Back in November 2022 I got an email from photo products company Shutterfly that starting in the new year customers were required to place orders every 18 months in order to store photos on their platform. Not knowing what I had stored with the service, I logged in found a couple of dozen photos from over the years. I downloaded them and then deleted my long-inactive account.

In the process of doing so, I found I had another Shutterfly account, one tied to an email address I wasn’t even using anymore. Upon dusting off that email and logging into that account, I found I had a few more images stored there – 3,283 to be exact. Yes, over three-thousand images I had clearly forgotten about. After some intense eyebrow-knitting, I remembered why they were there: in 2011 film processing service PhotoWorks.com shut down and allowed all images stored online to be transferred to Shutterfly, which I apparently did. And there they were for all these years.

What the Film?

Prior to the almost-purely digital age of photography we live in, there were film cameras. In the 1990’s I learned about a company called Seattle FilmWorks, where you could mail in your film for processing and get back paper prints, your negatives and a floppy disk with digital images of your photos. This was a game-changer for me, and I became a loyal customer. Over time they rebranded to PhotoWorks.com, and eventually shut down. But by that time, I was already using a digital camera and eventually my mobile device for photography.

The digital images provided by Seattle FilmWorks were in a proprietary format that could only be viewed and extracted into a non-proprietary format with software they provided. Over time I did this for many of the images, but not all, and I still have the digital files archived from those original floppy disks. That being said, the resolution of the original images was rather small; on average an image was only 768 x 512 pixels, where today an average image from my iPhone is at least 5 times that size.

Nonetheless I downloaded all of the images from Shutterfly and deleted that second account. As one my guess, the process of downloading over 3,000 of anything is a workload, and this was no different. On top of it, all of the images were in one giant folder and not organized by their corresponding roll of film as they likely were at PhotoWorks. For backup purposes I wanted them all, though eventually I will likely digitize the negatives to more modern dimensions. The accompanying picture with this post is one of those pictures – taken years ago along the trail between Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts where my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I came by a couple of American Revolution re-enactors. Our pleas to them to not shoot us didn’t humor them, but they did pose for this picture.

Where the fancy word for concern comes in

As I mentioned, I deleted both accounts with Shutterfly. Nothing personal to them, but I can’t recall a time when I ever ordered from them – there was no order history in either account. If I ever want to in the future, I am sure I can create a new account. This maintenance was part of managing my external digital presence, or footprint as it is often called.

Over time I review the massive list of accounts I have with online services. If it’s a service I use often, I will periodically reset the password. If it’s one I don’t use at all, I will try to delete it – I say try as some services don’t give the option. Sometimes when I try to login to an account, the service is gone altogether, and then I just strike it from my list. This periodic maintenance is necessary, but something I am not as diligent with as I would like to be, not to mention something most people don’t do at all. Where this doesn’t keep me up at night, it is something I am concerned about.

So what else of mine is out there, waiting for me to reclaim it? What else of yours is out there too?

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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