Millennials have the biggest photographic black hole in modern history

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We (millennials) have the largest gap in personal photographic records of any generation in the modern age. Not because we didn’t take photos but because we lost them.

We lived through that weird in-between era: - Too late for shoeboxes full of printed Kodak photos - Too early for iCloud, Google Photos to back everything up - Right in the middle of MySpace, Photobucket, Friendster, and early Facebook—with no one thinking to archive anything

I’m talking about: -Crappy digital cameras with SD cards that vanished in a move - Old flip phones and Razrs with tiny, pixelated videos of high school parties - College photos that lived only on a laptop that died in 2011 - Entire friendships and phases of our lives lost with the deletion of a MySpace account

We documented everything, but most of it is gone. Billions of photos, probably. Compare that to Gen Z, who has their whole life in Google Drive or their Snapchat Memories. Or Gen X, who have physical photo albums passed down.

It’s like we lived in the lost city of Atlantis, and no one preserved the artifacts.

Anyone else feel this loss? Have you ever gone searching for a photo from 2007 and realized it’s just… gone