The Memory Palace

Data study, 2 minutes

How many family photos disappear per decade?

Every family has a box of photos somewhere. Some of it survives, some of it does not. We want to know how much disappears in each decade, and why. Ten short questions, about two minutes.

Anonymous. No account, no email, no cookies. Your answers are used only for this study and published as totals.

From which decades does your family have photos?

Pick all that apply.

Roughly how many paper prints?
Roughly how many slides and negatives?
Roughly how many digital family photos, on all devices together?
Where are they now?

Pick all that apply.

Do you know of family photos that were lost?
How many of the paper photos, slides and negatives are digitised?
Are the people in the photos named, for example on the back, in an album or in a file?
Who in your family keeps most of the photos?

Please leave out names, addresses and phone numbers.

0 of 600 characters

How this study works

Who can answer: anyone with family photos, in any country. The people who answer choose to take part, so the results describe them and not every family. Every total comes with the number of answers behind it.

What we keep: your answers, the language of the page, the date and a coarse source, such as the name of the site that linked here. No name, no email, no IP address and no cookies. To stop floods of fake answers we check a code made from your connection that changes every day and is never stored.

Public sources: we set the answers next to published figures on photo habits, digitisation and data loss, and name the source of every figure.

Publication: totals per question, per decade and per country, in December 2026. Countries with fewer than 30 answers are grouped. Open answers are only quoted without anything that could identify you. The raw answers are deleted by the end of 2027.

Who runs it: The Memory Palace, a small team in Leuven that makes a private palace for family memories.