My love for the photo album

Today I am going to chat about something a little different from my usual fare. I recently found my parents old photo albums and was transfixed for ages as I turned every page and saw what they got up to in their lives before my birth and when I was a youngster. This made me think a little bit about the fact that photo albums are becoming a bit rarer in today’s technological age and how I feel that is a shame due to the value that they can hold. Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?

That old family photo album

I think I became quite fond of looking at old photo’s of my parents and family when my mother passed away a number of years ago as we weren’t the biggest of video families. So if there was any documentation of our lives it would be via photographs.

As I started off, I loved seeing these old stained over time photo’s of my parents in the 70’s getting married and being around their family Seeing my grandmother who I never got to meet and my grandfather who I only knew for a few years before he also passed away was a little emotional. I don’t remember too many things about him. Just little pieces here and there. So, getting the opportunity to see him smiling and hugging and playing with my cousins and sister is great.

I think my point is, I wasn’t around for these moments and to get a chance to glance into the lives of those people who are closest to me is interesting. I get to see the silly fashion styles, the hair and facial hair, the old house, or how the family home used to look etc. It is intriguing that I can just turn a page and look into the past and enjoy it.

Keeping it digital?

This brings me to thinking about how we mainly store images and videos now. It is all on our phone, computer or sd card. Stored away for preservation, but let’s be honest, if it wasn’t uploaded to a social media or properly sorted into a folder on your computer, how likely are you to check those photos?

I know people have the digital frames and it is like a mini slideshow, but for some reason, I can never get used to them as I like getting to look at the image for a while and thinking about what was going on back then and to the people in the photo. Maybe that is just the over analyser in me, but hey ho.

I had this issue a year or two ago when I lost my SD card of a lot of my photo’s from my trip to Italy. Luckily, I was being a bit of a social media fiend and posting a lot on Instagram and Facebook and had created a folder on there. I was devastated by the loss and I have seen people lose their Facebook or social media accounts, they could potentially have just lost all of their photos and memories. I now resort to storing everything twice and if one of these methods is on DVDs for videos and CDs or photo albums for images.

Keeping those memories for us

Back to the reason this post was made. It was my girlfriend and I’s first anniversary over the weekend and I wanted to give her something that we can just look on and laugh and reminisce in the future, so I gave her a photo album and said if there are ones she wants to add, to let me know and I can get a bigger album as we took a lot of photos’ this year and I merely picked some that had a bit meaning… Also, pictures of our food, because, food.

I want it to be this awesome document of our lives that eventually maybe people can see in the future and we can chat about. I am stupidly nostalgic like that. I want to be able to embarrass my kids or my other half with this massive book of the past instead of clicking through on a website. Yes, it will take up lots of space, but I want it there on my bookshelf ready for me to look into whenever I want, or whenever anyone wants, just having this document of the past there to be flicked through on a rainy day is what I want. Is it the old school person in me? Maybe, but it is something that I feel we shouldn’t lose in the future.

Are you a physical or a digital person when it relates to photographs? Would you like to have an album to have as a memory? Or is it grand on your computer or phone?

Let me know if you enjoyed this post! If you want to chat more about any of my posts, please follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to also receive updates. Until next time, thanks for reading and I hope to see you again soon!