Graham and I are working on emptying the basement for a family project I can’t reveal quite yet but rest assured it has absolutely nothing to do with having a baby. Anyway, we’re bringing pretty much everything that belongs to us upstairs out of the basement and one of the many piles of things we have is photo albums. I’m considering scanning all of our photos and storing them electronically on an external drive.
Aside from the sense of nostalgia that comes from slowly turning pages of photographs, I can’t really think of any disadvantage to getting rid of a lot of printed photographs. Actually, I probably won’t be able to bring myself to actually throw away the prints, but will get rid of the bulky and mismatched photo albums. Our photographs will actually be more safe in electronic format, since it won’t be possible for them to burn or get damaged by water or sticky fingers. I’ll be able to share them more readily if they are electronic in format, too.
I guess I’m asking…is there any reason why I shouldn’t convert our printed photographs to digital format?
Hi there, I really anjoy your blog and gardening advice! I think storing photos electronically is a great idea, but I think I would also want another back-up of some sort (can hard drives “die”?). I know CDs and DVDs have a shelf life too (I’ve heard 10 years, so maybe date the CD/DVD so you know when to upload and burn again because there are now no negatives)…that’s all I can think of at the moment but photo albums DO take up a crazy amount of space!
Keep some of them and put them in an album you like better. I often turn to the images that are actually printed. …Of course this is coming from a person who had to stop printing images because there was no where to keep them and whose film and backup dvds etc takes up a scary amount of space.
I have a ton (like 5 years’ worth) of photos on my computer. One day, I got that really scary message about virus, corruption, etc. and I FREAKED that I was going to lose all my photos because I never had them printed. I’ve now been saving them to online albums with the full intent to print them out because sometimes it really is nicer to flip through an album rather than watch your memories go by on a screensaver.