The latest organization project out here on the ranch has been the family photo stash. What a project that turned out to be...
Like many of you, my parents took pictures of the family and vacations, mostly on a polaroid, or a 110 instamatic, or occasionally a fancy 35mm that took slide film. Slides! Has there ever been a more cumbersome way to look at photos? And now? I have boxes in my garage attic of slides and photo albums and no efficient way to manage it all.
Of course, the easy solution would be sweep my hand dramatically over it all and say "scan yourselves and categorize by date and subject on a google drive!" If only there were some elves on loan from the cobbler's workshop to make all this happen. Because it's hella ton of albums and photos.
Many are placed in albums which, after my mother died, my dad actually went through and put sticky notes or labels on each with some general dates and subjects of the album. The big hurdle is that these albums number in the teens, and they are bulky with decades-old sticky pages. If I were to scan them all, it would be hours of peeling off pages just to attempt to extract a digital image from the polaroid celluloid.
The slides? Perhaps I will find that place that will digitally scan them and turn them into a neat cloud file? Will my children even care to view all of Papa's slides of the Grand Canyon in 1967?
After I am finished with my parents' photo collection, there's my own generation's collection of images to deal with. Here's how WE have done it.
Back in the 90's, I had a respectable 35 mm camera with a handful of dummy-proof settings that allowed me to take shots of my single party friends with ease. It took rolls of film you had to BUY then wait for developing, usually ordering double prints to share with friends or family. Obviously, if you DIDN'T give away that second image, you were unlikely to toss it because, well, you just might need it someday?
We were more selective about what we took pictures of, because each shot had a cost attached, from the film to the developing to the space it took to house the photo later. Which brings me to my next issue - what to DO with those prints? This was at the dawn of one of the 90's favorite MLM companies - Creative Memories. Born to encourage us theme-sweater wearing housewives to scrapbook our way to producing family heirlooms. I loved the stickers, the cut out card stock shapes, and the "acid-free" paper, designed to preserve those images for a life time! Whose lifetime?
So we scrapbooked our way into more albums and more stuff to store. Both of my children actually have a super cute baby book that I creative memory'd for their first year (the second kid got a few things tossed in on sticky notes, because I lost steam with a 5-year-old and a job). What happened next? The digital generation is upon us!
When kid #2 was born two decades ago, we got our 1st digital camera. You could shoot as many images as would fit in the Sony 8 gig memory stick (as Travis will tell you - it's not MEMORY, it's actually STORAGE - he hates when those terms are confused by us non-tech aficionados). The images were grainy-er than my 35 mm but they were instant! As long as you didn't inadvertently delete them from your camera, or computer, or lose the stick. I can now take 100 pictures of my kid's first day of preschool and send them electronically to the world!
After another decade rolls by, we are gifted with cameras on our cell phones! What? One device for BOTH things I want to do? This must be witchcraft.
So what do we do with THOSE images? Here, they are living in my laptop, the cloud, and my phone. Forever, I guess, until we run out of storage in the ether. Not to be undermined by digital photography, the clutter fairies over at Shutterfly decided it would be amazing if you made a tangible ALBUM out of your digital photos!! Because everyone wants to see your Disney trip album that's on your coffee table, so you painstakingly created a digital masterpiece then they turned it in to a book. That now you must find a place for. Oh yay, it's 1970 again.
Do I have a solution to this conundrum? I do not. Because, although I have no first day of school pics anymore, someday I will have more weddings, babies, and vacations to photograph and store. I adore the memories, like we all do. Facebook, iPhone, and my Amazon portal thingy all remind me of "this day in history" photos that I love to reminisce about. I groan/chuckle when I read facebook comments from the generation above me when they admire someone's picture in a post and say "that's one to frame for sure!!!" as if we all go around swapping out photos in frames around the house. We don't HAVE to spend money on wood and glass to admire our photos anymore. Even grandma has the rotating digital picture frame in the kitchen loaded with all the grandchildren on school picture day.
Best wishes as your tackle your parents'/family's photos as well as your own. Preservation of the memories is a task, and may yours be unburdened with stuff, and stored neatly in some cloud.
