Reply All: #71 The Picture Taker

July 28, 2016 8:17 PM

Rachel was a faithful user of a photo storage website called Picturelife, until one day all of her photos disappeared. As she investigated, she realized that every Picturelife user was having the same problem. Alex tries to find out if there's any hope of getting her photos back. Also, a preview of the new Gimlet show, Science Vs!
posted by radioamy (9 comments total)

Listening to this gave me so much anxiety! And reminded me that I am overdue for a hard drive backup to my Time Machine drive.
posted by radioamy at 8:19 PM on July 29, 2016

Loved the French ennui of 'yeah trust no one'!
posted by ellieBOA at 7:32 AM on July 30, 2016

I was on board until the host said, "And, I think, everybody in this story acted pretty reasonably and … you now, a bad thing happened anyway." That's a shockingly light-hearted dismissal of gross professional incompetence and outrageous narcissism. Yikes.
posted by eotvos at 2:36 PM on July 31, 2016

I thought that the timing of this episode was interesting given how much it echoes with the recent story of an artist named Dennis Cooper having his Google account suspended out of the blue (on the blue).

I found both Alex and Rachel's reaction to the idea of losing their children's photos to be deeply strange. I'll admit that I'm not a parent, but how do they think that parents managed in a world before it was possible to take (let alone store) gigabytes of media starring Small Human XYZ? Was each of our upbringings somehow a tragedy because only a scant photographic record was left?

This is maybe the first generation of babies that have been born to parents who can easily (and relatively cheaply) capture essentially infinite amounts of photos and videos of the their growing up years. But yet all of our parents, and their parents before them, managed to deal emotionally with the aging of their children without being able to look back on thousands of pictures per year. And that's not even considering the babies born before photography.
posted by sparklemotion at 1:03 PM on August 1, 2016

I found both Alex and Rachel's reaction to the idea of losing their children's photos to be deeply strange. I'll admit that I'm not a parent, but how do they think that parents managed in a world before it was possible to take (let alone store) gigabytes of media starring Small Human XYZ? Was each of our upbringings somehow a tragedy because only a scant photographic record was left?

I'm sure they fully understand this and have no illusions about the fact that their kids would be fine without all the photos. But the ability to take all that media creates the desire to have it, which in turn creates anxiety about losing it. And, as a father, having tons of photos does bring pleasure, so it's not totally irrational to fear losing it. I'm not particularly sentimental about photos qua photos, but I am sentimental about the beauty and poignancy of my children's journey through the strange and fascinating, and most significantly, fleeting thing we call childhood.
posted by that's candlepin at 8:28 AM on August 2, 2016

Also, re: I was on board until the host said, "And, I think, everybody in this story acted pretty reasonably and … you now, a bad thing happened anyway." That's a shockingly light-hearted dismissal of gross professional incompetence and outrageous narcissism. Yikes.

One of my favorite things about PJ is how charitable he tries to be. I basically agree that the dude that owns that service screwed up, especially with his failure to communicate clearly to his users, but I also think you're overstating things a bit. YMMV.
posted by that's candlepin at 8:30 AM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'll admit that I'm not a parent, but how do they think that parents managed in a world before it was possible to take (let alone store) gigabytes of media starring Small Human XYZ?

I could show you actual crates of photo albums from the 1960s and 70s featuring endless shots of my family.

I also was a bit surprised at Goldman's lack of critical tone re the Picturelife guy.
posted by aught at 1:36 PM on August 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I bet that, even in pre-inflation adjusted dollars, those crates of photos cost more to produce (camera + film + development) than a prepaid cell phone with the equivalent storage capacity today.

For example: assume, say, 300ppi, so you're talking about 1200x1800 pixels for a 4x6. And let's go with a 32bit TIFF for nice uncompressed quality, so like 9MB per image. This phone is $20. It can be upgraded with a 64 GB SD card for another $20. Even rounding down to 1000MB per GB, that's over 7,000 photos for $40.

I'm not going to put a huge amount of effort into historical price research, but this StackExchange question cites a (non-adjusted) price of $1.15 for a 36 exposure roll of black and white film in 1957. That's over $220 1957 dollars just for the film.

But even if you count all the babies of the 20th century in the "sufficiently documented" category, you still have literally billions parents of billions of babies that didn't need the documentation. I'm not saying that none of them would have wanted it -- more that it's just weird to think of not having this thing you want as a tragedy.

I'm still holding out hope that Jonathan Benassaya gets the database fixed soon and everyone gets their photos back. Maybe we'll get an update on an episode soon.
posted by sparklemotion at 3:40 PM on August 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

For a service that I've never heard of, their colo requirements sound insane. I'm kind of amazed he didn't just dump everything onto S3....
posted by schmod at 4:23 PM on August 27, 2016