This news came with a new default storage limit: 1,000 photos. Users could begin paying or take the rest elsewhere. A digital photo first uploaded to Yahoo at the turn of the century, in other words, when most people online were still dialing in to get there, and not once again rescued this year, may finally meet its demise. It would have had a better run than most.

And here it is, almost 2019. Do you know where your photos are?

Most of us don’t, at least not exactly, or in terms that we fully understand. Holding on to pictures was, for most of the history of photography, a matter of material decay and physical storage. Are these prints fading, and how fast? Are they organized by year or by subject? Do I know where they are?

To the people who took them, they were deeply valuable; to anyone else, mostly worthless. Their peculiar sort of pricelessness made archivists of regular people.

The problem of what to do with ballooning digital photo collections, on the other hand, is perhaps the great unsolved tech support question of the last 30 years. In retrospect, well-intentioned guidance reads like a manual for the obliteration of memory. Hard drives die unpredictably. If you could produce a Zip drive in 2018, it would likely regurgitate whatever you fed it. CDs and DVDs rot, it turns out.

The first services that beckoned us to what was not yet widely known as the cloud set the tone for what was to come. At the turn of the century a site called Zing promised, in a first, “free unlimited online storage” for photos. By the end of 2001, its home page had been replaced with an apology letter.