@gerrymcgovern When data generation is exponential, a rough rule of thumb. Now is about 2 doubling periods back and 2 forwards. Everything before that is now only 10% of the current total. The current total is only 10% of where we'll be 2 doubling periods forward.

For photos that looks like ~10 year doubling period, so Now is 40 years long. Most of computing is doubling a lot faster than that.

@gerrymcgovern
I am morbidly curious as to how this compares to the storage use (and thus CO2 emissions) of all those surveillance cameras taking 30 photos per second, 24 hours a day, 365.2411 days per year?

(disclaimer: I don't personally own a smart phone, or a surveillance camera, though my 12 yr old laptop does have a camera on it. )

@gerrymcgovern This is an interesting concept, but I have a lot of questions about how they arrived at these numbers—they aren’t providing methodology. And a few inconsistencies in the article (for instance, referring to 2020 in the future tense and giving two different numbers for 2023) make my AI-detector alarm bells go off.

Also, it seems like they’re ignoring videos? One could argue that every frame of a video is a photo, which would bring the numbers way up.

@gerrymcgovern I have an amateur photographer friend who's incapable of deleting anything. Apparently every photo is precious and worthy... Even worse, she stores them in a massive lossless format--not for editing, mind you, but just to avoid lossy JPGs. Even the lightest JPG compression would save her tons of storage space, and the visual difference would be almost nil.

The good news is that she doesn't store them online, as she doesn't want to pay for that kind of storage. 😀

@gerrymcgovern
I have a small handful of photos from my childhood in the early 1970s. I probably took 500 pictures of my son in the early 2000s.

Today's teenagers can take that many Instagram photos of themselves in a week.