So I'm a sentimentalist and a digital hoarder who is particularly OCD about original photos & videos.

Last year, I wrote an email to Apple's SVP of Software to point out a common, real-world problem that comes up every time a group of friends get together:

Hey Craig [Federighi],

The iPhone is the best and most popular camera on the planet…yet sharing photos & videos in full quality with friends & family is so hard! I wish sharing full-quality photos/videos was as easy as sending stickers to a group chat in iMessage.

I was recently on a trip to Hawaii with a dozen of my childhood friends. 10 of us had iPhones and 2 had Samsungs. We’re all taking photos, with plenty of candid shots, great group shots, and just living the moment. But when we wanted to share each other's best photos on Facebook, we were faced with several options that all have downsides:

• Send over iMessage — but then everyone receives a downscaled version of each photo and video.

• Send via AirDrop — (my Samsung friends were getting a jealous about this, lol) but AirDrop assumes all phones are unlocked and within bluetooth range, which isn't always the case. It forces us to take ourselves out of the moment just to make sure all our iPhones are unlocked and ready to accept the AirDrop.

• Share folders via Dropbox or Google Photos — but not everyone has an account on either of those.

• Use iCloud Photo Sharing — but not everyone has that enabled. And even if I send them a link to the album, photos/videos are downscaled to lower quality.

I take pride in the quality of photos I take with my iPhone! It’s a shame though that with all these priceless group photos on our phones, we either have to take ourselves out of the moment to coordinate an AirDrop with everyone, or we have to settle with downscaled versions of photos that are meant to last a lifetime.

I feel that of all the companies in the world, Apple is the only company that could solve this elegantly. Hope you take this into consideration!

-Mel

He read my email that day, but he never emailed me back…

Fast forward eight months later.

On Monday, at Apple's annual developer conference, Craig Federighi announced an awesome new photo sharing feature for the upcoming iOS 12 (skip to 0:30:21):

I'd like to think this feature was created 100% because of me — that way I can justify the celebratory chocolate chip cookie dough cinnamon bun I ate before bed — but even it wasn't, I'm just glad all you guys will be able to use this feature coming this fall.

So buy the best smartphone camera you can afford, take lots and lots of photos, and always, always, always keep the full-quality originals. Because the reality is, you can NEVER go back in time to take better photos of your loved ones.