I get very concerned about digital photography and the way we store our images.
In the days of film, there were always negatives and physical prints and everybody had a box of old family photographs in a shoe box, that got handed down through the generations and added to by each generation, with all sorts of information like names, date and locations written on the back.
These days people keep images on their phones which often get lost when their phone falls down the toilet. Or they are stored on a laptop. And when people pass on, these phones and computers end up being junked or scrapped and the images are just lost forever.
I fear there is a whole generation who have no record of their family history.
I can only urge everybody to make physical prints of all their important images and store them in a shoebox under the bed for future generations to enjoy.
I'm printing off a few photos a month of the grandsons, pushing them( photos, not the babies) between layers of cellophane in an album. I'll pop out and buy two new pairs of shoes, as need a shoe box per baby!! Thanks for advice ( and memory!)
I agree with you, to a point. Having just 'downsized' into a small apartment, with little space for storage, what to do with photos (shoeboxes, albums, loose etc etc) has been a very live issue.I went the other way because of space considerations and digitized everything but I have sorted and indexed on external hard drives for other family members and we regularly do the equivalent of 'slide nights'.
I agree totally. I have a box of old photos handed down by my Mum. I spent a lot of time during lockdown scanning all the old photos and putting them together in a photobook along with stories of each line of my family. I am really pleased with the result and although I still have the old photos, I also have a book to hand on to my daughter and grandchildren.
In an age where people take more photos than ever before I also worry that there will be no historical record because images will be lost or we will have no way of retrieving them from obsolete storage systems.
