I’ve been thinking about buying one of those mini-printers that bluetooth to your phone and let you print out little 2-inch x 3-inch Zink photos with sticky backs. So I could just take a photo of something, print it off and stick it in my notebook, with the digital original waiting to be backed off into an external drive later.
I suspect those little photos don’t have great archival duration. So, in ten years, I or my daughter might open one of those notebooks to find little blank rectangles stuck all the way through it.
I have saved a shitload of photos over the years. I mean, for many years I’ve had an automated system that saves off any photo I post on Instagram, because I do not need them owning the potential only copy of any photo of mine.
And I think several of us, around the same time, came to the momentary position that perhaps we don’t want Instagram to have them at all. Or at least not all of the photos we have a use for. I find, for instance, that I’m happier posting them here, and may do more of that. Even though square photos come with metadata that confuse the fuck out of WordPress and often causes it to post them on a 90 degree rotation for some dumb reason.
I admit, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. It’s an… urge? Without a lot of theorising behind him. I would like to use the available tools as tools more, maybe? Getting hold of these things and bending them more towards personal purpose?
Shit, Robin Sloan is just printing stuff and mailing it out. Craig Mod’s using a one-to-many custom system to MMS out photos from his long walk across Japan at the moment.
(because category jotter is for fragments and randoms)