My digital life started in 2002. In the years leading up to 2002, I have maybe ~50-100 photos per year. After that I have thousands of photos per year. Couple that with the explosion of the internet in the late 90s, archaeologists are going to know a LOT more about the year 2010 than they will about the year 1990.
I wonder what this is going to be like for my son. He’ll probably have photos from almost every week, if not every day, of his life, but will they be in a useful form? When I think about my own baby photos, I instantly remember a dozen key photos. What will pop into my son’s head? A folder of thousands of pictures that he’s never been able to look through?
There are a few tools around which try to sort through your photos automatically and pick out the best ones, but we’re not quite there yet. Until some magic tool comes along, I’ll keep storing all the data and manually going through a subset of them with Lightroom.