Is picture hoarding a character flaw or strength? Real quick, let’s remember the days when we had digital cameras with a five second lag between taking two photos. You had to know your camera pretty well because there’d be a small delay after pressing the button just before taking a picture, and if you were a second too early you’d kick yourself for missing the important moment. Our smartphones and tablets have long since resolved this phenomenon and even allow us to capture entire sequences of events. We no longer have any lost moments. There seems to be no limit as we can preserve just about any semi-significant instant just by tapping a screen. If you’re like me, you have a camera roll that looks like this.

Somewhere in a long photo series I have the picture I really wanted to get but I can’t just delete the others. How would I decide one is better than the next when they are practically the same? I should just keep them all until circumstances in the future reveal which version is more necessary. But lapsing time really only gives me more reason to hold onto the evidence of a memory. This is what makes me a picture hoarder. I sometimes think it’s some personal flaw that makes me unable to get rid of unneeded photos and I want to guess that there are some others that find themselves in the same situation. Despite being bothered with myself for having so many duplicate pictures, I won’t change it, so I thought it would be worthwhile to look farther into what picture hoarding is about.

I think the true matter of picture hoarding comes down to this one question. Is it harder to have something and lose it than to never have something in the first place? Picture hoarders would probably answer yes! It’s much more frustrating to have deleted a photo that is needed in the future than to never have had it in the first place (like when we had slow cameras). We can always take more pictures to try to get the pic we want, but deleting the other decent pictures may be throwing away something we’ll want in the future. Of course we’ll never know exactly if the occasion for a photo’s 10 seconds of fame will show up, but the possibility is enough to instinctively hold on.

For this reason I like to think that being a picture hoarder shows that a person is some form of an optimist. Always collecting resources that may, one day, complement a conversation or prove a point which therefore evades the regret of losing something that turned out be valuable (perhaps a feeling like prematurely selling a stock that turned out later would have been highly profitable). Don’t get me wrong, there are countless reasons to rationalize holding onto unneeded photos. But maybe at the root of it, these people uphold a latent hope that there will later be an opportunity to connect a speck of the past with the present.