In the olden days, people didn’t take a ton of pictures. Even families who were big photo takers didn’t have all that many photos compared to the number of pictures that families take now that everyone has a phone in their pocket.
I have accumulated dozens of photo albums over the 20+ years that Tod and I have been together, and then a few years ago I started doing photo books, and there are dozens of those as well.
What’s going to become of these when we’re gone? There are just waaaaay more than it would be reasonable to expect the kids to want to keep. So what will become of them, will anyone even look through them before they are tossed out? *Sigh*
As older family members have passed away, it’s been so wonderful to get ahold of all their photo albums so I could scan the pictures and have them electronically. Doing that over the years has left me with a terrific digital photo trove, and carefully cataloguing the pictures makes it simple to find the photos I need.
It was supposed to be my retirement project to clean up our photo library – get rid of duplicates and the ‘bad’ pics (sure, I *take* four snaps of the same scene, but do I really need to keep them all?), and be sure all the pics are tagged appropriately. But I’ve just been too busy to even start on that yet. First there was a graduation party to plan, then getting Reed ready for college, then Tod’s Dad passing away, plus all my Dems stuff. Maybe post-election I will have time to start?? Of course then it’ll be time to get ready for Christmas.
I was thinking about this massive photo library and what will happen to it. There are so many – 84,291 at the moment – would the kids each want to keep a copy of all those pictures? What will the technology even be by then? Will there be cheap digital cloud storage they can use? Are my tags going to still be there? Or will the AI be so advanced that it won’t matter much anymore, computers will just “know” who’s who?
I wonder if I should stop doing photo books. They will just end up being something the kids will have to deal with after we are gone, do we want to leave them with a bunch of things they don’t want? Tod says since I enjoy doing them, I should continue making them. And after all, I won’t know what happens to them after I’m gone!
I hope that the kids will want to keep at least the digital photos to remember everything and everyone by. So many good memories.
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