Photo Books
Print versus Electronic
I’ve had a surge of creating photo books recently. This was initiated, in part, through the clearing process of Mum’s house. There are many printed photos, some dating back before my childhood. They take up more physical space than my mobile telephone, which has over 60,000 photos on, but they are much easier to view. The three of us look through photos together, and tell our son of family past and present.
The other spur to create photo books was the demise of my husband’s laptop. A specialist repair shop confirmed it was terminal. Fortunately, everything on the laptop was available remotely through the cloud. So a replacement laptop could be set up to replicate – more or less – the one which was no more.
If my technology should fail, albeit backed up in various places, I would lose not just work, but thousands of photographs. The entire history, to date, of our son. And over twenty years’ worth of family photos from the time when digital cameras and mobile telephones began to replace film photography.
Photo Books
It doesn’t matter to me if things don’t match. So rather than have an identical library of photo books, I wait for the discounts (which are available regularly). Snapfish and myphotobook are two of my favourites. They are easy to use and always produce excellent quality products, at competitive prices. Snapfish currently have a discount code (happy322) for 40% off photo creations, if used by 27 March.
Perhaps having printed copies of these pictures will eventually lead to waste. What’s meaningful to our son won’t hold the same value to future generations. But isn’t it interesting that in a 2021 survey for the Association of British Insurers, photographs were the second most popular items to save from a fire. Credit cards and cash were top of the list, and mobile telephones were in third place. For avoidance of doubt, the question made clear that there were no living entities to save from the fire. A similar survey for the Automobile Association in 2019 found photographs top of the list, alongside laptops and jewellery.
Future Considerations
Although the cloud is a useful storage back up, it is not quite the nebulous structure the name suggests. It is supported by a huge global technology infrastructure, which has its vulnerabilities. Human error, cyber attacks, natural disasters all have potential to take servers offline and possibly even destroy data.
Anyone who uses Apple’s iCloud for storage agrees to ‘no right of survivorship’. Unlike physical photographs, anything you store digitally with the iCloud is (under the terms of agreement, at least) non-transferable. You go, so does your content.
Google operate a more flexible system of inactive account management. There is also an option to request access to an account if inactive management has not been set up.
I’m not going to print every photograph out. But I will continue to prepare a selection of photo books comprising images of the past, present, and whatever the future brings. The pictures are part of my life story, and that of our son. People, animals, places, in the photographs have shaped who we are today. And some of the faces in the photos are our ancestors. People who followed paths which led inexorably to me sitting here writing while our son sleeps.
The ‘classic’ car was a green Renault 6 bought from a Renault dealer in London. We had a choice of green or pink!
I do remember the Renault! I liked the green.