Posts Tagged ‘photo albums’

In Vanity Fair’s September 2010 issue, there was a poll asking people several questions.  One of the questions was,  ”The King Tut exhibition is currently in the U.S., showing the objects that were buried with him in his tomb, because the Egyptians believed the pharaoh could take things with him into the afterlife. If you could take one of these objects with you to use in the afterlife, which would you take?’ The choices were..

a family photo album (47%)

a pet (25%)

an iPhone or Blackberry (9%)

A favorite car (5%)

A big screen TV (3%)

Our family photos are mostly being stored on computers, rarely printed, no longer put in albums, and ultimately not looked at very often!  We are taking more photographs than ever before in history… and we aren’t doing much to care for these family photos for future generations of our own families.  Ask any computer technician how many people they work with who have lost ALL of their family photos on their hard drive that crashed because they had no backup.  It is common today, unfortunately.  And the statistics in restoring those family photos from a crashed hard drive  are painfully low.  

Let’s start creating photo albums again.  Years and years from now, no one is going to feel a CD or DVD pull at their heart strings as they rummage through old memorabilia!  But if they were printed images of family members, friends, pets, vacations, and cherished memories, these tangible photos would be little priceless pieces of the past that family would hang onto, preserve, pass down.  This is what they were talking about in the survey, NOT our hard drives. 

I briefly touch upon how I am guilty of not printing family snapshots and how I’m turning a new leaf in a post entitled Capturing The Moments That Matter Most.  It’s been great fun to go through my personal photos, choose the ones that make me smile, print them, and store them in my acid-free box that I created marked “Our Family 2010.”  Finally.  Our friends and family are enjoying the little capture moments on our coffee table. 

Now I’m hoping I can encourage more of you to create tangible treasures of those scads of images you’ve left unattended on your hard drives!  Photograph, back up, burn, AND PRINT!