Memory Media Solutions Blog
Contents: Photo Management Anxiety :: When Media Becomes Memories :: A Jukebox for Your Memories :: Memories in Your Pocket ::
Are You Suffering from “Photo Management Anxiety?”
2019 "advice" for how to organize your photos includes using file names, folders, sub-folders and sub-sub-folders (3).
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Do you sometimes feel stress when you think about managing so many photos stored in so many places? Are your photo collections cluttered with screenshots and duplicates? Do you worry about some of your precious memories getting lost? Do you sometimes feel photographically uninspired because your new photos will just end up in a disordered collection? I certainly do!
In 2000, Kodak announced that over 80 billion photos had been taken that year alone. In 2021 people are capturing over 1.4 trillion new photos every year - that's nearly twenty times more photos every year(1)! In fact, there are nearly five times more pictures taken every year now than ever existed in total between 1826 and 2000 (2). If you’re like me, you probably take a few pictures every day. But those snapshots of life quickly add up to over 100 pictures in a month – and over 1000 new images every year! That number doesn’t even include the hundreds of film-photo memories I have accumulated and need to scan to properly preserve them. Managing my photo collection is important to me, but it is also a source of anxiety when I think of how important yet disorganized my collection is.
These anxieties are a topic I ask about anytime I am discussing memory management and access. In those conversations, dozens of people have shared with me their worries and general sense of futility about managing their photo-memory collections. It makes sense – if you can’t find, display or share your favorite memories where and when you want to, what good are they? Although our personal photo collections represent some of our most precious possessions, there just isn’t a good tool for managing and enjoying our memories. Some products, like Google Memories, Facebook and Instagram can help you back up some of your photos, but how well do they help you organize and de-clutter (3)? Do they help you browse and display your memories at home? What about your privacy? Do these companies scrape your photos for data (4)? If you lose your login or miss a payment for cloud-storage, will you be locked out of your own memories?
During my many conversations over the past several years, I have yet to find someone who feels confident about their organization of their memories or about their own ability to enjoy and share specific memories that are part of their collection. That is why we designed and built Pinpoint Memory Management System. Pinpoint gives you a single, easy to use digital memory workspace where you can import images, clear the clutter, create tags to label your images, browse and search your memories to find what you want as well as easily organize them into memory albums. It has a built-in memory slideshow viewer to display any subcollection (who, where, when or what) or any memory album. With Pinpoint, you can even share the image files with others or export a video slideshow.
Pinpoint is designed for memories and it is installed locally so you have control over who sees which parts of your photo-memory collection. So, if you want to feel confident that your memory collection is complete, without duplicates and clutter, organized using customizable tag labels and easy to display and share, then you’re going to need more than a file browser. You already know that giving your photos “names” and storing them in “folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders” doesn’t work when you have hundreds of new photos every year. This is a problem millions of people struggle with and it is one reason why we designed and built a complete, all-in-one memory management system.
References
(1) How Many Photos Have Ever Been Taken? F-Stoppers [Stats], 2012
(2) Photos, Photos Everywhere The New York Times, 2015
Greg McLean, President
Memory Media Solutions
When Media Becomes Memories
"And somewhere in the shadowy centuries that had gone before they had invented the most essential tool of all, though it could be neither seen nor touched. They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before. Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, humanity had acquired a past" – Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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Language, painting, dance, photographs and videos are just a few of the ways that humans externalize thoughts and share them with others. In addition to the information, opinions, facts and fantasies that we share using all forms of media, we also use media to communicate and externalize our memories. All communication requires media and the sharing of autobiographical memories is no exception. From telling stories while sharing meals to flipping through photo albums or watching home videos, media is crucial for sharing, refining and re-creating our pasts.
There are many components and schools of thought relating to autobiographical memory. For instance, there is the neuro-psychological perspective of the 'modal model': new synaptic connections in our brains are formed during emotionally engaged reinforcement of our sensory perceptions that create pathways into short-term memory which are then encoded into and back out of a long-term memory storage system (1). Other perspectives focus on the act of constructing self-narratives based on those stored perceptions. These internal narratives are often referred to as “autobiographical memories” and they represent present-tense constructions of actual, past sensory experiences (3). These narrative, autobiographical memories are “transitory" and "constructed dynamically” and, as such, internal recall of these narratives can be inspired by external stimuli such as words, images, music, odors or tastes (2). Not all types of stimuli evoke memories in the same way; it has been found that visual cues inspire more emotional memories (2).
