What We Capture - and Lose - with All the Photos and Videos We Take

      In this article in National Geographic, Emma Magnus says it’s great that we now have so many easy-to-access digital images – kids’ birthday parties, vacation trips, family gatherings, weddings, selfies. With our smartphones always within reach, we’re capturing more of our lives than any previous generation; one woman estimates she has about 150,000 pictures in the cloud.  

      This plethora of images may be affecting our “autobiographical memory,” says Magnus, which “is central to how we understand ourselves” – a mental reservoir to which we refer when we think about our lives. Photos and videos can help with reconstructing our life story, jogging our memory about details and emotions we might otherwise forget. Remembering is an interaction of what we actually recall and all the images we’ve off-loaded onto hard drives, smartphones, and social media. 

         All of this reduces the cognitive load of trying to remember everything, but it may also weaken our ability to recall details unless we look at those images. “As a result,” says Magnus, “when we turn to digital images to reconstruct an event, those files don’t just support our memory. They feed back into it, becoming part of it and subtly altering it… They’re shaping which moments we remember, how vividly, and how well we interpret our personal histories.” There are also photos we delete – snapshots of an ex, a bad night out – and those are deleted from our mental hard drive as well (except for those that refuse to leave)

      There’s another wrinkle to our prodigious picture-taking: relying on a camera to capture an event can detract from appreciating the moment, in the same way that concentrating on filming a concert can reduce our enjoyment of the music. And what if we never look at the thousands of photos and videos we’ve taken? Most people don’t review and organize their digital material because it’s overwhelming, so there’s a double loss – being less present in the moment, and then not revisiting the images we’ve taken.

      “Of course, outsourcing our memories to technology is nothing new,” says Magnus. “Human civilization is built on technology created to preserve and export what’s in our heads: Instagram, floppy disks, the printing press, even language itself. But tech is temporary. Hard drives will fail and social media companies will fall, and while that may not make them worth avoiding, today’s memory repositories have so much capacity – and are so integrated into our lives – that we stand to lose more when they inevitably fail.” Does that mean that if our phone is stolen or left behind in an Uber and there’s no backup, part of our brain is gone?

      “Many of us have conditioned ourselves to instantaneously, almost unconsciously, rely on our phones to capture moments,” Magnus concludes. “Capture the highlights all you want, but remember that the moments that shape you may not be the ones on your camera roll.” 

“Are We Reaching Photo Overload?” by Emma Magnus in National Geographic, December 2025 (Vol. 248, #6, pp. 96-99)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1116 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.