> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. [...] But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
So now the value is created through curation. Before it was inherent at creation. If you never curate it might seem like it lost value in comparison.
And there’s software to help you with that. For example, using faces, time stamps and GPS info iOS creates collections for you.
Yes, it’s crude, and you have to do the face tagging, but I think it’s a huge improvement over not having that.