Immersive, internal re-experiencing of autobiographical memories – sometimes described as “mental time travel” – can be stimulated using media (1). For instance, we use language to tell ourselves stories or to share them with others. We look at photos, videos, letters and memorabilia to remind us of certain details of our pasts. We listen to audio recordings and music that were the soundtracks of specific moments. We travel to places, cook food from passed-down recipes and try on clothes from the past to inspire personal and cultural memories. These are just a few of the ways by which media can not only preserve and refresh memory but also to become a part of the dynamic construction of memory.
The concept of memories as dynamic, present-tense constructions was explored by Andrea Smorti in his 2011 article, "Autobiographical Memory and Autobiographical Narrative: What is the Relationship?" In his experiments, participants were asked to share autobiographical narratives with interviewers who then transcribed these stories into manuscripts. After some time, the participants were invited back for several sessions to read the transcripts and to conduct further oral history interviews. Smorti explains that engaging with these transcribed memory-media narratives, “permitted the narrator to assume new stances towards what had been produced orally during each session. This procedure encouraged new narratives and new memory constructions” (4). The process was repeated for ten iterations with the same volunteers which led Smorti to conclude that autobiographical memories emerge from a process of continuous construction and are composed of at least two aspects, “that of memory and that of narrative” (4). The participants' memories and the narratives interpreted from them transformed over time and over the course of repeated tellings to different audiences. This meant that the media used to preserve the volunteers’ memories also served to transform and refine their memories.
Media is essential to communication and remembering. Over time, it seems some of the original, sensory-based synaptic connections of most non-traumatic memories begin to fade away and are progressively replaced by newer neurological imprints made up of the stories, photos and other recordings that we’ve engaged with through the years. If this is the case, then our memory-media collections are invaluable and irreplaceable when it comes to remembering our pasts. And, since visual cues evoke more emotional memory engagement, our photos are especially important. A comprehensive library of personal memory-media that we can display, share and engage with makes for more reflective, emotional and vivid memory recall experiences as well as helps to refresh, create and refine our autobiographical self-narratives. In these ways, media not only helps to construct and preserve memories - media becomes memories.
References
(1) Baddely et al. Memory, 2009, p. 11.
(2) Baddely et al. Memory, 2009, p. 144.
(3) Neisser, U. (ed.). The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, 1994, p. 2.
(4) Smorti, A. (2011). Autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative: what is the relationship? Narrative Inquiry 21(2), 303-310.
Greg McLean, President
Memory Media Solutions
A Jukebox for Your Memories
Music creates powerful memories that become “the soundtracks of our lives.” I think photo memories are similar – they are the “image tracks” of our lives. This was a fundamental principle of envisioning a memory management system for the thousands of photo-memories I own. I wanted to be able play memory slideshows as quickly and easily as we play music.
In a lot of ways, Pinpoint is like a jukebox for your memories. You can organize, browse and search your collection to display or share the memories you want when you want to. You can create and watch memory album playlists. You can select and play a memory slideshow of any person, place, date or theme you like – or just press play to watch moments from your entire collection. Memory slideshows can be displayed on any connected screen or device instantly and in high resolution. They can also be exported as a video file or bundled up as separate images that can be shared with friends and family.
Greg McLean, President
Memory Media Solutions
Don't Leave Your Memories in Your Pocket!
Do you ever feel like your pictures are “stuck” in your phone with no good way to organize, browse, display them or to share them with friends and family? Obviously, it’s easy to quickly share an occasional picture to Facebook or Instagram, but when I want to reminisce with my family, it is frustrating to not have a comprehensive, indexed library that I can use to tag, search and browse my entire collection.
We all have so many beautiful memories in our phones, cloud accounts, computers and old photo albums, but there is a lack of an all in one tool that makes it easy to organize, display and share these memories. That’s why my company is building Pinpoint Memory Management System. Pinpoint brings your entire collection together and makes it easy to tag, browse, search, display and share your memories.
Photo memories deserve to be displayed and shared and Pinpoint’s integrated memory slideshow viewer that can display images on any connected device. So, don’t leave your memories in your pocket, use Pinpoint memory management system to share your most precious moments with friends and family!
Greg McLean, President
Memory Media Solutions
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