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Last night, I found myself suppressing a small panic at a pointless sunset. Nice sunsets always make me jittery: They seem like such rare things that I'm always possessed of a compulsion to capture them. I bought a gigantic digital camera for just this kind of thing, but there I was on the waterfront without it. So what if the sky's on fire, if I don't have 20 photos of it at different exposure settings?

Thank God I had a cellphone camera in my pocket. It kept this particular glory of his creation from being a total write-off.

But now I am struck by the photo malaise that always hits me at the end of summer. As I rifle through the mountain of photos I took, I wonder whether I really need four near-duplicates of each. It's staggering, really. We live in an age of conspicuous documentation. As digital cameras have proliferated, picture-taking has become compulsive: It is as if people fear that moments won't exist unless they've been reduced to bits.

No transgression goes undocumented, no inebriation goes unpublicized and no child goes un-camcorded. People have always taken care to photograph the streetscapes around them. But now we have urban enthusiasts capturing construction sites from three angles every day, people who just sit on buses with their digital cameras, taking grainy videos out the window as the suburban wasteland rolls by and an electronic voice rhymes off the stop announcements.

It all gets posted to YouTube and stuck on Flickr, filling up giant, remote server farms like the one Google built on a river in Oregon. It's not just family snaps any more, it's every square inch of populated turf, every spare moment of carousing, the combined detritus of Facebook friendship, artistic impulse and wish-you-were-here idleness.

The world is so redundantly well-documented, it's as if you could reconstruct a virtual reality out of it. In fact, that's exactly what some projects are doing. Microsoft's remarkable Photosynth project, for instance, stitches photos of the same place taken by different people into one panorama. So if you've taken a picture of the Taj Mahal, Photosynth will cross-reference it with all the other pictures people have taken of the Taj Mahal from other angles, and weave them all together into one cohesive scene.

The catch is that the same technology that's allowed our self-documentation to balloon has made it incredibly fragile. Digital information is notoriously prone to being lost, to physical decay or troubles decoding it as technology advances. As Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist, famously said, "Digital information lasts forever, or five years - whichever comes first." An iPhone is more useful than a clay tablet, but the clay tablet is a handier find in an ancient ruin. (Besides, the contract is better on the clay tablet.)

But it's not just the apocalypse crowd that need fret. Digital photos present a quandary for preservation-minded folks in the here-and-now. In broad strokes, there are two options for storage: You can store them yourself, or store them online, in what people are increasingly calling "the cloud" - that nebulous world of servers, mostly owned by giants such as Google and Yahoo.

Neither is a perfect option. As most people have learned the hard way, sooner or later, hard drives fail. CDs get scratched and degrade. Laptops get dropped in the pool. Backing up isn't such an issue if you entrust your digital legacy to the likes of Yahoo's Flickr or Google's Picasa, but then you've just swapped a high-tech danger for a low-tech one: Companies go bankrupt. They merge, they fail, they change their minds and decide that there's not as much money in digital storage as there is in eggbeaters.

Yes, paper photos burn in house fires, get carried off by burglars (the dumb kind), get eaten by dogs. As Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky points out, preservation can never be assured for any medium, merely worked at. But it's easier to safeguard precious objects like photos in boxes and albums. The digital age, on the other hand, has turned memories into commodities that get shipped around in bulk with the care and tenderness of iron ore pellets.

When a person dies, I sometimes think of the memories that die with them. It's not like we could get at them, but at least a living person can relate what he's seen. Asked the right questions, those memories could be dug out. But when he dies, they die too, never to be retrieved.

Without really realizing it, we've engaged in a great project of memory-making for our civilization. It's nice to think that, if and when things come to a grinding halt, our records will live on after us. But as we abandon the finite treasures of printed photos for bucket loads of endless digital snaps, our pictures become almost as fleeting as our intangible memories. The more comprehensive our digital world gets, the more likely it is to wink out - just like us.

Sunsets are such fleeting things, and that's what makes me jumpy. A few minutes of magnificence and it's over. Years of careful observation tells me that they happen on a regular basis, yet it's never quite allayed my fear that the one I'm watching will be the last. I still don't know what the best way to appreciate them is, but compulsive digital photography isn't it. Quite the opposite of freezing them in time, it takes a fleeting moment, and turns it into something that might vanish faster still.