Inspired by Johnny Harris’s video on remembering life
We tend to remember the big events. The marriages, first bike ride, first job offer, college festival’s etc.. but there is a lot of beauty in the day to day too. The short visit to cafés, jokes at get togethers, sunsets with friends are worth being nostalgic about in their own right.
Here’s how I go about remembering life.
Volume
Take a lot of pictures, you can always delete them later.
Every once in a while, I sit and start deleting cruft from my photos. Delete ruthlessly though since you don’t want to be having 10 TB of random junk.
iPhone also comes with a decent duplicate photo delete functionality.
Metadata
Metadata is key, every snap on my iPhone comes with
- Date
- Location
- People recognised from contacts
- Self added caption
This is actually a ton of data.
With this, a couple of queries become possible. For example
- What is the name of the cafe we visited in allepy last April? A lookup for a picture on that date and then look up on the location of the photo will get you that data
- When did I last visit Goa? Just go to the maps view and click on pictures from Goa.
Some minor notes, WhatsApp seems to trim metadata off pictures. So prefer something like local send, airdrop or iMessage.
Backup
iCloud is pretty good , but just in case. Also see if you can do a monthly or quarterly backup of all your pictures.
