'no storage:' the curse of the endless camera roll

miss Taylor Swift asks, “are there still beautiful things?” and the answer is yes: over on my instagram

If you’re like me (and I know a lot of you are), you will have, at any given time, around 60,000 photos in your camera roll, and will be no stranger to the ‘no storage’ notification. Often, it will get to the point where my camera app will decide to not even open its lens: it is stuffed full - chocka - pleading me to not force feed it another picture of the sunset. 

When it gets to this point, I back everything up to my Google photos account (which I pay a steep $17.99 a month for), and then delete them off my phone so I can start the cycle all over again.

If you asked me what I was doing on any day of the year, I could go back and tell you where I was, thanks to my photographic evidence. What was the name of the opening act of the gig we went to 3 years ago on 23rd of March? Don’t worry - I’ll have a photo of the poster. How come you weren’t at that party again? Let me check the roll - I appear to have 7 photos of me crying in my room and sadly holding a Lemsip: that would have been when I had covid. 

People ask why I do this. I think some people tend to think it is a habit born out of vanity or a need for attention, which is understandable - when you take lots of pictures of your life, especially if you share them online, it can look like you are trying to show off. I get it - it’s not very ‘mysterious girl’ of me to make 3 carousel posts and a TikTok of my trip every time I leave my suburb.

It’s not very lowkey of me to post a video compilation of each time I’ve cried over the past 8 months.

It’s not very ‘chill girl’ of me to take a picture of everything I have ever found on the ground while walking to the bus stop.

But something compels me to take a photo of every person, place, and thing I’ve ever loved, as well as everything else I find funny, delicious, heart-wrenching, entertaining, random, or beautiful. I like to be able to look at my life and hold it in the palm of my hand.

I fear losing everything, ever

When I was in high school, perusing Tumblr.com like every other teenage girl without a fully formed frontal lobe, I found a quote that I’ll never forget.

"If you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph."

As my camera roll doubles and triples itself, it has become extremely obvious to me that one fact is undeniably true: I fear losing literally everything ever. 

This first became clear to me during a therapy session, when I asked my therapist why I am so terrified of dying (a classic, amirite ladies?!). She then revealed to me that the reason I feel like I am constantly running out of time is probably because I have been taught from a young age that life can be short. I was someone who learnt as a child that people I love have ongoing and dangerous health issues, and thus I have been waiting for everyone around me to potentially fall off the face of the earth at any given point in time, including myself. As my mum’s health issues intensified, my need to hold on to the life around me did too. 

Since then, my simple human brain has been doing what the simple human brain does best - picking one thing that falsely gives us a sense of control over our own mortality, and running with it.

Some people hyper-fixate on controlling their diet, their physical appearance, or the tidiness of their house, but I hyperfixate on my Instagram feed to feel like I have any sense of control at all. It’s been an uncertain few years (as everyone on earth likes to point out), and I’d be willing to bet there are a lot of people like me out there who document their life just to feel like they actually own it. Especially in a world where we didn’t know how much longer we’d have to enjoy things; where going to parties, picnics, concerts, birthdays, and simply seeing the light of day and our friends’ faces could all go away in a heartbeat, this is very understandable. You can take away events, but you can never take away the photographs. Like a child scribbling graffiti on a playground, we all have the innate desire to proclaim to the world, “____ waz here.”

The things I am terrified to lose and the things I am so grateful have, are two sides of the same coin. By reframing taking photos as gratitude practice, I can change clinging to to cherishing, and I can rebrand obsessing over to reminiscing on. It’s not lost on me that pictures are “photography” when men take them and “trivial and vain social capital” when women take them, but if Kim Kardashian can publish a coffee table book of her selfies, I can post a photo dump of myself having a good time with my friends and family and not feel silly for doing it. 

There’s been a lot of discourse about social media only being “someone’s highlight reel,” and therefore an ‘inauthentic’ facet of their lives. While this can be true, it’s nothing we don’t do all day long. When we get dressed up, and put on a brave face, and try to be charming at the dinner table without crying, we are also only showing the world our “highlight reel.” People are trying to show themselves in the best light possible, it’s what we do. It’s easy to forget that social media is exactly what we called it - a medium. Something we use to be human somewhere else. And so the key is not to take photos to try and convince other people your life is good; but to take photos to remind yourself that it really, truly is. 

I no longer feel guilty for my camera roll - I reframe. I visualise my social media as a pinboard in my room; it’s there for guests to see as they please - but it is full of photos for me, photos I take not to capture and hold my life down, but to celebrate it. Not a strategic culling of the bad memories, but a monument erected to celebrate my favourite ones. 

My body Instagram is a temple and I leave it offerings of the slices of my life I enjoy the most. Miss Taylor Swift asks, “Are there still beautiful things?” And the answer is yes: over on my Instagram.

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who wrote this?

Bryer Oden is a writer based in Wellington, NZ. She loves to use her Master’s in Linguistics and BA in Media Studies to focus on the way we use language online. Her passions are body politics, pop culture, food, and feeling nostalgic about Tumblr in 2014. You can find her being chronically online in the following places: @healthsensation on Instagram & Tiktok for Food recs, Cheap CBD Lunches and Scone Reviews, or

Bryer Oden

on Substack and Instagram for more writing xxx

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