Photo memories – online isn’t cutting it
I found a few printed photos the other day, nothing special, just a few snap shots, but I really enjoyed looking at them again. This got me thinking about how I would never go back more than a week or two on my Flickr stream and ever look at any of my shots from the past – partly the whole reason for taking pictures surely? iPhoto doesn’t cut it either as it’s so bloated and slow and currently crashes constantly – it suffers from the same problem as Flickr I guess, I’m not going to sit there and go through them. However I have a shoe box of 6″x4″ prints (matt with borders) from the last few years beside my desk are all from film cameras I occasionally use like Dad’s OM20, my lovely LC-A, Nikon F801 or the Olympus Trip 35. A lot of the pictures are rubbish but they remind me of being somewhere or doing something which I’d probably forgotten about. I guess I find a bit more of a connection with the printed version
Flickr is obviously my main online store of photos (some people use Facebook or Picasa etc). I’m always uploading new stuff of course but this seems to only enhance the transitory nature of these images, it’s always about the next image. I’ve also become a lot more critical of what I upload, so snap shots of friends don’t always make it. Do these go on Facebook instead? Hard to say.
In terms of digital storage this lot all sits in a big folder on my external drive titled “The great JPEG dump”. Paid work is all organised neatly but it’s always been hard to know what to do with the personal images. I was going to use Adobe Carousel but I can’t see that working out.
So I’ve decided that I’m going to go back to printing out actual photos and buying a box for each year. Some physical objects that I can look back on – maybe at Christmas each year and remember what’s gone on. I’ve found a cheap online printers and will do a set each month, I’ve even found somewhere that does a nice shoe box (yes you can find anything with Google). A bit like the 365 project but longer, maybe one box for each year. I’m going to go back and do all of 2011 and keep going as long as I can.
Updated: It’s working out quite well printing all these pics. Just sorting out the 2011 box now.
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that’s a nice idea. i might follow suite.
i personally throw everything at iPhoto, don’t put much online except Instagram and the odd more formal thing from time to time.
that said I do look back through the iphoto catalog and enjoy it, either on my own or more often when i’m recounting a story of an event to someone else [parents usually!].
i’ve printed some stuff with online printers but never really got into it, maybe the ‘one box a year’ approach is a good solution, it certainly makes the most of their ‘cheap per print, expensive to deliver’ pricing.
alex.
[...] engage in this following my 365 project in 2009 and more recently by starting to collate prints of each year in boxes and maybe albums going forward. I like the idea of snaps also and that not too much [...]