Too Many Pictures?

I received a digital picture frame for my birthday. I spent an entire weekend selecting photos for the frame. I first went through all our digital photos that we have saved, then I went through every photo album in the house.

My parents were never very good at placing photos in albums. Instead we had several large boxes that held a lifetime of pictures. Holidays pictures, vacations, family events, etc. were all mixed up together. After both my parents died, I ended up with the responsibility of dividing the pictures between my siblings. I took the liberty of throwing away many; some of people no one knew, others that the subject was too far away, and still others that were simply bad pictures. My parents never threw away a picture.

As a result of that experience, as a new mom I diligently marked date and subject on the back of every photos. I successfully placed my daughter's pictures in albums on a regular basis. That is until we got our first digital camera. For the last few years, we have been more selective about which pictures we actually process. Most are just downloaded from the camera and stored on our computer.

I am not a big scrapbooker. But every summer, scrapbook materials take over the dining room table for a month or two. I create pages for my daughter's previous year in school. My unmet goal for the last couple of years is to create a Christmas album and a cousins' album.

But as I looked through every image we own, I questioned whether I should follow-though with my goal for those two theme scrapbooks. Why can't I just place the best pictures on the digital frame? In fact, why print any image? Is looking at them on my computer or the digital picture frame good enough?

All those photo albums I diligently put together years ago are almost never opened. Time provides perspective regarding which pictures should be kept and which ones can be thrown away. If I organized those same albums today, I would have used far fewer pictures. And this despite my efforts to use only the good photos!

If my parents had created a lifetime of albums, how many would I have? A friend, like me, sorted through all her parents photos after they were gone. To distribute the pictures to the siblings, she had to pull all the photos from the albums first. My parents lack of initiative actually made the process easier.

So, where will technology take us in the future? Will scrapbooking survive? I read recently that Eastman-Kodak is no longer making Kodachrome film. After the invention of digital photography, there was little need for the first color film made (click here, huffington post). And now with the digital picture frame, images can be downloaded without ever printing the picture.

The dilemma is whether to put the effort needed to transfer your former images to up-to-date technology. During his leisure, my husband has spent two years editing and transferring old camcorder movies of my daughter to a dvd. He is only up to her third year of life! From our last trip to his parents' house, we returned with slides from his childhood. Of course we had to purchase a scanner to capture the images.

During our annual scrapbooking experience, my daughter occasionally asks if she can have a photo. I tell her that eventually everything we have is hers, including four-generations of photos. Luckily, as an only child, she won't have to remove all the photographs from albums to share with siblings!