Print your pictures!

     “Where are my pictures”, my daughter asked me one day. “What pictures?” I asked. “Well, I can see pictures of me until I’m about 10, then everything stops.”  Yep, that’s about the time we went digital, and we stopped printing out all of our pictures.

      With film, you had to print out your pictures. I have boxes and boxes and photo albums full of pictures. They are taking up space in my closet now, but boy am I glad I have them. They document my family’s history.  Occasionally I will open up a photo album and be transported back in time. It is fun to sit with my 20-something year old kids and laugh about their baby pictures. Hopefully I’ll be sharing these same pictures with my grandkids someday. But the timeline on these pictures stops about 12 years ago. That’s when I bought my first digital camera. I didn’t stop taking pictures, in fact I took more pictures,  I just didn’t print many of them out. The pictures did get downloaded to the computer and even backed up on a disc, but now those computers are long gone, and the discs are somewhere around the house. My daughter is right, the pictorial history of our family has disappeared. This really saddens me.

     When my parents passed away and I was cleaning out their house I came across pictures of myself  that I didn’t even know existed.  What a thrill that was! 

Me at approximately 3 years old

     Then there was the old small suitcase I found that contained pictures of my grandmother, my kid’s great-grandmother, with her family when she was in her twenties. Those pictures are almost 100 years old, and they are priceless to me now. 

A portrait of my grandmother

      I got to wondering will the millennial generation have the same pictures to pass down, or will they find some old silver disc with  “Pictures from Disney Trip” written on it. Hopefully they will be able to find a computer that still reads discs because we all know how fast technology changes. My kids have stated, “Mom, just use The Cloud!”, and to that I say, “I hope you have all of your passwords written down.” My friend had a pretty major stroke and can’t remember a single password. His family couldn’t get into his phone, his computer, or anything else. If he had a Cloud account everything on it will forever be in cyber space, lost to his family.­

      Don’t let your history disappear, PRINT YOUR PICTURES! Of course, not all of your pictures, no one needs 50 selfies, but the important events in life should be printed, births, graduations, family trips, sweet 16s, all the milestones in our lives. There is even an app that makes it easy to print from your phone, Instagram, or Facebook. It won’t make a fancy book, but it will create a physical document of your history. Something for your kids to run across when you’re gone and exclaim, “WOW, look at these…I remember when we did that.” There is no better gift for you to leave behind.