http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/fa.../05photos.html

May 5, 2005
Stop Them Before They Shoot Again
By AMY HARMON

THE baby pictures just kept coming. At least once a month Suzanne Weber
opened her e-mail to find the same friend had sent a link to as many as
50 pictures, often including multiple shots of the same child at the
same moment at slightly different angles. Finally Ms. Weber, who enjoys
the occasional digital baby snapshot as much as anyone, stopped
responding, and the friend, taking the hint, stopped sending.

Ms. Weber's e-mail, however, is by no means picture-free. Like many
regular Internet users, she estimates that she will view more than 1,000
(why stop? it's free) digital pictures this year of friends, family and
their assorted offspring. And she has some unequivocal advice for
snap-happy e-mail correspondents everywhere.

"Edit your pictures, people," said Ms. Weber, a writer in Brooklyn whose
pen name is Anita Liberty. She suggests no more than three pictures by
e-mail, no more than 12 to an online "album," no albums more than twice
a year. (Exceptions may apply for grandparents and best friends.)

Ms. Weber is not alone in her plea for restraint. At a time when this
country is indulging in an unparalleled binge of personal picture
taking, and some digital photographers find themselves drowning in the
product of their enthusiasm, the notion is dawning that even in a
digital realm less may still be more.

Some critics warn that a great photograph's singular power to trigger
memory may be at risk. For many people a photograph they have seen a
thousand times itself becomes the memory. With digital pictures it is
rare for a single photograph to achieve that kind of status.

"When you have hundreds of pictures where you used to have one, people
are less likely to ever go back to look at any of them," said Nancy Van
House, a professor in the school of information management and systems
at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social use of
photography. "A lot of people are getting to the point in their digital
photography now where it's becoming a problem."

Tinamarie Fronsdale, who is the keeper of her extended family's photo
albums, shot more than 300 pictures after getting her first digital
camera last year. She saved some on CD's and printed others. But she has
not used the camera in months.

"It's too much," said Ms. Fronsdale, 47, a special education teacher in
Berkeley. "Looking back at our family pictures from our childhood, I see
it isn't important to have so many pictures. We do not need to record
every moment."

The idea of passing on hundreds of CD's filled with pictures to her
nephews was wholly unappealing, Ms. Fronsdale said, when she realized
they would never casually pull them out the way she did with an
old-fashioned photo album when she and her mother were recently
reminiscing about a family friend.

AMERICA'S amateur photographers produced 28 billion digital pictures
last year, 6 billion more than they shot on film, even though only half
as many own a digital camera, according to the market research firm
InfoTrends. That does not count pictures deleted before being printed or
transferred for storage.

People are not just switching formats. They are taking more pictures, 13
billion more last year on film and digital combined than in 2000, when
the price of digital cameras began to decline. The number of albums
compiled using Kodak's popular Ofoto software (now called EasyShare
Gallery) jumped nearly 90 percent in 2004.

In an era when no moment passes that is not a photo opportunity, pet
owners compile vast photo archives of their cats and dogs, teenagers
wielding cellphone cameras take pictures of one another to fight
boredom, and it is not uncommon to receive dozens of pictures
documenting a baby's first few hours of life.

Many new photographers - and the newly prolific - extol a new category
they call ephemera. It might include a picture of an interesting glove
on the sidewalk. Seen through the lens of a camera that never requires
its owner to pay for film, the mundane takes on new meaning.

The digital shooting spree is only expected to accelerate as a growing
number of camera-phone shutterbugs join the ranks of those reveling in
pictures immediately available and easily shared. Many digital picture
enthusiasts say the medium has taken on a new currency as a running
document of everyday life. Others say that even if they never look at a
picture, just the experience of taking it engages them with a scene in a
more interesting way.

Most people save all of their pictures, no matter how blurry or
unremarkable. Many store them with the file names automatically assigned
by their cameras, like "DSC31.jpg." Others develop complex
classification to take the place of shoeboxes or an envelope with "Grand
Canyon, 2003" scrawled across it.

Van Swearingen, an avid gar-dener in Greenwich Village, has sorted the
6,000 flower pictures he has amassed in three years into seasonal
subfolders on his computer. Within them are folders labeled with the
date and within those are other folders of the pictures he has cropped
and color-corrected to his liking.

But when he was looking for a particular image of a lotus the other day,
it took him half an hour sifting through computer files. And the
hundreds of pictures he exchanges daily with other garden hobbyists has
made him look at his own with a jaundiced eye.

"The constant stream of images somewhat cheapens the medium for me," Mr.
Swearingen, 43, said. "It becomes almost too immediate."

It is partly the pleasure of that immediacy that propels people to take
all those pictures. Many digital photographers, including Mr.
Swearingen, describe the immediate gratification as addictive.

But Jim Lewis, a novelist who wrote an opinion article for Wired
magazine titled "Memory Overload," suggests it is the hollowness of the
gratification that fuels the addiction.

"You take the picture to capture the memory of being there, but if you
take the picture, you aren't really there," Mr. Lewis said by telephone.
"You're trying to satisfy a hunger which is actually being created by
the activity."

In his article Mr. Lewis compared mushrooming digital photography to a
map of the world that grows in detail "until every point in reality has
a counterpoint on paper, the twist being that such a map is at once
ideally accurate and entirely useless, since it's the same size as the
thing it's meant to represent."

MICHAEL KUKER, 31, does not see a problem with that. He has deposited
9,946 images on his hard drive since buying a digital camera two years
ago. The no-risk nature of the technology, he said, has emboldened him
to express himself. He shot 200 pictures of a bridge in Redding, Calif.,
and saved them all.

"Once it hits my computer, it stays, even if I don't like it," Mr. Kuker
said. "In a historical context, 20 to 30 years down the road, someone
else might find it interesting."

Or even tomorrow. Like many protophotographers, Mr. Kuker has been
inspired to take more pictures to attract an audience online. He is a
member of Flickr, a photography Web site (www.flickr.com), where half a
million people have plunked 8.2 million pictures since it opened for
business last summer.

Caterina Fake, Flickr's founder, argues that people just have to get
used to a new way of interacting with photographs. The digital deluge
may make it harder for single images to stand out of the dense crowd,
but it also offers greater intimacy with friends and family and a new
means of communication among strangers.

"The nature of photography now is it's in motion," said Ms. Fake. "It
doesn't stop time anymore, and maybe that's a loss. But there's a kind
of beauty to that, too."

Adam Seifer, the founder of another photo-sharing site, www.fotolog.net,
said the glut of pictures is a problem only when they are channeled to
the wrong audience. Mr. Seifer, who takes a picture of every meal he
eats, concedes that his mother-in-law might not be interested in those
pictures. "It becomes sort of the new spam," he said.

But Mr. Seifer's food log receives 15,000 visits a week from people who
are apparently interested. If photographers save the baby pictures for
their mothers-in-law, Mr. Seifer argues, and store the rest in a central
location where others can choose to view them or not, no one would
suffer from overload.

Still, even in the enthusiast bastion of online photo sharers, there are
signs of paring down.

"I'm thinking of going on an image diet," Frederick Redden, 52, of
Stuart, Fla., wrote on a Flickr discussion board. His plan to delete
some of the 250 pictures he had put up, based on unpopularity, was met
with cries of disapproval.

One respondent wrote, "If I did that, I'd have to delete all of my
pictures!"