Overview
Snapshots is a visual archive spanning over a decade of personal on-the-go photography. It preserves moments captured and shared across Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram from 2011 through 2023.
The collection captures a single lens across a particular arc of time: personal observations, places visited, people met, and small details worth preserving. Rather than let these images scatter across defunct platform archives, this collection gathers them in one place.
Why I Kept It
At some point, most of us realise that the platforms where we share our lives can disappear, change ownership, or become inaccessible. Tumblr and Instagram served as my primary visual journals back then, but relying solely on their infrastructure felt precarious. This project became an exercise in intentional curation and preservation, taking photos from across those years and storing them somewhere I could control, where they'd remain accessible and visible.
Why It Matters To Me
Not everything worth preserving needs to be polished or production-ready. Sometimes the value is simply in the continuity: the fact that you looked at the world this way, on this particular day, in this particular way.
It's also a practical argument for owning your own content. These images exist because I chose to preserve them myself, not because an algorithm determined they were valuable enough to promote.
Looking back at how I used to use platforms like Instagram to intentionally capture moments of gratitude also serves to remind me of how things have changed in the social media landscape, and maybe serves as motivation to get back to some of those simpler roots.
It's also interesting to look back at the global pandemic and the images I took at that time.
Looking Back
This project represents a small act of digital preservation—taking a decade of moments and ensuring they remain visible and accessible. It's not earth-shattering work, but it's the kind of infrastructure that matters when you want to own your own history.
