All gone...

Last week I decided to delete a photo of a list I'd taken for future reference and in the twinkling of an eye deleted all the photos on my phone camera. Oops! How? I asked myself that many times. Didn't it warn me with that 'did you really mean to' sort of question? Was it just too weary as it was about to run out of battery? Were the gremlins inside my phone being spiteful?
So what to do? Well, it turns out I still had the downloaded stuff and the favourites like my son and his fifteen (at last count) motorbikes, the family Christmas photo, my grandroo Roody and so on. I had saved some to Google photos and was able to retrieve some back to my phone for bragging purposes - this is my granddaughter in the wondrous dress she created last year for the young fashion designer awards, this is the colouring in I did, the focaccia bread I made, the rose in the front yard. You know how it goes.
Then I mined messages - in and out - for important photos shared. It seems most of them were not that important.
Now a week later, it's fine. I'm not sure what else I've lost but I'm okay.
It got me thinking. I have about a handful of photos of my Mum (born in 1919). There is a cute toddler, one of her with her hair all the way down her back before it was cut in her late teens, a wedding photo and a few with us as babies. (Less of me since I'm the third child.)  In her day cameras were rare and photos were often taken by professionals or in a  studio. It seems common for there to have been a photographer in the street as I have a few pictures of family members walking arm in arm along a city footpath.
So what will happen to the zillions of photos we snap every day? How many will survive? The technology with be obsolete. Will we print them all and will they last? Who will sort through them all when our time is up?What will remain
One of my friends is on an overseas trip. It's fun to see her photos on Facebook. Tourists seem to take so many photos since most of us have a reasonable quality camera in our hand as part of our phones. I remember seeing a tourist take photos of about twelve historic plaques. Would he read them when he got home. Surely he wouldn't expect someone else to look at them That would be even worse than my dear Dad's boring slide evenings (one of our family friends curled up and went to sleep as soon as the lights went off.)
Now I have discovered it's so easy to take a photos of a notice or a recipe in a book and I even know one person who takes a photo of the page number where she is up to in a book, Those things will be deleted at some stage perhaps, but what happens to all the photos? Maybe memories .....