It was when I bought my third hard drive that it dawned on me that we’re all taking way too many photos!

I have just purchased my third 2TB hard drive, there are over 44,000 images on my Google Photos account, and I have 10 rolls of film waiting to be developed. Even as a content creator/photographer, I’m starting to think that we are all taking too many photos.

Every day, around 5.3 billion photos are taken, that’s 61,000 per second. There isn’t an event that isn’t photographed, whether it's the big ones, weddings, birthdays, holidays, etc., or the small, mundane happenings that no longer go uncaptured, funny graffiti on the back of a toilet door, what you ate for lunch, or a cute dog you pass on the street.

We reach for our phones so instinctively, we rarely stop to consider the elements that once defined a good photograph - lighting, composition, even where the image will end up. Once upon a time, when film cameras ruled and photography felt more precious, photos would end up in albums, meticulously documented and manually stuck into pages so they could be looked at and loved for years to come.

There was romance in the tactile world of physical photography, a kind of magic born from the hours spent shooting, developing, and curating. But digital photography rarely allows for this sort of intimacy; nowadays, a select few might make it to ‘the gram’, but the majority languish on phones, in the cloud, or stored on hard drives, never to be looked at or thought about again.

A big reason we take so many photos is that it’s easy. When someone asks you to take a photo, you take several in the hopes that one of them is ok. And if it isn’t, you do it all again. Camera reels are no longer individual snapshots into someone's life, but a series of burst photos from a single moment. All taken in the quest for perfection, and it makes you wonder, are we living for the photo or the moment?

In the last few years, we’ve seen more nightclubs decide to ban phones from the dancefloor, a refreshing movement that signifies undocumented experiences are still sought after. These sacred phone-free spaces are a welcome break from the endless demands of social media posting. After all, if social media didn’t exist, we surely wouldn’t be taking quite as many photos.

I remember travelling through Southeast Asia, feeling incensed by the number of cameras, phones, and drones I encountered at every beautiful landmark. Hordes of people waited in queues to take the same photo that so many people before and after them had taken. I thought, how boring. But, should I wait too? Would I regret not having the postcard-perfect picture of me in front of the temples of Angkor Wat or the famous Maya Bay (the one used in DiCaprio’s 2001 film, The Beach)? And the sad but honest answer is yes, I probably would’ve done.

Of course, we want to document our lives; we want to be able to show people the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen, but there is something beautiful about the moments we only capture with our eyes. Those memories are just for you!

Perhaps if I can take my own advice, I won’t have to buy a fourth 2TB hard drive anytime soon.