The problem of quantity

I shoot more photos in a year than my Dad did in his life. There are more photos of my son's soccer team than were ever taken of my grandfather. (As of 2008 there are 2 billion photos on Flickr, and FIVE billion on facebook).

Until recently the challenge was to get enough data to adequately record the family history. Now we have the opposite problem, an embarassment of riches.

As of very recently, storing it is cheap. Finding something to put it in is now affordable, with home disk drives in the hundreds of gigabytes.

The challenges are managing it, and making it useful.

Managing it

How long does it take to sort through all that data and categorise it?
How to decide what to keep?
How much of it do we want to convert into other formats, such as smaller files or hard copy print or books?
How to make backups and other copies of that much data?
What to - gulp - throw away?

Making it useful

Finding anything in that much data is tough. How to organise and index it all?

And the most important question of all:
How to make it so someone else wants to see it? My wife has whole photo-albums of the same ten people. Our wedding fills another album. That is nice for her, preserving the memory. But who else wants to go through hundreds of similar photographs, especially in fifty years time? One is fascinating, five are interesting, ten....

How will they know what they are looking at? or put another way, why should they care? What is the context and meaning of what they are looking at? What makes it relevant to them?

Archiving and presenting

It is valid to create an archive for future generations to mine, to trawl through. If you have time for nothing else, at least store it all in a way that it will survive and still be readable. We should all do that.

But many more descendants will derive much more pleasure and enlightenment if we present a selected extract in a form or forms where it entertains them, engages them, speaks to them across time. This is the real mission of the Digital Family Trunk.