Creeva’s World 2.0

My mother left me a com­ment the yes­ter­day (yes the mother I don’t talk to) about one of the baby pic­tures.   Her com­ment asked if I could send her an email with all the baby pic­tures we have.  Here is where we have the gap in the usage level between an older and the newer gen­er­a­tion.   I remem­ber years ago when every­one used to mail pic­tures around, but this was also a time where the pic­tures were nor­mally 100kb or less in size.   Even then busi­ness envi­ron­ments were com­plain­ing about the pic­tures clog­ging up their email sys­tems ( no mat­ter that they were send­ing 300KB full HTML emails each time).  Now we fast for­ward to today.

Peo­ple still rou­tinely email pic­tures, but they are more apt to go look at them on Flickr, Face­book, Myspace, (insert social net­work of the week here).  We are more likely to send an URL link then to attach a photo.   It makes sense.   Now I could have just blown off my mother, but I gave her the first response that I have in over two years.   This does not mean I want to open a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel with her, it means that I responded to her com­ment the same way I would to any other com­menter on the site. The impor­tant part of this excerpt is this:

Unfor­tu­nately I can’t — this isn’t because I’m being mean, this isn’t because we are not speak­ing and this is the only response you’ve got­ten from me in two years. It’s because it is too unwieldy and impractical.

The last photo ses­sion I uploaded over 200 pho­tos that were over 1.5 GB of total space. To give a com­par­i­son with my gmail account I have over 35000 emails (that are not spam) saved, this email only takes up 2.4 GB of space, since I save ALL of my out­go­ing email also just send­ing you pic­tures a few times would com­pletely fill up my email box. There is a rea­son I use a photo shar­ing site, I could spend hours resiz­ing pho­tos just send them out to peo­ple who may or may not be inter­ested to dif­fer­ent degrees, but I always use the orig­i­nal size at home — so if a fam­ily mem­ber wants smaller sizes they can go to my Flickr account — which by the way has over 10GB of images (will prob­a­bly pass 7000 images in a few weeks). There is a rea­son I actu­ally pay for this service.

If want to read the rest of the com­ment which was a brief expla­na­tion of dif­fer­ent options she could do on her part her­self to be proac­tive, it’s on the com­ment sec­tion of this story.

What this means though is tech­nol­ogy has fixed this issue, iron­i­cally the peo­ple that are most likely to use this tech­nol­ogy to get pic­tures of their chil­dren or grand­kids are still stuck in the old guard men­tal­ity of expect­ing things sent to them instead of going out and grab­bing them.  If my sis­ter had a pic­ture out there I liked of her, I would go out and down­load it and archive it.  Most of the time I don’t make these pic­tures pub­lic, I save them as an archive for my child and any chil­dren he may have.    This is nor­mal activ­ity, for peo­ple my age and younger.   We don’t take dozens of prints at the Sears Stu­dio and send it off to rel­a­tives still.

Some of us do, but that num­ber is dwin­dling as you get to a younger and younger age of inter­net users.   How do I know they wouldn’t pre­fer a dif­fer­ent shot than I would, I don’t.   That is the point they can take their own pic­tures they like and have them printed up — giv­ing them back choice instead of forc­ing my tastes upon them.

So how do we move on from here?   I guess evo­lu­tion will even­tu­ally take it’s course and uti­liz­ing the cloud will become the norm.   Maybe it doesn’t need a push in that direc­tion.  I did fin­ish my com­ment by giv­ing my mother fairly explicit instruc­tions on where to go.….….to han­dle get­ting the pho­tos on her own, and on demand.

Now if only she would scan all of her photo albums (at a decent and high DPI level — ie should be 5-10mb per photo) so I could archive all those pic­tures I would be happy.  Granted not happy enough to go talk to her and get the pho­tos and do it myself, but hap­pier.   It’s tooth and nail to bor­row pic­tures from my grand­mother to scan in, but I’ve got­ten some.  I have man­aged to scan all of my father’s pho­tos from the pre-divorce of my par­ents era.   I need to get his after that images still.

I don’t want with my sib­lings over who gets what pho­tographs once my par­ents and grand par­ents ass away (which is still hope­fully decades and decades away), I would pre­fer to just have the dig­i­tal copies, that way we could all have each pho­to­graph in the fam­ily his­tory.   Maybe some­day.  At least my grand­kids won’t have to fight over photo rights, and they will know how to share them with one another.

I’ll end this with another staged stu­dio image of myself for all of those read­ers out there: