Do you know where your photos from 20 years ago are? 

The big social network of the day was MySpace. Theoretically it still exists, but a botched server migration in 2015 led to the loss of most user data – over 12 years of content – so if you were hoping to find your Christmas 2005 photos there, you’re out of luck. 

Flickr was at the height of its popularity in 2005 but if you were on a free plan, it was strictly limited in the number of photos you could upload. Free storage limits have varied substantially over the years, and unless you’ve kept a close eye on account limits, it’s entirely possible that many of your photos have since been deleted to keep you within the storage quota. 

Photobucket was another big player in 2005. And much like Flickr, storage limits have varied over the years. But unlike Flickr, Photobucket seems not to have deleted photos that breached free storage limits. Good news? Well, possibly – because Photobucket will give you a download link for your old photos if you reactivate your account and become a paid subscriber. But a trawl through old Reddit threads, while mostly positive, suggests there are some gaps in the archive. 

FaceBook? Well, FaceBook in 2005 was much smaller than it is today. If you were a college or university student in the USA – possibly you had an account. If you were a normal punter in the UK, you had probably never heard of it. 

So where does that leave us? The concept of unlimited cloud photo storage didn’t really exist in 2005. Dropbox camera uploads started in 2012. Google started offering the same service in 2015. So that’s another bust.

Most likely in 2005, your photos existed on CDs, memory cards, hard drives, maybe even floppy discs. Do you still have all your data from then? Do you have an unbroken chain of backups or transfers from one computer to the next, covering a period of two decades? 

Thankfully I do. It probably helps that I studied information management at university so I learned the importance of building and maintaining archives very early. When I started using ACDSee PhotoStudio to manage my photos in 2016, I was able to migrate all of my digital photos into a single, easily managed database, backed up to multiple locations. A few years later I digitised the majority of my old film photos. They are now in the same database, and the result is a photographic archive dating back to my early childhood. Yes, I do know how lucky I am.

And where are my photos from 20 years ago? Well, that’s some of them there at the top of the page. Happy Christmas!