Lead
Six years into parenthood, it is not unusual to have more than 30,000 photos on your phone. Three thousand to five thousand a year, roughly 10 to 15 a day — not because anyone is deliberately overdoing it, but because that is simply what steady, attentive documentation looks like [note: domestic photo-volume estimates based on author observation; see translator notes].
The problem that emerges from this accumulation is a strange one: you took the photo, and now you can't find it. You know the day. You remember the location. But extracting one image from 30,000 is harder than it sounds.
The technology of taking photos has become universal in family life over the last 20 years. The technology of finding them afterward has not kept up. This article is about that gap — between volume and retrievability.