Old family photos
16My dad was in the service and we moved every two to three years until he retired from Edwards AFB. I was 17 at the time.
My mom and I didn’t really get along, our family was one of those that put the fun in dysfunction. There wasn’t much visiting after I moved out and I avoided the family reunions because I didn’t want to be around her. (She was a mean drunk and she was drunk a lot, she had issues, I think it was self medicating, but that knowledge did not lessen the impact of her words.)
Anyway, mom and dad are both gone now and one of the cousins started a facebook group for the family. And I started going through the old photos, amazed that they made it this far, through all of our moves, from state to state, country to country. And I started scanning them (this little Epson v39 will scan more than one photo at a time!) and uploading them to the group.
It is so much fun “listening” to my surviving aunts responding to pictures of themselves as kids and teenagers. Pictures of their mom, my grandmother, who had passed away before I was born.
It makes me wish we’d had a closer family.
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I’m sorry things were so rough in your family. I completely understand that!
Sometimes grieving the loss of relationships we never had is harder than grieving the people we have lost.
Choose a good family by choosing good friends. If nothing else, be a good family to yourself.
Lesson I learned the hard way.
It’s a lot of effort to scan photos and negatives and slides and film and home movies 8mm and VCR tapes.
Meh has had scanning service bundles before, so keep an eye out if there’s lots still ahead to scan.
I use scancafe.com and have had great results. Better scanning than I could ever do or have time for. Scancafe also runs sales, so get on their email list.
Another place for photos that isn’t “give facebook my family history and tracking of everyone that views or likes or comments on or shares my pictures” and isn’t “facebook is the storage and backup service for my family photos”, is forever.com.
It’s a bit pricey, but its yours, you plan for what happens and who the account transfers to after you pass, just like you do in your will for other stuff you own.
Facebook locks and shuts down your account after you pass away and your survivors have no right to access the account facebook has been letting you use for free in exchange for letting yourself be surveilled 24x7x365 everywhere online.
@mike808 Well, the facebook thing is a private group. And got no kin. No kids or brothers or sisters.
If I did, I’d probably be more concerned about it.
@lisaviolet Facebook will shut down private groups when whoever created it shuts it down or if they pass away.
The thing about social media accounts is that they don’t “know” you’ve passed away. Just that youve stopped using your account. If nobody has access to the account (because the owner passed away), Facebook won’t convey access (reset the password and give it) to the survivors of the former account owner. That doesn’t mean Facebook stops mining the account for data like facial recognition or with AI.
For you, that might not be an issue. It might be for people under the mistaken impression that Facebook can magically replace that photo album as a digital equivalent. It doesn’t, so the takeaway is that “free” online social media and services are not really the same as storage for your tangible personal property. Its more like a personal property storage unit that the landlord lets you use for free, but can inspect anything you put in it at any time, including all the time, not to protect your stuff, but to collect any information they want about you and your stuff to sell to anyone for any purpose. Like to people that think you’re gullible to propaganda and might vote for someone.
@mike808 I will have no survivors when I die.
And those people who think I’m gullible can kiss my fat white ass.
They just wasted their money.
@lisaviolet @mike808 Perhaps Facebook locks/closes your account when you die if they are aware of your passing, but a high school friend of mine was killed in an accident 5 years ago and his Facebook page is still up. FWIW
@lisaviolet @macromeh They are only aware of it when the survivors want access to the account because it is in zombie mode when the owner (presumably the only person with the password) passed away. The alternative is to “recover” your password, but you still need access to the deceased’s email account to reset the account’s password. That’s why email accounts are the holy grail of identity thieves - they control password resets for everything else, and why 2-factor is such a big deal. For most people, a one-time code to your phone via text message is OK, but that doesn’t help you when your phone is stolen/lost and you are locked out of everything and can’t reset anything.
Generally speaking, society still has some work to do with what happens to our online presence, history, content and control of and access to that content when we pass on.