Go on data diet
Taking photographs in a greener way has nothing to do with the white balance in your settings but has everything to do with your digital footprint. Digital photos and films are increasingly contributing to the huge mountain of dark data taking up storage space worldwide that no one cares about anymore. All that storage does get kept running and guzzles energy. That has quite an impact on the environment. A good resolution for the coming year could be to shed some pounds of data. That’s good for digital waste, your own digital living space and the climate.
CO2 emissions
Analogue photography, with all the romance surrounding it, was never an environmentally friendly process. Both in making the films and developing and printing them, quite a few chemicals were used and at the end you were left with gallons of silver-contaminated waste that had to be disposed of at the waste disposal. For this reason, at the turn of the century, some photographers even managed to switch to digital photography with environmental subsidies. After all, developer, acid stop bath and fixer were no longer needed. As a digital photographer, you had a completely clean process, right? What nobody could have foreseen then was how many digital shots would be taken 20 years later and what the environmental impact would be. We are not so much talking about the energy it takes to take a picture or film with a camera or phone, or even the energy consumed by a computer and monitor during editing. The biggest impact is in what happens to all those billions of images afterwards. It is estimated that 1.6 trillion photos will have been taken by 2023, 90% of which will be taken with smartphones. So that’s 1,600 billion photos or 200 photos for every person on earth, and it’s expected to be even more by 2024. Most of those photos are stored on phones and therefore on Apple or Google personal accounts, somewhere in the mythical cloud. They are sent via WhatsApp to others who also store them again, put online on Tiktok and Instagram for everyone to stream and they are forgotten later, but never deleted. So, all that data is edited, stored, shared, and viewed and it all consumes energy. When we think of CO2 emissions, we mainly think of cars, industry and aviation. But by now, CO2 emissions from data use exceed those from flying, at 3.9 versus 2.5%, and that percentage is also growing. How do we as photographers contribute to this and what can we do about it?
Dark data
As filmmakers and photographers, we produce large files. A 60-megapixel jpeg from a Sony A7R V is already 18 megabytes, a raw file effortlessly over 80 megabytes. Shooting 1 second in raw plus jpeg at the highest speed of 10 frames per second yields just 1 Gigabyte of data. Filming is even more data-intensive. Initially, that data ends up on computers and internal or external hard drives or NAS systems. But we end up taking all that footage in order to share it. This can be done via e-mails, or – for larger files – via FTP servers or services like WeTransfer. Another option for sharing files is via cloud services like Dropbox and Box. Larger organizations often work with these types of services, as they make files accessible to the right users anywhere in the world. We also put photos and films online on social media like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and make backups with cloud services like Backblaze. So, all that data is stored on servers. The big problem with that is that, unlike physical data in the shape of drawers of paper documents, cabinets of prints or boxes of films, this data takes up no visible space and therefore hardly ever gets cleaned up. A 2021 study by the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET)on data use among Britons led to a figure of 355,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions from photos alone that were no longer needed. That’s more CO2 than you would get if you had everyone from a town of over 112,000 people flying up and down from London to Australia. The World Economic Forum estimates that of all the data that is kept, more than half is never used again. Other estimates on keeping old data go as high as 70%. All that superfluous data stored endlessly, and consuming energy is called dark data. It is estimated that some 1.3 trillion Gigabytes of dark data is produced every day. Data centers and cloud services have little interest in limiting this or alerting customers to all this redundant storage because it is their revenue model. As consumers or small users, we also do not readily consider the hidden costs of data use. Often, we do not pay directly for storage or uploading. Instagram, Tiktok, a Google Drive or iCloud Drive or a starter package at Dropbox or WeTransfer are all free. Viewing movies and photos on social media or sending and receiving files doesn’t really cost anything either, except for the cost of an internet connection or an unlimited data plan for your phone. We are all happy about that. At the same time, though, there is growing opposition to the arrival of data centers, which generate few jobs and try to take a disproportionate share of sustainably generated power, in order to pretend to be green. Those data centers also use a lot of water for cooling. In the Netherlands, about 3 to 4% of all power already goes to data centers and network operator Tennet expects this to grow to 6.5% by 2030. To make us more conscious of our data consumption, Marleen Stikker, founder of the Dutch Waag/Futurelab and a pacesetter in the field of experimental internet and new media since the early 1990s, therefore already launched the term ‘data shame’, analogous to flight shame.
A few simple actions can make a lot of difference to your data consumption.
What can you do?
To avoid suffering from data shame, you can do a few simple things that can make quite a difference to the data obesity we all suffer from. This will save storage space and energy and perhaps also ensure that space is restored to your Google Drive or your Dropbox and that all the indulgences or opinions of your ten-year-younger self, which you may not want to be reminded of now, are no longer online. Based on the 2021 study, the IET formulated some recommendations that are actually even more topical now, three years later, than they were then:
– Ditch your duplicates: Of course, it is good practice to take multiple photos of a scene. But then pick the best one and delete the rest.
– Clean up your cloud: Regularly discard files that are no longer current. This will not only give you back storage space, but also help the environment.
– Delete your WhatsApps: Do you really still need all those WhatsApps, Signals or other messages from five or 10 years ago? Pick out the messages that really still have value and delete the rest. Then also think about whether you still need to be in all those app groups and whether you still want to get messages from everything? Unsubscribe if that is no longer the case.
– Video-free day: If there is no need to turn on the camera for a Zoom meeting or a WhatsApp conversation, leave it off. This also saves a lot of data.
– Select a screen: If you are watching TV or streaming a series on a laptop, turn off your phone and other screens. If you play music on YouTube, choose Audio-only if you’re just listening anyway.
– Deactivate Auto-play: Turn off the ‘Auto play next episode’ feature in your streaming service and activate the sleep timer if you use your phone or a screen late at night to fall asleep with.
We can add a few tips, specifically for photographers and filmmakers. Indeed, you may not need to save everything. But if you still like to keep every version of your shots also – or especially – in raw, put them on a hard disk and then store them. This will not only prevent your archive from short-circuiting together with your computer in the event of a lightning strike, but also prevent the drive from consuming energy 24 hours a day. Also deal sparingly with backup space in the cloud, through services like Backblaze, for example. If you need a backup, it’s nice if it’s not too big. That way you avoid spending a week or more downloading to get your important files back, simply because there are also so many unimportant images among them. So online, go for 2 terabytes rather than 20. For phones, consider turning off the auto-save function, even though that creates other risks, and only upload worthwhile recordings to your Drive.
concluding
Unknowingly, while photographing and filming, we are all contributing significantly to climate change, simply because of the huge numbers of recordings we take, share and store online. We don’t have to take fewer photos or films. But by being just a little more conscious about what we share, store and view, we can already make a big difference. Just eat that yummy snack in January and lose weight with a data diet!
Those interested in learning more about data use can watch the episode What’s holding us back?/Sustainable Data on NPO Start. The programme served as a source for this article. (the programme is in Dutch, as Focus Magazine is a Dutch magazine).
This article was previously published in Focus Magazine 8-2024 https://focusmagazine.nl
All photographs: Data centres of Google and Microsoft in Middenmeer, Municipality of Hollands Kroon along the A7. Photos: Kenneth Stamp
