10/09/2026
When did we stop printing our memories?
I’ve been decluttering recently and came across twelve old photo albums.
They were looking very tired and worn, so I decided to carefully remove the photographs and give them a new home in some lovely photo boxes.
What I didn’t expect was how emotional the process would be.
As I sorted through those photographs, I was suddenly travelling through my life.
My childhood.
My adolescence.
My adult years.
My parents.
My children when they were little.
Family celebrations, holidays, birthdays and ordinary everyday moments that, at the time, probably seemed completely insignificant.
And yet here they were, years later telling the story of our family.
It made me stop and think about how much photography has changed.
Today, we can take hundreds of photographs without thinking twice. Our phones are full of them. We capture everything but how often do we actually look at them?
How often do we sit together and pass a phone around, telling the stories behind the photographs?
And what happens when that phone is lost, broken or replaced?
Perhaps, in making photography so easy, we have somehow made the photographs themselves less precious.
There was something wonderful about waiting for photographs to be developed. Choosing which ones deserved a place in an album. Writing a date or a name on the back. Opening an album years later and hearing someone say, “Oh, I remember that day”
Those photographs weren’t just pictures.
They were tangible pieces of our lives.
And perhaps that’s what struck me most while sorting through my albums.
One day, our children and grandchildren may want to know what our lives were really like. Not just the big occasions, but the people, the places, the faces and the little moments that made up our everyday lives.
So maybe I’m going to start printing a few more photographs again.
Not hundreds.
Just the ones that matter.
Because memories deserve more than a place in the cloud.
Sometimes they deserve a place in our hands. ❤️
What do you think? Have we lost something by leaving so many of our memories trapped inside our phones?
