The Case for Leaving Strangers in Your Family Photos
I first heard about Magic Eraser—the feature within Google Photos that lets you crop out errant strangers, stray trash cans, or anything else in a frame that makes it look less than perfect—when my husband, an Android user, texted me a beloved image of our daughter that he’d just edited. In the photo, J. is emerging from an amusement park ride at the local pumpkin festival, jazzed out of her ever-loving mind. In the new version, the ash-blond stranger wearing suede boots who got off the ride just behind J., and who had been gracing our fridge since we printed the photo out and put it up a couple years ago, was gone.
Once I knew Magic Eraser existed, I started seeing the concept mentioned everywhere. A pediatrician I follow on Instagram shared a few family Disney pics, with and without the strangers who were walking between their group and Cinderella’s Castle at the time of the snap. I also found out that Reddit has long operated a board where you can post pics and ask people to erase strangers, or any other unwanted objects, using Photoshop, for a small fee. Magic Eraser was just automating this function.
I first heard about Magic Eraser—the feature within Google Photos that lets you crop out errant strangers, stray trash cans, or anything else in a frame that makes it look less than perfect—when my husband, an Android user, texted me a beloved image of our daughter that he’d just edited. In the photo, J. is emerging from an amusement park ride at the local pumpkin festival, jazzed out of her ever-loving mind. In the new version, the ash-blond stranger wearing suede boots who got off the ride just behind J., and who had been gracing our fridge since we printed the photo out and put it up a couple years ago, was gone.
Once I knew Magic Eraser existed, I started seeing the concept mentioned everywhere. A pediatrician I follow on Instagram shared a few family Disney pics, with and without the strangers who were walking between their group and Cinderella’s Castle at the time of the snap. I also found out that Reddit has long operated a board where you can post pics and ask people to erase strangers, or any other unwanted objects, using Photoshop, for a small fee. Magic Eraser was just automating this function.
My most Andy Rooney opinion, at least since the latest flare-up of the sleepover debate (I’m pro), is that we should not erase strangers from our family pictures. My original nuclear family’s albums, which my mother maintained in those classic 1980s scrapbooks with self-adhesive pages, annotating each image in her distinctive handwriting, are absolutely, positively chock-full of randos. When I was in elementary school, I loved to look at these pictures, hauling out two albums at a time and paging through them at our kitchen table. It was a time when I was becoming acutely aware of the difference between our family and others—not in a bad way, but in an interested one. We lived in a small town, and our family vacations gave us information about how things were elsewhere. I wasn’t going to pass up analyzing those clues.
As a parent, I have read advice about the good effects that looking at family photos can have on kids. (It’s sometimes given by the kinds of people who want to sell you family portraits). The advice goes like this: Keep family photos around so that your child knows they are a part of a bigger story, and they will develop a sense of belonging, become more psychologically stable, and generally be happier. That was probably one thing that was happening to me during my album-looking days. But the strangers? The strangers taught me something different.
Read More Here: Slate
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