Where did our 2004 photos go?

FlippingFlipping through your high school scrapbook is a humbling experience. There’s a lot to reckon with — including braces and bootcut jeans, in my case — and you get a sense of what kinds of moments you thought were worth preserving. Apparently, a great deal of funny things happened to my friends and me as we loafed around a suburban coffee shop avoiding homework. Looking through those pages, I can find plenty of documentation of life as we waited for our teammates to finish their tennis matches and turned the communal couch at Caribou Coffee into our own private rec room. But only a few pages later, the photos abruptly stop.

This was all in 2003, my senior year of high school. (Please don’t do that math.) I carried around disposable cameras a lot of the time, which is why I wound up with so many printed photos of such inconsequential events. But there’s a curious lack of photos from the following years — a handful of prints from a 2004 spring break trip, and then nothing else. There’s not much stored digitally, either. The first years of college were probably just as memory-worthy as the last years of high school, but the photos just don’t exist anywhere I can find.

I thought this gap might be the product of circumstance — transitioning from high school to college, moving halfway across the country. But many of my Verge colleagues also struggled to find photos of themselves in 2004. Senior correspondent Liz Lopatto scrounged one up from an old hard drive, calling it “one of three photos I have from that year.” Weekend editor Wes Davis saw his photos destroyed by Facebook after deleting his account and realizing too late that none of it had transferred properly. Reviews editor Barbara Krasnoff managed to find a picture a friend took of her that actually included her own “cruddy little” digital camera in the photo. But the photos from that camera remain elusive. “I must have taken some photos with it, but I haven’t found them yet,” she told me.

What exactly happened? How were we taking photos in 2004, and where did they go? Were they on thumb drives lost to time? Digital compact cameras long since donated to Goodwill? Lurking on rolls of film in the back of our closets? Trapped in Myspace accounts?

The problem really may have been that year. The year 2004 “was really the height of the transition from film to digital for consumers,” says Ken Parulski, now the chief scientist at photo consulting firm aKAP Innovation. While I was mainlining triple-shot mochas and avoiding AP History, Parulski was working on the frontlines of the photo-taking revolution that was well underway. He spent his first 10 years at Kodak as a research scientist, and in 2004, he was halfway through his three-decade tenure at the company, working on digital imaging systems.

It was a messy time for photo storage. For starters, printing photos out was no longer baked into the process. “In the days of film, you didn’t have to worry about archiving your pictures,” he says. “You couldn’t see your pictures until you got your prints.” That all changed with digital, where the onus was suddenly on the photographer to be diligent about saving and printing photos.

The technology around photo management was limited, too. Slow transfer speeds and early hard drive capabilities made for an experience Parulski calls “frankly more painful than it should have been to back up pictures and save them.” Likewise, storage space was expensive. Parulski worked on the Apple QuickTake 100, which was released in 1994 using Kodak’s digital imaging sensor. The camera contained just one megabyte of storage, which was enough room for eight 640 x 480 “high-resolution” images. That single megabyte of storage cost the company $40. If you copy and paste that price into the present day, then a smartphone with a modest 128GB of storage would have more than $5 million worth of space. 

All that friction gave people more and more reasons not to deal with their photos. And even as storage got cheaper, the cost shifted from money to time. “The fact that you could take a lot more pictures without incurring costs meant that you were tempted to do that,” Parulski says. “Trying to just transfer them or deal with them became one of these things like, ‘Well, I’ll do that next week,’ which became next month, which became never.”

Around the same time, photo sharing and storage websites started booming. But these early “photo finishing” services like Picasa and Shutterfly centered around processing and printing images. Photo storage was more of a byproduct, not the point.

The service that really ignited image sharing on the web was Photobucket. We take it for granted now, but in 2003, when it was founded, Photobucket provided a rare utility: hotlinking. You could upload your photo and share it anywhere on the web. The site’s traffic boomed. If you were putting photos on Myspace or eBay, you put them on Photobucket — and by 2006, it owned 2 percent of all internet traffic with 80 photos uploaded every second. Then, in 2004, another photo-sharing behemoth emerged: Flickr. Unlike the photo finishing sites, Flickr offered a slick interface for uploading, organizing, and sharing your image library. It quickly became the go-to platform for enthusiast photographers and ushered in a new era of storing images online rather than just uploading them to be printed or emailed.

In 2004, the other major shake-up in how we took and shared photos — the phone camera — was just getting underway. At that point, over half of phones sold across the globe came with an integrated camera. But image quality was generally pretty bad, and 3G was still a year away in the US. Phone camera popularity only became critical later in the decade as the iPhone arrived. Whatever photos you took on your 2004 cellphone probably died when the device did.

Knowing all of this makes me feel a little better about my missing photos from 2004. It wasn’t just me; photo sharing and archiving was a mess. That’s just how things go in a transition time, when one technology is passing the torch to another. I can see in my own online photo libraries where that transition happened — I started posting photos to Flickr in 2005, and my earliest photos on Facebook date to 2006. Instagram, Google Photos, Apple Photos, each of which I still use now, all came in the next decade. 

So what did I lose in 2004, and is there a danger of it happening again? Parulski thinks that the problem now is almost the opposite — photo taking is so easy, and we have so many photos, that it’s hard to find the signal in all the noise. 

“At Kodak, we had this notion of ‘my favorite image,’” he recalls. “These are the pictures that you print and hang on the wall… those are the ones you’re going to want to have access to a generation later.” If social media serves that function now, then the kinds of photos we pick as our favorites to share with the world probably meet a different set of criteria. We share the photos where everyone looks their best, where the vibes are impeccable, and suddenly your “photo album” means something different than the one you filled with prints and kept under your bed. 

Google Photos and Apple Photos recognize the problem and try to package up our old photos and resurface them in little memory reels, collages, and albums — all conveniently ready to print and ship to your door. I’m a sucker for a montage of pictures of my kid and me just as much as the next parent. 

But it’s weird that the photos I see most are either the ones I’ve deemed worthy of the grid or the ones a computer picked because it thought I might like them. It’s hard to say what’s lurking, forgotten in the 8,000 images in my Google Photos, because hell if I’m going through them all anytime soon. In a way, they’re almost as elusive as those photos from 2004 I still haven’t tracked down. 

Out of curiosity, I checked Photobucket. It’s a paid service now, so I had to fork over $5 to access my account. There’s nothing there — and I have a vague memory of some warning emails from Photobucket a few months back saying my photos would be deleted if I didn’t take action. At the time, I thought they might be a scam and never got motivated enough to find out. If that’s where my photos from 2004 went, then I guess they’re long gone.