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Where did our 2004 photos go?

As we moved from digital cameras to cameraphones and prints to the Photos app, a year of our shots went missing.

Looking through those pages, I can find plenty of documentation of life as we waited for our teammates to finish their tennis matches and turned the communal couch at Caribou Coffee into our own private rec room. Slow transfer speeds and early hard drive capabilities made for an experience Parulski calls “frankly more painful than it should have been to back up pictures and save them.” Likewise, storage space was expensive. “These are the pictures that you print and hang on the wall… those are the ones you’re going to want to have access to a generation later.” If social media serves that function now, then the kinds of photos we pick as our favorites to share with the world probably meet a different set of criteria.

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