Apple’s iCloud service has been nagging me to expand my online storage, for mine is down to a mere 100MB, mainly taken up by pictures on my iPhone. Thousands of them. The company must be of the firm belief that the past seven years of photos are worth preserving for posterity. I am not convinced. Purveyors of extra data services are not as clear-eyed as the photography critic.Scrolling back, I wonder what I was doing. Family photos are fair enough, capturing the generations as they change. Events too. They only happen once. But what are all these photographs of buildings and landscapes from summer holidays, so forgettable I’d even forgotten I’d taken them?
I imagine that, for a moment, I was so overcome with wonder at the scene in front of me — a pretty canal bridge in Venice or the grand piazzas of Krakow and Siena — that I had to snap myself out of it by snapping it, the little camera click being the full stop to the moment before trotting off to the next place. There’s a danger one might actually develop a genuine and deep appreciation of a place by standing still — most unfashionable.
If Apple, Google Photos or Facebook really wanted to do me a service, they could flash up a notice on the screen to say: “This is a trite scene and a waste of data.” “Do you know how many hundreds of thousands have taken practically the same photo before?” they could inquire. “We know. They are all gathering dust on our servers. And, anyway, Geraldine from Newcastle took a much better one last week, when the clouds were all moody.”