by Jason Snell
Grief and a Photo Shuffle
Charlie Warzel’s beloved dog died last year, and he used an iPhone feature to memorialize her:
Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.
Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus.
Not only do I empathize with Warzel’s situation (we lost a beloved dog in August 2022), but as I wrote about last year, my wife and I also recently started using the Photo Shuffle feature that was introduced with iOS 16… and it’s pretty powerful.
Not a week goes by where my wife doesn’t show me one of the pictures of our kids (her phone is set to shuffle through photos in which either of our children’s faces has been identtified) that have surfaced on her phone’s lock screen. We’ve taken tens of thousands of photos of these children over two decades, and while many photos are familiar (the ones that we’ve printed out and framed, or put on calendars, or added to a Favorites list), the vast majority of them have largely gone unseen, filed away in an infinite iCloud Photo Library filing cabinet.
One of the magical thing about Photo Shuffle is that those obscure photos also keep floating to the top. They’re not necessarily the best or most polished, but they’re surprising and delightful.
Warzel writes that iOS has “taught me how to grieve,” and while I haven’t used Photo Shuffle to grapple with that particular emotion, just a few weeks after our dog died, our youngest child went off to college and we officially became empty nesters. I suppose the Photo Shuffle is filling a particular (but different) emotional need for us, too.