I have observed this phenomenon in a few friends, and I wonder if it is a general thing.
So, have you noticed that new parents generally make far fewer pictures of their younger kids then they did of their first child? Does it matter if the picture-taking took place before every home had (digital) cameras?
I don’t know if it’s true now that there are digital cameras that everyone has on them at every minute of the day.
But yes, with my family and my friends’ families, the oldests’ infancies and toddlerhoods are documented in insane detail. (“This first album is you in the hospital, the second is you on the car ride home, and then we slowed down a little, the third album is the first week of your life.”) The second less so, the next, even less, and so on until you get to the one who has an undeveloped roll of film somewhere.
Yeah, it happens all the time. My dad is very big on photography–he had his own darkroom setup in the garage. There are a zillion pictures of me. Not so many of my younger brother. The next two brothers–pictures are more rare, especially of the youngest. Then, after a six-year gap, my sister was born and there are a zillion pictures of her.
I only have two, so it’s not quite so pronounced, but I don’t take as many pictures as I did when the older kid was an infant.
You just don’t get as much time, and the minor details of baby development, while fascinating with every kid, don’t seem quite so new and amazing.
Your first kid has your full attention. No one else will have your full attention ever again.
It happens with first kids, too. I took at least 500 photos of my son’s first birthday, and about a tenth of that for his second.
Yes… there are tons of baby photos of my older brother and only a tiny handful of me as a baby. It’s always made me feel a bit jealous 
I have far more pictures of my first child than my second and a lot of the ones I have of my second has my first born in them.
The only picture I have of my second that I do not have of my first if the hospital picture. They claim his pictures did not come out. I don’t think they ever took them as I asked several times if they had taken them yet and the answer was always “not yet” so I think they just forgot.
Absolutely! The first album is maggenkid - birth to 1 year. The second album is maggenkid 1 year to threeish. The rest are on disc somewhere, I should sort them out one day. She’s 9 and a half.
Erma Bombeck did a routine on this, How she slavishly noted the eldest’s first smile / tooth and number of full nappies, etc. I don’t think she ever found the third child’s baby book.
I’m the fifth of six: I think I had multiple birthdays on the same role of film!
My mother used to show my older sister’s pictures to people and tell them it was me. Sis and I have a joke that we’re twins born 11 years apart! 
Both my daughter and I came along with peaks in Dad’s photographic history. I was born when Dad was still buying and developing many metres of photographic film himself (there are still negatives of me undeveloped somewhere), Rosa was born when Dad went fully digital, camcorder and all.
In comparison, photos of my two sisters are notably fewer.
I’m the fifth kid. My mother has tooooons of pictures of me.
I joke that I’m the favorite and it’s backed up by photographic evidence. My mother has pictures of all of us when we were about 5-9 years old in one spot on the wall in her living room; it consists of two framed 9x12 photos. One has my four older siblings in it; the other is a head shot of me alone. 
This was often a sore spot for me with my parents.
They were told after they were married that they wouldn’t be able to have children then 2 years later my older sister was born. The family album is full of pictures of her. My mother’s hope chest has all her first clothes. Baby books. I understand why. She was the baby they thought they couldn’t have.
Then came me 2 years later. For whatever reason they are hardly any pictures of me. No baby book. No clothes. Nada.
Then came my younger sister. They knew she would be the last baby so they went crazy with the pictures. The baby books. All that baby stuff. Fast forward to my graduation and looking for a baby picture of me. There was none of me alone. I had to crop my two sisters out.
It sucked.
5th kid here. There were tons of pics of my brother (oldest, only boy). Then my sister came along. Exceptionally beautiful baby girl - lots of pics. Then came the twins. Absolutely identical. All kinds of pics wearing matching outfits. THen there was me. 5th kid, 4th girl. big deal. There’s a picture at a christening that might be me. That’s about it.
StG
My four children were born 30, 28, 26 and 22 years ago, well before digital cameras. Although we do have pictures of all of them, I must confess that I took more of my first-born child. That’s partly because the first-born is intrinsically the most exciting, and partly because my photography has had its ups and downs. (Currently, it’s in an up period, as I’m taking a lot of pictures with my DSLR – but not so much of my children, since they are in different continents from me.)
There’s just two of us in my family and photographs do swing in favor of my older brother.
We have one single family video, which is a compilation of a bunch of 8mm movies my uncle took in the late 70s and early 80s at family gatherings. In the half hour video there’s about 1 minute of me and the rest is my brother being adorable.
Christopher Titus did too. Freaking hilarious.
“I have pictures of my first child at 3 seconds, 6 seconds, 9 seconds, and 15 seconds because ‘dumbass couldn’t set up the camera in time.’ Yeah, ha ha ha, she wrote that in the photo album.”
“With your second kid…you’re a little lax with photos. I have to admit, if my little one ever got abducted, we’d need to hire a sketch artist.”
As the youngest of six, and the person in the family who went through the family photo/slide collection, I can tell you there is a large drop off in quantity and quality of photos taken of younger children.
However an exception is when a family say has a boy child another boy child etc. then a daughter is born, the new gender kid gets lots of photos, not as much as origianl child but more than the second child.
That’s hilarious!
I’ve got two older sisters 43 & 45, me 38, and my little brother 33.
My parents recently dug out all the photos they took over the years to organize them. They had tons and tons of the oldest sister from birth to 5 years but had problems finding a scant handful of my younger brother.
You wouldn’t believe how guilty they feel about it. Of course my brother finds it funny and like to play it up with the “I’m the forgotten one.”