Not Every Photo Will Matter in 10 Years - but some will. Save those. Print those.
We all have thousands of photos sitting in our phones or buried in digital clouds. We don’t look at them, but we don’t delete them either.
Actually, let me tell you a story.
A friend of mine - a lovely tech bro - last month proudly told me he wasn’t like everyone else. He had one photo on his camera roll. Just one. I was curious. He’d just got married, he had close friends, a full life. Surely, he was taking photos?
Of course, he was. He just backed them up and deleted them from his phone. Thousands of images, sitting in the cloud, out of sight.
So even he, the man who thought he’d hacked the system, was like the rest of us - drowning in a digital mountain of photos, unable to engage with his memories in any meaningful way.
And here’s the truth: not every photo is going to matter in 10 years. But some will. And if you don’t take action, they’ll be just as lost as if you’d never taken them at all.
The Problem: We Hoard, But We Don’t See
I recently spoke to someone who lost three years’ worth of digital photos due to a syncing error between Apple and Google. Three years of family memories - irretrievably gone. Another friend told me that her Australia trip, one of the most meaningful experiences of her life, had become a daunting task to revisit because she had taken too many photos.
We hate clutter. We know that too much of anything diminishes its value. But when it comes to our photos, we keep everything- not because we need to, but because choosing feels overwhelming.
We’re not narcissists. We don’t need 3,000 images of last year. But how do we strike a balance between the big moments and the small ones that unexpectedly hold weight?
The Role of a Printed Photo: Seeing What Truly Matters
The best writers don’t just spill words onto a page. They edit. They decide what to keep, what to cut, and what order to tell the story in.
Your photos work the same way.
Memories are not just recorded - they’re curated. Every photo you save, every image you print, is a decision about what matters to you.
A digital album of 10,000 photos is just fairly impenetrable storage. But 20 carefully chosen images from this year? That’s a story. And the difference between a story and a storage unit is that you’ll actually look at one of them.
The Thought Experiment: If You Had to Choose 100 Photos for Life, What Would They Be?
Think about it. If you could only keep 100 photos from your entire life, which would you choose?
The ones that make you laugh?
The ones that remind you how loved you are?
The ones that capture the feeling of a time in your life—not just the way it looked?
You don’t have to know the answer right now. But I challenge you to rethink what’s actually important in your camera roll. If you had just 100 photos from the past year, which would they be?
How to Start Curating Your Story
This isn’t about deleting everything. It’s about making sure the right photos stand out. Here’s how:
Start with an end goal. What do you want to remember in 10 years? The last year of your life? Your child growing up? A once-in-a-lifetime trip? Let that guide you. How do you want it to look? On your wall? Something for a bookshelf? I humbly suggest print is important as it engages different parts of your brain; it is more meaningful than a revolving digital slideshow which is gone in a digital upgrade.
Create a “2025 Keepers” folder. As you come across photos that make your heart sing, add them. Don’t overthink it—just trust what makes you feel something.
Print them. Because digital photos disappear. They get lost in endless scrolling, buried in forgotten folders, or wiped out by a failed backup. Printed photos, though? They stay. They live in your space, ready to be revisited. Generations can enjoy them.
Final Thought: Your Story Deserves More Than a Folder on Your Phone
Here’s something we know from scientific research: The more we actively reflect on our own story - our connections, our challenges, our growth - the stronger our resilience and sense of self.
That’s true for kids. That’s true for adults.
But your story doesn’t live in a backup drive. It lives in the photos you actually see, the ones you put on your walls, the ones you flip through with your family, the ones you print.
If choosing feels overwhelming, we can help. But whatever you do, don’t let your most important memories rot in sad little folders on your phone.
Decide what matters. And make sure you keep it.