I took a bunch of photos of PowerPoint slides at a conference. Why do you do that? I mean, why did I do that?
I also took a picture of someone taking a picture of someone taking a picture of a PowerPoint slide. This rabbit hole goes all the way down.
I have thought about this topic before. I have even given a talk about taking photos of PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides do not take up a lot of storage space as a PowerPoint slide. But, when you take a photo of a PowerPoint slide you take a small file size and make it over 20 times the size. Then, imagine more than one person taking a photo of the same slide. A small file could expand to thousands of times of its original size. And, those photos have to be stored on the cloud for the rest of time for everyone who captured that image.
I take photos of things all of the time: fireworks, weddings, PowerPoint slides. I am doing this more and more to capture the moment and to remind me of something in the future. It is my modern day way of note taking. The problem is that I just keep taking photos of moments of my life. I wonder how important the moments will be later in life. The late Norm MacDonald covered the evolution of photography and the absurdity of how many photos we are taking of our ourselves.
All of us are building data lakes filled with screenshots, photos, and texts. In the current state, this lake is only useful to the companies that use the data to understand our buying behaviors, but the data is not too useful for all of us. Many that is the next step for us? Maybe there will be a service that curates our photos, culls them, and extract meaningful insights for us to easily parse. Otherwise we are going to drown in the data lake.