[DanielBMarkham]

I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became an adult.

I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.

This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.

Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!

God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.

Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.

Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.

[ellisd]

I'm fascinated by the "family memory TV" idea. Losing cherished memories—photos, videos, or writings—is a recurring fear of mine and a big reason I’ve embraced digital hoarding. Having a place to share this with yourself and others is really powerful.

Could you share more details about your setup? Do videos play continuously in your living room, or are they triggered by presence? Is sound muted or do you just have it at a lower level?

[lmm]

> God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.

Why? I've done data takeout from multiple social media sites. It's much less tedious than babysitting VHS->digital transfer (which I've also done).

[DanielBMarkham]

The generalized answer is layered curation versus tagged curation. In my VHS scenario, there are several layers involved. First, I'm taking the video because I think there's something important going on. Many times I'll be in the background explaining why I'm recording this for the future. When the tapes and DVDs were made, there's a general summary of the topic, ie "Children Christmas plays and grandma's house, 1993" Finally, when I'm scanning/ripping, I'm also adding information and filtering as desired.

My next project is exactly what you mention: using takeout. This project is involving going through hundreds if not thousands of videos with names like "45437905_521345565468507_6881371949495794958_n_10156232738427354.mp4" all stuck in one big folder. 10-30% of these are probably memes or other throwaway stuff, mostly because there is little to no curation going on (until now). Even if I sort keep from delete, there's still the issue of generalized topic. (FB Takeout, for instance, gives all the files the same date) Assuming I could go through them all in some automated fashion, I'd still only end up with categories an automated system could provide. That's far too reductionist to actually work, eg who wants pictures of the dinners you ate, but that one time they made the 17-layer cake, oh yeah, don't want to forget that. These edge cases are part of what makes the curation so personalized and special.

Feed-based sharing is not the same activity as recording for the future. There are different goals, audiences, situations, etc. More specifically, I'm probably going to end up with 4-7 huge hunks of hundreds of impenetrable filenames from different services, each with their own nuances -- and that's after going through takeout.

Starting in on that next project today, yikes, the last thing I want is thousands of small randomized videos from my life. You could conceivably do that by wearing a GoPro around and coding a bit. That would be a terrible (and egocentric) thing to inflict on house guests.

[Loughla]

My wife used to give me shit for recording her and the children when we did things like the grand canyon and aquarium and what not. She used to say I should be taking pictures or filming the event or activity.

Now that they're older, she gets it. I can Google a dolphin, but I can't Google my oldest's reaction to seeing one.

[slumberlust]

Thanks for sharing, this is wholesome.

[kowlo]

Beautiful and inspiring. Can you share the specific e-picture frame you mentioned?

[Damogran6]

Not the OP, but I've had great experience with Aura frames...Costco sells them each year on the run-up to Christmas.