Scattered

have been online for a long time. Long enough to have accumulated a digital life that is now scattered across more services than I care to count — some still running, some sunset, some technically alive but spiritually dead.

The project I’ve been quietly working on is pulling it all back together. Twenty-five years of photos, posts, bookmarks, and memories, distributed across whatever platform seemed like the right answer at the time.

Picasa was the first right answer. Google’s desktop photo organizer was genuinely good — clean, fast, and free at a time when organizing your photos meant either paying for software or accepting chaos. Then there was Flickr, which in its prime was something close to remarkable: a real community built around photography, tagging that actually worked, and a sense that your photos were going somewhere worth putting them. I have photos there I haven’t seen in years. They’re still up. I’m not sure what that means.

Then the platforms multiplied. Google Photos when it launched felt like the obvious successor — unlimited storage, machine learning that could find your dog in ten thousand photos, available everywhere. Amazon Photos came along because I already had Prime and it seemed almost rude not to use it. iCloud, which Apple has quietly made the default answer for anyone who gave up arguing with their iPhone.

The photos are the most acute problem. I have photos of my kids as toddlers on Flickr. Family vacations on Amazon Photos. The last few years reasonably well organized in iCloud and Google Photos, occasionally in both because my phone couldn’t make up its mind. And somewhere in a drawer there are hard drives with the truly old stuff — the pre-cloud era, back when you managed your own files like some kind of pioneer.

The cruel irony is that I was a developer for the first half of my career. I built systems. I understood data. I should have known better than to let my personal archive become an archipelago of loosely affiliated silos, each with their own export format, their own pricing changes, their own “we’re updating our terms of service” emails that I clicked through without reading.

But that’s the thing about the internet between 2000 and now — every few years something new appeared that was definitively better than the last thing, and the sensible move always seemed like going where the momentum was. Flickr was definitively better than managing your own gallery. Then Yahoo got involved and the obituaries started. Picasa was shut down in 2016 and rolled into Google Photos, taking years of desktop organization with it. Google Photos was free and unlimited and miraculous right up until it wasn’t. The story repeats.

So now I’m consolidating. iCloud is where I’m landing — it’s where my phone already puts everything, Apple has enough skin in the game that I trust the longevity more than I trust a free tier, and the family sharing makes sense for where we are as a household. The work is in the migration: downloading years of exports, deduplicating, organizing, importing. It is exactly as tedious as it sounds and I am doing it anyway because the alternative is leaving twenty-five years of my family’s life in places I don’t control, on services whose business models I can’t predict.

If you’ve been online since the dotcom era, you probably have your own version of this problem. The digital life diaspora is real. The question isn’t whether to consolidate — it’s whether you’ll get around to it before one of those services finally sends the email you can’t ignore.

I’m getting around to it. Slowly. Rose and Iris are being very patient about the amount of time I’ve spent staring at photo export queues this week. #DigitalLife #Photos #Flickr #Picasa #GooglePhotos #iCloud #IndieWeb #Blogging