Comment by forgetfreeman
1 day ago
More accessible? Barely. Kodak disposables and Polaroid cameras were so common they were frequently used as toys by children. Also you can't claim zero marginal cost. If anything continuous data retention headaches make it more expensive (in terms of time) to take and keep photographs than any point in prior history. The costs just moved from the camera to the photo album.
Continuous retention is a huge issue that needs to be solved, but it is not insoluble. I would not be surprised if most kids are losing their childhood photos from services being shut down, tinkering with quality, or altering terms.
However the rest of the points are wrong as the photo album step was there originally. Film acquisition time, album acquisition time, labeling time, sorting time, sharing time, shelf space creation and cleaning time have all improved by orders of magnitude and all of that impacted accessibility.
Film acquisition time? You tossed it in the shopping cart while walking through the grocery store along with batteries and other random household essentials. In extremis you'd grab a few rolls off the display in the closest gas station. People literally spend more time a year getting off their phone lock screen to take a photo than you'd spend in the act of buying film. You're talking about a task with seconds-per-year levels of overhead for normal households. Professional photographers ordered theirs in bulk shipments so again the unit cost in time was functionally nil. Same with albums. Labeling and sorting were optional and at most happened one time (1) per pack of proofs and this was typically a group recreational activity for families. Dust gathers at a set rate regardless of what is occupying a given space, so it's not obvious how having a photo album increases cleaning time.
As to the claim that retention isn't insoluble, that's at best a baseless statement of faith not terribly dissimilar to someone praying a rosary. With other religious pieties there's at least some evidence (someone built a cathedral, there's a book, etc.) to support the faith. There is no evidence to date to support the idea that basic file formats are a settled matter on archival timeframes, much less retention services or storage hardware.