Photos of the Future

Last week’s blog discussed decluttering photos on our phones. This rolls into this week’s blog of digital photos. The current generation is technology savvy and believe and love anything digital. So where does that leave us old school printed photo people? Are we considered relics because we have several boxes of printed photos? What should we do with the photo albums passed down through the generations? Should we only have digital photos. There is a way to live in both worlds.

Scrapbook Queen

I confess…I’m a scrapbooker! It is a creative obsession I’ve had since I was young (I am 53). Imagine lots of pretty paper, glitter and tchotchkes all over my spare bedroom in my house. Therefore, printed photos are important to me. However, scrapbooking has even moved away from paper and embellishments and has turned to digital scrapbooking (not fun for me). I refuse to adjust! My daughters use social media as their scrapbooks, uploading pictures into albums and deleting them from their phones to save memory. Which method is correct?

Digital vs. Printed

There are several pros and cons for each:

• Digital photos require no physical space. The only space it needs is memory on an external hard drive, a laptop, on your phone or a cloud service. Printed photos and scrapbooks require real estate – on a bookcase (like at my mom’s house), on a closet shelf (in my house) or a corner somewhere in the house.
• What happens when technology is upgraded? Do you have to worry about transferring all your digital photos to a new hard drive? What if your laptop crashes or a cloud service shuts down? You will still have your photo albums, printed photos and scrapbooks.
• Both have an expense attached. Digital photos require hardware (or cloud service. There is a max to the free memory for Google, iCloud or Dropbox. Digital images take up A LOT of memory so thousands of photos will eventually max out and you will need to pay for additional memory to save your photos.
• Natural disasters affect both digital and printed photos. A fire, accidental spill or lost/stolen equipment happen so understanding how to protect your photos (syncing your phone to your laptop/tablet, having a fire safe, keeping liquids away from electronic equipment and photos) is very important.

Make sure you preserve your photos for future generation so they know who you are and what you look like. By the way, The Photo Managers events for Save Your Photos Month are great!