Start Making Physical Photo Albums: Digital Memories Are Too Easily Lost

View of a photo album page, with yellow background, and the title

The linked article really focusses on physically printing photos and sticking them in an album. But I’ve actually found printed Photo Books to work very well. They do achieve the same purpose of sitting around a table and being able to enjoy looking at the memories together, and they both last 100+ years. I’ve been able to add the text captions, stickers, etc quite well to Photo Books, and they look great with their hard covers which also include selected photos.

Digital photos are very easy to share, and to forget, as the constant stream on Instagram or Facebook moves relentlessly onwards. People die, and hard drives crash: It’s easier than you think to lose thousands of photos in a flash. We’re not even sure if the JPG format will be readable in 100 or 200 years’ time.

A photo book is a great birthday or anniversary gift, as memories are probably more precious than a pair of socks or another T-shirt. By doing a book, you are also forced to select the very best memories to be printed.

And it’s not just about family or friends, organisations should also be producing similar printed Photo Books. When I left my company, I was working for, I had 10+ years of photos and videos. Hopefully, many of those are still on one of the servers, but a collection of printed Photo Books by the year, would have been really worth something to have on a bookshelf or even in the reception area.

I’ve been slack myself, but I’m going to now commit to doing at least just one such Photo Book annually from now on.

See https://www.wired.com/story/photo-album-rave/

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