Photography dates from 1827 (see Dr. Robert Leggat's History of Photography site). I don't think anyone knows how many millions of photos have been taken, but I can testify from personal experience that there are a LOT of photos in the world, probably BILLIONS!
In the early days, it took time to develop an image. The emulsions were expensive and hard to produce. By the 20th century, film and cameras became a consumer product, and even rank amateurs could take high-quality photos.
As we crossed into this century, digital cameras started to emerge. We can now produce an almost unlimited number of high and moderate-quality images. Cell phone cameras remain rudimentary in their quality and resolution. There may be 300 million "image capture devices" working this year (see a WSD article by Andrew Burt). Figure each takes 50 images per year--that is another 15 billion images to file, store, and review.
We'll worry about the new images, another time. (E.g., how will we process them, how do we handle them economically, how can we expand EXIF to make it help us track image use, etc.) For the moment, let's worry about the old images. There is a thriving market for "art photos." Some old prints trade for thousands of dollars. Like the Renaissance masters who used dyes and surfaces that we can no longer reproduce, these images are probably timeless and irreplaceable.
But what about more ordinary images by more ordinary artists? For practical purposes, I have divided the old image world into three categories:
1. Images that are timeless and beautiful. My company, Index Stock, has a lot of images in its files that were taken 5 years, 10 years, or even 50 years ago. Whether in color or black and white, whether on 35mm film or a glass negative, some of these images will continue to speak to people, forever. They may not be collectible in an art sense. (Often the artist who created them is long gone and regrettably forgotten.) But, they have commercial and emotional value that argues for them to continue being promoted, viewed, and hopefully used in current works of art and design.
2. Images that record something important. Our file has a few wonderful old images of New York City's Grand Central Station. They may be art. They definitely are history. We have images of construction workers and of little girls in curls, dressed up for their baby photo. Remember the 70s? The hairstyles, the dress? It would be a shame to lose these slices of what life was like, in the past.
(This links shows our modern photos of Grand Central.)
(This links shows some of our photos from the 1970s.)
3. The rest. Unfortunately, there are a lot of images that aren't in either of the above categories. We may always be uncertain which ones they are. Your high school snapshot of a bunch of guys hanging out at the pizza place could have John Kerry in the background! Your photo of a neighborhood that has been destroyed or a social group that has been assimilated could help a future historian or ethnographer make sense of a whole era. But, face it, 99.9999% of all photos taken will never be of interest to anyone other than the person who took them and his or her close family and friends.
If I am right, we should keep the beautiful images and important images, and throw out the rest. I'm sure some will disagree with me, but how else can we make room for the new? Keep anything that appeals to you, for any reason, but put the rest out to pasture.
Storing them in the basement (or on a CD) is not the same thing as throwing them out. A future generation will find them and feel guilty about discarding them. They won't know that the picture is of Uncle Dan and that he really wasn't that nice to you, anyway. They won't realize there is a much better picture in the family album and that he hated this shot, when you showed it to him.
To put it another way. My company gets offered the chance to buy collections of old images, all the time. We don't do it. The cost and energy needed far outweighs the economic value we could capture by marketing the images. We currently have more than 650,000 images in our on-line collection. I think that could grow to one million in a few years, but only if several hundred thousand of our current images move out of the way.
Even commercial artists who have invested thousands of dollars in their images, need to be ruthless in their housecleaning. Pruning is good for roses. (For proof, please see this article by the American Rose Society.) Yes, you might be throwing away a priceless moment or an Ansel Adams print, that got mixed into the pile somehow. But, you will be making room for great new images that you will enjoy for years.
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