I recently read the following on Twitter:

“Emotional roller coaster evening, thought I’d lost all baby photos from camera, then found them & watched last 9 months slideshow, tearful”

I love looking through old photographs and am lucky that both sides of my family seemed to have collected lots.  As a child I’d sit and rummage through an old suitcase of photographs and ask my grandmother about the people in them, people I’d not met but still a part of me.

Many of us snap away with the latest point-and-shoot and even our phones, but what happens to those photographs?  We all lead busy lives and how many of us, I wonder, set out with good intentions to create something wonderful with precious photographs, but never actually get round to it.  I’m as guilty as the rest when it comes to my own photos and I do wonder  if our grandchildren will be able to view our  digital images.   Digital media is unstable; hard-drives crash, CDs and DVDs degrade and who is to say how technology will develop;  whether our irreplaceable photographs will be accessible in twenty years let alone a hundred years time.  I’m determined to try and make time to do something with my photographs before it’s too late, what about you?

Maybe something as simple as having prints made at a lab and then filing in a box with dividers for years or events;   mounting in a scrapbook or album and perhaps including school reports, tickets to events etc;  creating a more elaborate photo book; or creating a photo collage for the wall.

While I’m on my soapbox:  I’ve often thought about the demise of letter writing,  it’s so easy to email and text; even my mum texts now!   I miss the thrill of receiving letters and have some old ones tucked away from my parents and grandparents, they are lovely to reread and bring those people and moments to life in a way photographs alone can’t.   Perhaps write a letter to your children and store it with some photographs, they may not appreciate it now but in the future it might well be priceless to them.

As I like pretty pictures with blog posts, it seems an ideal opportunity to share a few images of a little something delivered yesterday to a lovely client, aptly called the Memory Box  ;-)

Update:  Though this particular product is no longer available, there are now a couple of luxurious alternatives available in great collections.