrastructure, married with great product, can breathe new life into and new value to old data.
Historical Appreciation
I have always been an unabashed data hoarder. I have saved over the last few decades hundreds of thousands of images, almost all of my email, and most of the school papers and professional work I have done.
While I have saved everything, I would be the first to admit that the archive I have built up over time is far too big and hard to access to be meaningful or useful.
I think a lot of people understand this. Without great tools to search or surface history, old photos and documents just become dead bits to most people over time. History has been an enormous unorganized archive which is impossible to meaningfully interact with.
As the technical platforms come online to store and organize the scale of personal data we are generating, the value of having history increases. The old bits are dead no more.
This shifts the balance of power between permanence and ephemerality. We have lived in a world where taking photos and generating media has been directly coupled with sharing it. Ephemerality has provided the veil for many who worry about controlling and curating their identities. And in a world where history is hard to interact with, the fact that media goes away has seemed acceptable.
I have friends who talk about deleting old photos to free up space on their phones. I know others who share daily photos of their children with friends and close family on Snap. In a world where history is inaccessible, these might seem like fine choices. But as history becomes more accessible, and thereby more valuable, the cost of all that ephemerality is going to become clear.
In the near future, taking ephemeral photos will come with a clearer understanding that you are mortgaging the future value of having access to the media. And the people and platforms that have all the data will be massively advantaged over those that don’t.
Implications for Camera Companies
As technology makes history more valuable, the strategies of many of the camera companies are going to need to evolve.
Take, for instance, Snap. In its S-1, Snap talks about itself as a camera company, not an ephemerality company. It recently hired the CEO of Timehop, an app that resurfaces your memories from a year ago to the day. The company also launched its Memories tab with old Snaps and camera roll access.
Snap’s Spectacle glasses make it easier to capture fuller memories. My sense is that the company is waking up to the fact that the real power of AI isn’t going to be silly filters and faces on shared photos. The real power is going to be in mining and creating value out of all the data embedded in photos broadly. If this is true, it means he who has the most access to photos for a given person will win—and Snap is currently behind others.
It is also interesting to look at Facebook through this lens. The company has done more and more resurfacing your old content in News Feed and through things like automatically generated videos that recap your year. But, at least for me, those experiences remind me of just how small a percentage of my full camera roll Facebook has access to. A photo here or there from a year or two ago isn’t what I want.
Facebook’s memories app has some useful features akin to what Google Photos achieves. But because Facebook doesn’t upload all my photos from my camera roll anymore (it turned off a short-lived feature that was in that direction), it actually has less of my memory than I would like. This is going to need to change. When you look longitudinally, Facebook has an immense archive to work from. But when you look at specific consumers in the first world, my sense is that Facebook is only capturing a small percentage of the media that is available.
In this iteration of the game, Google, which has been shut out of being the central player in personal media for a while, has a shot at finally getting its foot in the door with things like Photos. Google has the technical infrastructure and prowess, it has built the product chops, and it has the pipelines to get the most data.
It is going to be interesting.