In this day and age when everything is going digital, we might ask ourselves: what’s the point of having a paper photo album anymore? After all, we have everything in our phones. And for the rest, a good hard drive will do the trick to store the mountain of photos taken over the years.
I think it’s so important that I could give you at least a dozen reasons to convince you to keep printing your photos. Of course, we all have our own sensibilities and some of us will find no difference in looking at photos on an album or on a smartphone.
But I’ll still give you three reasons why I think it’s crucial to keep getting your photos out on paper.
Create a family heritage and legacy
If you had to keep only one reason among all, it would be this one. A photo album allows you to create a family heritage!
I didn’t have the chance to know my grandfathers, yet I know their faces. And if I am lucky enough to be able to put a face on their first name and to know their story, it is simply because I was able to see them in pictures.
That’s right! Family albums are passed down from generation to generation and are all treasured. They keep with them memories, stories and anecdotes that we can discover or rediscover as a family at each viewing.
So why not allow future generations to know your history and your face? They will be delighted as we were when we discovered old family photos.
There was a time when we passed on the furniture and dishes of our ancestors. As this tradition is destined to disappear, we can wonder which objects our children will be able to keep. It is very unlikely that they will keep our plates bought at Ikea! However, if you give them a family photo album, I’m sure they will treasure it until they pass it on to their own children.
What’s up? Isn’t that a good reason to make a photo album?
Sharing family moments
What’s the point of storing thousands of photos on a hard drive if nobody ever looks at them? How many of your photos have simply fallen into oblivion because they have been stored for years in one of your hard drives?
A photo album has the advantage of being easily and quickly available. And let’s be honest, it’s much more pleasant and user-friendly to flip through an album than to scroll through photos on a computer screen.
Whether it is during a meal, a coffee or at any other time of the day, the pleasure of gathering around a photo album and seeing the reactions of the people who look at it remains the same.
It will always have its place somewhere in your home and above all, it will be available at any time.
Who hasn’t experienced the famous “oh wait, I’m going to pull out the kids’ photo album!”, and there you all go for hours looking at it (I don’t know about you, but personally, every time I see pictures of me as a little girl I think to myself “good lord who dressed me like that…”).
Do not deprive yourself of these moments, create new ones.
So as not to forget anything
I will take a few lines from a novel by Virginie Grimaldi. These few lines are extracted from the novel “You will understand when you are older”:
“The photos of the children when they were babies, the slides, their drawings, their poems […] the photos of my parents, of our wedding. Without all these objects,” she continues, “our memory can no longer fail. It no longer has a lining.
“Our memory has no right to fail”. This sentence gave me an electric shock.
In 50 years, how many times will we have changed our smartphone and how many photos will we have lost with these changes? Where will our hard drives be? For that matter, will they even be functional?
Your photo album will be available and ready to be leafed through. It will be the guardian of your memory and will allow you to relive the important events of your life or that of your children. Their first days, first smiles, first steps …
Because time flies by without us having the time to realize it. Children grow up and become adults, while the older ones leave their place. It is also important that your children know their own history, what they were like as a child, what they looked like, what they played with.
While writing this article, I asked my Instagram followers what they thought about photo albums. The question was “do you think it’s important to make photo albums” and their answer was a resounding “yes”. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their answers.
I then asked them why they thought it was important and here are some of their responses:
“Flipping through albums with the family is so much better than looking at them on a screen.
“It gives a palpable side, a precious object, especially in a box”.
“My kids love to look at pictures on a book and I prefer that over a phone”
“Paper stays, digital can go away”.
If you were not convinced of the importance of making photo albums, I hope this article will have made you see things differently. Creating an album can also be an activity to share with your children, by choosing together the photos to put in it.
Of course, there will always be advantages to digital and we should not deprive ourselves of what it can bring us. For security, I store all my photos myself, both professional and personal, on hard drives. But my library is filled with personal photo albums that I can view at any time.
So the important moments, keep them on paper. It will never display the message “Windows has detected a hard disk problem”.
Life is made of events that the memory keeps in a selection of memories sometimes fading with time.