Right but that's partially technology and partially habits.
My wife literally has track of zero printed / film photographs she ever took. She's got zero clue where they might be. Not even "shoe box somewhere" :->
Whereas, I have all my photos of last 20 years (since I first took a digital shot) chronologically sorted in folders by year then event (e.g. "Photos/2022/HalifaxTrip2022") on my NAS. It's barely any effort to organize in that way (no fancy tagging or sorting, just year and event, or generic yearly photos /photos/2022/2022_Photos as catchall), yet Typically it takes me seconds to minutes to find some obscure photo somebody remembers or wants, and near instantly for big events like trips, birthdays etc.
It's all about how much one treasures those photos / how obsessive compulsive one is :-). There's certainly ways to manage digital photo libraries, whether manually like I do, or automagically like Apple or Google do.
(we also print albums through Costco of fun trips etc. Nothing about digital prevents that)
To be fair though, When it comes to discussion about cloud and gaming though, it's an utterly disingenuous comparison. I fully and permanently own and control my digital photos in an universal format and can switch and back them up from provider to provider seamlessly. This is empathically triply not the case for stadia games.
> Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.
The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.
As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.
Well, I still print photos and I still listen to MP3 files.
The difference is that photos are conveniently took from my phone and that MP3 files are conveniently downloaded from a certain major Video Streaming website by a company with a name that is a reference to math. Every time I listen to those MP3s I make sure to watch some ads somewhere first.
Also, I get DVDs from the public library and use Handbrake to convert them so I can stream them on the living room TV from my NAS. When returning the DVDs, I, of course, I email the video files back to the library.
When I think about it, my family still has photographs from 70 years ago sitting around in family albums.
Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.