Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

Summary

Members of The Photo Managers help their clients with the 2005-2010 "Black Hole" all the time. "I see it over and over again, the whole digital 'black hole' thing," says Photo Manager member Caroline Guntur. "There was a period from the early 2000s to 2013 where it was very difficult for people to get organised and photos were lost."Nelson, Guntur and other Photo Manager members say they pull pixelated baby photos from Nokia flip phones, recover pictures from sleeves of photo CDs and go to battle with customer service at online photo album websites like Snapfish or Shutterfly. "Our members always say it's the one job they do that people cry when they return everything back to them," Nelson says.The digital dark ageAt the exact same time, there was another seismic change underfoot: free online photo sharing. We not only had the ability to generate millions of photos, we could share them with every person on Earth – in a way that felt far more permanent than it really was.In 2006, the social media platform MySpace was reportedly the most popular website in the United States, and for many, it became a default photo sharing and storage service. But the reign of MySpace was short-lived. Facebook launched in 2004, and by 2012 it boasted over a billion users. Soon, MySpace fell into obscurity, and countless photos and other digital memories were left behind.In 2019, MySpace announced that 12 years' worth of its data was wiped out in an accidental server crash. The company said "any photos, videos and audio files" posted before 2016 were gone forever, a whole generation of pictures lost to time.MySpace wasn't the only hub to store your photos, however. Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish, pharmacy chain Walgreens and many more went all-in on internet photo services. Customers got free online photo galleries, and the companies could generate revenue through prints and gifts. At first the model was a huge success. Shutterfly, for example went public in 2006 with a high profile stock ...