23Mar11 | Project Visuals

My use of Instagram

Something I’ve wanted to do for months now is my own small photo documenting service.

I’m mainly into sharing photos for the “documentation” aspect of it.

What helped shape this purpose was a year-off from Instagram I did around 2017.

Back then I remember I was disgusted by the idea of having to maintain a standard for a profile on a photo sharing service; like everything has to be neatly selected, no randoms.

Partly because this approach rips it of the “time” dimension. We pay so much attention to how a photo is taken as opposed to why the photo is taken.

For me, the most important part of any photo is the timestamp. When exactly was this photo taken?

When I returned back to Instagram, I was documenting my life by just snapping random photos of the sky, each of which I remember when & why I took! I even remember the state I was in during capturing each of them. The main goal.

This, back then, was an over-simplified version of what I now believe how I want to be using Instagram. Until march 2020, when I first posted an image that is not taken by me.

Since then, I’ve been interested in the way most celebrities use Instagram for dumps.

And I think that’s what Instagram mostly fits in: Here’s a dump of things I’ve seen, places I’ve been at, or people I’ve been with. Minimal effort, good for social sharing, easy to document what’s happening in your life.

I shared a primer about the idea, around 2 years ago:

I have been using instagram since its first week, when we were sharing overexposed photos through instagram's built-in filters. Over the past 4-5 years, I went through two big shifts, in chronological order:
From using instagram for highlighting to using instagram for documenting
From documenting heavily-selected stuff to documenting barely-selected snapshots
This second shift made using the app a thousand times easier: Zero-overhead, zero-thinking & zero-justification goes into posting stuff. I go by in real life & I take photos of moments I want to remember then I favorite some of those in iOS then I post when I feel like posting something. If anything I'm primarily doing it for my future-self and maybe my kids would find it fun many years from now.
Imo this idea of "snapshot" dumping may be the best thing that happened to the app. You went from highlighting too many meaningless stuff to documenting snapshots that you believe can withstand time, and with stories that can still resonate many years from now.

History of photo sharing with respect to time

The “time” aspect is what easily attracts me in any photo sharing service I use. Over the history, there were 4 different services that were trying to achieve more or less the same thing, each of which I liked some things about:

Snapchat Memories

I briefly returned to Snapchat during the Covid days and I was blown away by its automated monthly summaries – It felt like a reward for using the app

Instagram Stories Archive

Something I still use once or twice per week – It’s literally a calendar that has your photos on top of it – easy time travel! My perfect description for an interface I would like to browse to recall my moments, and my favorite part of the app

Timehop App

This used to be popular around the time when we were all using Retrica (remember?) – It grabs your social posts (FB, IG & Twitter) from the same day, through the years. So a summary view of everything you posted on March 11th 2022, 21, 20, etc

BeReal App

I briefly played with it through late 2022, and it was the main inspiration for me to be interested in the “One photo per day” practice. I found it so rewarding to document one live snapshot per day. A snapshot that eliminates the need to take a hundred perfect photos for you to remember the day. Our brains can hold massive amounts of information; they just need an identifier, a hook, through which they can use to recall finer details

Project V

Late 2022 I wrote some scripts that do the exact functionality I want: iOS favs → to my website. And then one month later, I came across this great article: Documenting a Life, One Photo at a Time

💡 As a summary, here are some insights that sticked:

Instead of trying to capture a day in dozens of photos and videos, I made a conscious choice to document each and every day with a single photo. I was aware of the photo I was choosing: its place, moment and beauty combined with the story of my day. I was trying to say something in sharing.
Adding photos contributed a level of beauty and intimacy to the data points. The maps, steps and heart beats overlaid these daily photos to create a story. My moment in time in a past, a place and numbers.
We can’t ignore photos. In fact, the photos we take and share are crucial aspect of creating and documenting a life. Photos, especially as an act of conscious creation and curation, are important expression of the meaningful and the beautiful.
There are so many areas that come with quantification and with numbers. But photos fail as a numerical expression alone. But if we expand the idea of a quantified self and think about these data points as part of a larger effort to paint a complete picture of one’s life, then the fuzziness of life, its words, photos and patterns matter.
Combined with other data points, my day’s weeks and months taken on a new perspective. I’m able to not only have the cold facts but have the abstract textures and colors of these past days. To borrow an idea from Harry Potter, these photos provide a kind of ansible for pulling back the threads of past moments and memories. This habit of taking and crafting one picture a day has also turned into my daily dose of beauty and meaning. You can’t help but become more positive about life when you consciously choose to focus on it.

These words provided a better interpretation for the concept in my blogpost from 2 years ago, but put 100x more beautifully. I never thought someone could explain it this clear – This, the above, is exactly why I’m into the Quantified Self practice in general, and documenting my life one photo at a time in particular.