Changed perspective on taking photos

I thought it'd be interesting to note my changed perspective about taking photos (of people, of trips). For the majority of my life, I subscribed to the idea that taking photos wasn't very Buddhist (to put it shortly), because you weren't living in the moment or seeing things with your own eyes. So I'd almost never take pictures of things, even of things that were pretty meaningful to me or very photo worthy. 

What changed is that I traveled solo for so long that I saw so much stuff that it was clear that a lot of memories will get lost if you don't take photos. It's not that 100% of the memory is stored in the photo. It's that you retain large portions of the memory deep in your mind somewhere, but you do need the photos to jog said memory. What also changed is that from traveling solo I started to realize that life is much longer than I thought it was, and so if life is that long you end up forgetting a lot of stuff, so it's really nice to have the photos to, again, jog your memory. I guess that's to say I shouldn't have been so judgemental of "older people" always being so eager to take photos at every moment, whereas I had seen myself as perhaps somehow arrogantly or smugly wiser than people years my elder by practicing what I thought was a greater degree of mindfulness. 

Here's the thing, though. I still don't let trips and events get consumed by taking the perfect photo. I kind of just do the "snap and run" thing, even if the photo is a little bit blurry. I'd still rather make time to experience to moment. But also maybe I should take some photography classes because a lot of these photos suck. I'm not sure how to balance these things out. 

I will say this. I love that AI and the falling cost curve of data storage totally increased your productivity on taking photos. Since it's so good at sorting your photos into timelines and search boxes, and also if you have duplicate photos it's just not important to delete them anymore. And the best feature that Google Photos etc. seem to harbor is that they surface these "memories" string of photos at the top of their apps each day. So you get to benefit from the nostalgia of a bunch of happy memories. In fact remembering happy things in your past is a free and extremely easy way to boost your day to day happiness, and I do think that is a Buddhist technique that has been described before. Especially if you're doing good or compassionate deeds in your past. So yeah, I guess taking photos is just a human thing to do!