Something I find very handy with Google Photos is not only that it stores and displays your photos chronologically, but every few days or so you get a notification saying “Rediscover this day”.
Usually it shows you your photographs you made one year ago, but sometimes it’s five or seven years ago.
I assume that the more photos you have, the more this varies. If you only have a year of photos of course (or less), it has nothing older to show you.
This doesn’t mean you have to have been using Google Photos for that period of time, just that you have uploaded photos taken over this time, as Google Photos goes by the date the photo was made that’s stored in the EXIF data, or that you’ve dated it as manually.
The oldest photo I have is from 2010, made with a camera phone, though I’ve only been using Google Photos consistently to back up new photos since the beginning of 2018.
Anyway, it’s fun seeing what you were shooting a year, three years or five years ago.
This time last year I was using my Lumix LX3 to make close up moody b/w photographs like these.
Regular readers will not that these are not at all dissimilar to the images I’ve been trying to make with my Pentax K30 DSLR this month, and might also question why I’m bothering with a DSLR that’s been challenging to learn, when I could use something like the almost point and shoot compact, the LX3.
It’s a question I ask myself too. More on that in future posts though.
Here’s what I was shooting five years ago.
Experimenting with colour with my Sony NEX and vintage lenses, then processing in LightRoom –
In between shooting film with classic film cameras like the Yashica Electro 35GTN –
Despite falling out of love with colour recently, I really like the colours in both of these. I’m not quite sure how to interpret that either!
How about you? What were you photographing this time a year ago, and five years ago?
Please let us know in the comments below (and don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of new comments via email” box to follow the conversation).
Thanks for looking.
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35hunter 
I don’t use Google Photos, but since it’s the last weekend of July, I know exactly what I shot one year ago and five years ago. The Summer Carnival in Rotterdam is more or less the Dutch equivalent of the London Notting Hill Carnival, and takes place every last Saturday of July. A year ago I was there with an X100, five years ago probably with a mobile or compact camera. Yesterday I was not there – for the first time in years -, given the “photography hiatus”. And I didn’t have the feeling that I was missing anything at all. I do not yet know whether that’s positive (= I can temporarily distance myself from photography) or “disturbing” (= the spark has really disappeared).
I can relate to those feelings Robert. I’ve had it with certain outlets and hobbies in the past.
For example I was intensely into salsa dancing for about four and half years, teaching a couple of nights a week and dancing three or four. I gave up as a trial experiment as I’d lost the enthusiasm plus a connected relationship had ended messily.
I partly expected to return to the dancefloor after a couple of months off. But that was about eight years ago, and I’ve probably only danced about eight times since!
I couldn’t see it happening (for me) with something so fundamental as writing or photography. But you never know.
What I do believe is that creative spark and urge we have will always reappear in a different form, one way or another…
At least, I have the feeling I can now accept that something can end, without detracting from the value and pleasure it has given the past four decades. I’ve always put a lot of energy into photograpy (and all in all quite a bit of money), but now it’s okay when it’s done. I leave my site online, maybe – if I feel like it – with some older, personal favorites added. And then we will see what the future holds.
Yes, that always baffles me about relationships. Perhaps a couple will mutually agree that after 20 years together they no longer feel the same and would like to part. Some observers say “wow, 20 years wasted…” Well, no, not all, if they were happy for 19 years of them, it was time well spent for both of them! Some people seem to think that unless something lasts forever, it’s not worth having at all. Which sounds crazy to me, life is a series of moments!