At long last and after much creating, shuffling, stacking, and moving of photo piles, I finished getting my family photos into some kind of order this past weekend.
It's satisfying to see the results: a nice-sized box of original photos waiting to be given to my sister and brother, a rough pick of shots to use in the photo books CJ Madigan is making for me through her newly-under-development Snapshot Stories book creation product, and three neat boxes of photos to keep here. One of the benefits (aside from the general pleasure of neatness) is that I can actually enjoy the pictures now, rather than having to rummage around searching when I wanted to use or look at one.
I don't usually mention products, but I must say that the Creative Memories PowerSort photo boxes I used for this project were a nearly perfect solution both for the sorting process and now for my storage needs. I have no relationship with Creative Memories, so I don't mention this with any agenda; I just love it when folks come up with truly useful and ingenious solutions for problems, and appreciate a product that does exactly what it says it does and more. The large versions each hold a whopping 1,200 photos in durable, waterproof, portable and photo-safe fashion (photo safety is important to everyone, but portability and waterproofing are especially crucial to those of us who live in hurricane zones). The twelve mini-containers that can go into and out of each box helped me break down the collection by groups (photos of mom, photos of dad, photos of them together, etc., etc.) and made the sorting much easier than it would have been without them. They're not cheap, but they're immensely more useful than the ordinary little photoboxes I tried to use before.
Having finally gotten everything collected in one place, I was shocked to see that I had over three thousand actual hard-copy photos even after I'd made big boxes for my siblings. That number seemed ludicrously large until I thought about it. I took several hundred shots on every one of my major vacations; each family Christmas probably contributed another fifty or more, each new neice and newphew were good for several hundred over the years...the list goes on and on. When I thought about it this way, I was actually surprised that I didn't have more photos.
Digital photography will reduce these numbers for generations to come; they'll be able to store images on disk rather than having each and every picture developed and printed. I'd like to think that will make their lives easier when it comes to family photos. But then I remember how much most of us struggle to keep our data backed up and deal with computer meltdowns, as well as how many more images most of us take now that we're digital...and I think that it'll be just as hard for them, just in a different way.
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