How Digital Photos are Too Abundant to be Sentimental

By Anna Kathryn Hazlett

Photography by Mary Louise Sprague

“There is not enough available storage to take a photo. You can manage your storage in Settings.”

This is a notification that my phone presents me with almost every day. As I attempt to free storage space, I find myself scrolling through thousands of useless, meaningless photos that I barely even remember taking. Almost none of them consist of family portraits, breathtaking vacation views, or lifelong memories. Still, I cannot bring myself to get rid of the senseless photos in my camera roll. 

With the abundance of digital photos spread across cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, iPads, and almost any other electronic device, photographs have become considerably less meaningful. We no longer cherish an image as the only memory we have left of a time, place, or person because we now keep hundreds and thousands of photos tucked away on various platforms. We hoard photos that have no significance to us for the sole reason of not wanting to press the delete button. 

In an age where technology has completely taken over, the abundance of digital photos has caused photography to become too cheap and meaningless to have any real value. We snap pictures left and right and upload them to social media immediately. No one, including the photographer, truly cares about the image of their dinner or of the coffee they just bought. However, that is what most people continue to capture. In a technology-reliant era, pictures have lost their sentimental value and the emotional emphasis that was once placed on them. But at least we have a picture of our morning coffee, right?