Photo diary · Onestill
Does taking photos hurt your memory of a moment?
Sometimes. In Linda Henkel's 2014 museum study, people remembered fewer objects and fewer details when they photographed them than when they only looked. The effect is not fixed, though. Zooming in on a detail removed it, and later research found that taking photos can sharpen memory for what you see while weakening memory for what you hear.
What the museum study found
The question got its name from a study by psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University, published in Psychological Science in 2014. Students were led on a guided tour of the Bellarmine Museum of Art and asked to take note of certain objects, either by photographing them or by simply looking at them. The next day their memory was tested.
Henkel called the result a photo-taking-impairment effect. When participants photographed an object as a whole, they remembered fewer objects, fewer details about them, and less about where they were in the museum than when they had only observed them. In the press release from the Association for Psychological Science she put it simply: the mind's eye and the camera's eye are not the same.
Her explanation was about reliance. Counting on the camera to record the event, she said, means people may not attend to it fully themselves, and that can hurt how well they remember the experience.
Why zooming in changed the result
The second study in the same paper is the more useful one. This time some participants were asked to zoom in and photograph a specific part of an object. For them, memory was not impaired. Even features of the object that were outside the zoomed frame were remembered as well as the parts they had photographed.
Henkel's reading was that the extra attention needed to choose a detail and frame it was enough to cancel the effect. In other words, the camera itself was not the problem. Pointing it at something without really looking was.
Photos can sharpen what you see and dull what you hear
A 2017 paper in Psychological Science by Alixandra Barasch, Kristin Diehl, Jackie Silverman and Gal Zauberman complicated the picture. In one experiment, 294 participants toured a real museum exhibit of Etruscan artifacts while listening to an audio guide. Those with a camera could photograph anything they wanted and were told to take at least 10 photos.
People who could take photos later recognized more of what they had seen, but remembered less of what the audio guide had told them, compared with people who had no camera. The authors note that this held even without revisiting any photos, so the boost did not come from reviewing pictures.
The most telling detail: participants who believed their photos would be deleted, and those who were only told to mentally take a photo, showed the same pattern. Having a camera in hand seems to steer attention toward the visual side of an experience and away from the rest of it.
Is it offloading, or just looking away?
If people forget because they trust the camera to remember for them, then photos that disappear should not hurt memory. A 2018 study by UC Santa Cruz researcher Julia Soares tested exactly that. Participants took a virtual museum tour of paintings and either just looked, took pictures with a phone camera, or took pictures with Snapchat, where images last only seconds.
The photo-takers consistently scored worse, by as much as 20 percent, on multiple choice tests about what they had seen. Even the Snapchat group remembered less. Soares attributed this to attentional disengagement: stepping out of a moment to take a picture leaves you less focused on what is in front of you. Her advice was not to stop taking photos, but to be mindful about deciding when you do it.
What photos do for enjoyment
Memory is only part of the story. In a 2016 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kristin Diehl, Gal Zauberman and Alixandra Barasch ran nine experiments with more than 2,000 participants, in settings such as a bus tour and a food court. In almost every case, people who took photographs reported enjoying the experience more.
There were limits. Taking photos did not add enjoyment for people who were already actively taking part in the activity, and it had no positive effect when the camera got in the way, such as bulky equipment. For unpleasant experiences, photographing made things feel worse. The common thread was engagement: a camera helps when it pulls you further into what you are doing.
Common mistakes, and what to do instead
Shooting on reflex. Henkel described people whipping out their cameras almost mindlessly. Look first, decide what actually caught your eye, then take the picture.
Photographing everything. The zoom result suggests that choosing one detail is a form of attention. Fewer, deliberate photos are closer to that than a burst of twenty. Forgetting to listen. If a conversation, a guide or music matters to you, remember that a camera tends to pull attention toward the visual.
Never looking again. Henkel noted that the sheer volume and lack of organization of digital photos discourages many people from going back to them, and that to remember, we have to access and interact with the photos rather than just amass them. A small, regular habit of picking and revisiting photos does more than a large archive. A one-photo-a-day diary such as Onestill is built around that idea: it keeps a single photo for each day with a short caption, and lays the month out as a film strip you can look back over.
Frequently asked questions
What is the photo-taking-impairment effect?
It is the finding, first reported by Linda Henkel in 2014, that people remember objects less well when they photograph them than when they only observe them. Later studies have replicated it but also found conditions that weaken or reverse it.
Does taking a picture help you remember it later?
It depends on what you need to remember. Barasch and colleagues found camera users recognized more of what they saw but recalled less of what they heard. Henkel found that photographing whole objects hurt memory, while zooming in on a detail did not.
Does it matter if I never look at the photos again?
In the 2017 studies the visual memory boost appeared even without participants revisiting any photos. For using photos as a memory aid later, though, Henkel argues you have to go back and interact with them rather than just collect them.
Do disappearing photos, like Snapchat, have the same effect?
In Julia Soares's 2018 study they did. People who took pictures with Snapchat, where images last only seconds, still remembered less than people who simply looked.