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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Yeah and I think people overestimate how much interest their kids will have in old photos of their ancestors.

I cleaned out boxes of photos from my late parents house. Lots of pics from my childhood years, somewhat sparser selection of older photos. Never look at any of them. I have a framed photo of my parents on a shelf; that's enough.

I also basically stopped taking photos of stuff about 15 years ago when I realized I never go back and look at them again.

Bottom line, I don't have much digital content to archive, and I plan to keep it that way.

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Pro tip to parents out there:

Your kids will want to see other people in those childhood photos, more than they'll want to see 100,000 photos of their own faces. You, when you were younger; their now-gone grandparents; that friend they had for two grades before one of them moved ("OMG I totally forgot about them!"), that kind of thing. You'll get way more than enough photos of your kids, so far as your kids themselves are concerned, without even trying—it's the others you may neglect.

Now, for your own purposes, yeah, you probably want the photos of your kids more than anyone else who might get in the shots—but try to think of them and snap one or two of other people in the room, when you're taking e.g. birthday photos, or pan around from time to time when shooting videos of them. They'll eventually get more enjoyment out of the stuff, if you do.

Counterpoint, your grandchildren will appreciate pictures of their parents as kids.

yes yes yes! not only that, the graduation ceremony won’t be as interesting as a casual day at home. What are the kids playing with? what’s on TV? or on the computer screen or phone (that’s going to be vintage in 20 years). Cars on the street and signs on shop or on buses. The dull daily stuff can become super fun to look back on.

source: me looking at family videos from the 90s

Yep. I could take a million pictures per day of my cats because they're cute, but those aren't going to be interesting even to me in a couple of years.

I actually try to take what others might consider 'bad' pictures. Someone mowing the lawn, cleaning the cabinets, sweeping the floor, parking at the grocery store, working on some hobby or another, etc. These kind of pictures show "what were we actually up to in those days".

Another (much more obvious) tip: pictures with people in them are almost always more interesting than pictures of nature/buildings/objects/etc.

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