How to: organize photos

It seems to be a growing phenomenon: people don’t mind lining up to get a photo in front of the Mona Lisa, they would rather enjoy concerts through the screen of their phone and everyone’s doing weird poses to get that one funny photo with the Pisa tower. But why do we want to take so many photos?

There are several explanations for why it’s so hard for us to put our cameras down. One of them is our desire to hold on to the moment. Because humans are natural collectors, we like to take a lot of pictures. It’s our instinct to collect as much as we can so that we’ll never run out.

“Our biology is lagging years behind current technological developments,” explains Els Jacobs, cultural anthropologist. “This hoarding behavior and urge to collect things are in our genes.” But do the math: if you take 100 pictures per month, you’ll have collected 12,000 over a period of ten years. Jacobs recommends making one album per child. By limiting yourself, you make the album more special, she says. “And if you make a ‘breathing’ album that has some ‘space’ in it, you also give room to your memories and feelings when you are thumbing through the album.”

And it’s not entirely true that photographs keep memories alive, by the way, according to Douwe Draaisma, professor in psychology and history at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands: “A photograph needs memories to really represent something. What actually occurs more frequently is that the photograph’s image supersedes real remembered images of old friends and loved ones.”