The Digital Shoebox

We tend to take a lot of photos nowadays. And most, if not all, of them are confined to digital mediums; we keep them in hard drives, on the cloud, our phones, memory cards, etc. And they remain there, and eventually they may get lost when the hard drive fails or the phone is dropped in a bucket of water or when, many years from now, the format becomes obsolete -and you will need to get your old computer from the attic in order to open that program that can display your old photos. But even then, you will be able to see the photos, but they will loose context and meaning.

Before digital cameras were so popular, we used to print the photos taken with a film camera, go through them and keep the best ones. Sometimes the date was written on the back along the names of the people or place where the picture was taken, perhaps a small story, and put it in an album book. It was a nice, warm feeling going through these books and reliving the memories. All that is lost with the digital photography revolution.

I’d suggest that we get those photos out of the digital shoebox and put them again in an album photo book, where they belong. My plan is to make a yearbook, go dive in the digital mess that is my digital photo archive and select the best photos from the past year. Put them together and make an album, and then have that album printed in high-gloss quality paper book. That way, many years from now when I go into to the attic looking for that old computer, I may stumble upon those yearbooks. Bring them down and relive the moments with my wife. Looking back at when our daughters, all grown-up by then, were happily smiling, showing off their first two teeth.