>>2940374>god only knows where they are nowMan, this. Nearly all my photos from the 00's are long gone. I have entire years without a single photo of them left anywhere to be found, and when I've talked to people I've found it's a common thing. During the era of early digital cameras there weren't many ways to store them online and a lot of those services have closed, meanwhile people have changed computers without proper backups, or backups have become corrupted, HDDs have suddenly failed, and cards and thumb drives have gone missing. I think the 00's will end up a black hole of a decade as far as photographs go. And maybe even now - it seems that people generally don't bother making backups of their digital content and now rely on online services more than ever.
As opposed to the film age, everyone I know has a huge box of family snapshit negatives starting from god knows when. I could go to an estate sale and pick up a gym bag full of negatives which contain photographic documentation of that family's antics going back several decades - hell, estate hawks often try to get me to buy them off their haul because to them it's just junk. I really wish I had the time to scan through them, but maybe that's something to consider for retirement. With digital there isn't anything like it, computers get reused and reformatted and every digital photo on them is wiped out for good. Film has made sure that physical backup always remains without the user's personal effort, as long as they didn't throw the negatives away.
