Whenever someone sends me a screenshot on WhatsApp, it automatically saves to my photo library, which in turn saves to my cloud storage. When I plug my phone into my computer, it syncs it to that too. Perhaps it also gets shared with Microsoft and Apple, HP and Toshiba, even GCHQ and CEOP.

Okay, not CEOP. Don’t panic.

I know I could turn the WhatsApp image-saving setting off, but I’m worried that in doing so, I’ll end up forgetting to manually save the photos that I actually want to keep. The upshot is that my digital photo library is a massive mess – pictures of my young niece sit alongside images of Cyberpunk 2077, hilarious anti-vaxxer memes are followed by screengrabs of other people’s conversations that have been forwarded onto me, almost certainly without their knowledge or consent. Several times a year now I spend the best part of a day browsing through everything to filter out the trash and label and secure the ‘keepers’.

It’s easy to see why some people are so worried about their digital footprint and spend their time trawling the web trying to erase any evidence of themselves. But right now I’m worried about the opposite problem. That in my ongoing bid to remove pointless pictures and irrelevant images, I’ll end up accidentally discarding the things that actually mean something to me. This happened once before when I lost half of my digital photo library while migrating in haste from a broken laptop. I don’t know what happened, but the images I lost didn’t exist anywhere beyond the faulty piece of Lenovo crap, so once deleted, they were most definitely deleted. They included a handful of snaps taken with a girl who once drove me to distraction called Tracy. Sadly she’s no longer with us, and the photos are no longer with me.

I back things up now. Go figure. Maybe I’ll start printing things out too, just to be safe. I can put all of these printed internet images in boxes and stow them under the eaves. That way, at the very least someone can dig out the dusty memories and take unexpected delight in them when I’m dead. I really have no idea whether my loved ones will be granted access to my iCloud when I’m gone and I’ve forgotten to make any such provision in my will, so a reversion to the physical domain makes a lot of sense to my morbid side (as well as to my non-morbid side, which is itself pretty morbid).

I’ve said it many times before, doubtless on this website, but the vast majority of digital content is transitory or throwaway by nature, and the danger in over-digitisation is that absolutely everything ends up falling into the same discarded bucket. We take a picture on our phones, it gets uploaded and then we never see it again, unless of course we run out of storage and have to scroll frantically through our libraries in search of things to delete.

There’s no joy in this form of accumulation; just frustration and sadness when it turns out we’ve deleted the one thing we wished to hold onto.

Photo by Adam Birkett on Unsplash.