This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a bit. There is a ton of media that includes unimportant information that doesn’t need to be stored pixel perfect. Storing large portions of the image data as text will save substantial amounts of storage, and as the reality of on-device image generation becoming commonplace sets in digital memories will become the main way people capture the world around them. I think this will inevitably be the next form of media capture (photography and video), not replacing other methods/ formats, but I could see things like phone cameras having saving images as digital memories set to default to save on storage.
I mean… that’s gonna fuck with people’s memory. And what of the software that provides this service? What things will it decide aren’t important? A child playing in the background? A beautiful sunset that should be remembered as it was.
I think it’s an interesting idea, but the power it takes to make this happen every time you view the image and the wild inaccuracy that would inevitably happen would create significantly more problems than just improving image compression or investing time in increasing the capacity of existing storage devices.
Realistically, in the future we won’t have to worry at all about our disk space. It’s almost to that point already. My NAS is way more than I’ll ever use, and it was pretty cheap.