Sharing one great big album

Sharing one great big album

Thanks to Kath for this idea for a blog.

Long ago and almost in another universe I used to paste my pictures into albums and scrapbooks: most people did. After every holiday the work four or five envelopes of enprints, or if you were lucky there was a slide show in a darkened room when nobody could see you yawn.

When our children were small I started using colour print film so that we had something to pass round friends and family: for a while Mrs. D put them into albums, but latterly she sorted them into file card boxes instead. There are quite a lot of those round the house…

What do you do now? I’ve got a printer, but really it’s set up for large prints, and the odd six by four is actually fairly difficult to produce. After holidays we often get a bulk printing order so that the per-print cost is acceptably low – the problem is selecting files for printing!

I’ve realized a few years ago that my children avoid the slide show and the pile of prints: as they enjoy holidays and socialise they upload their snaps to Facebook, and friends and family cannot choose what to look at and when. They can follow things as they happen, or they can ignore most of what goes on. Holiday snaps are less likely to get in the way or friendship these days, I think.

And the iPad has meant that a whole generation of women (mainly) who have all relied on others to take pictures have been able to take and share pictures very freely. For every time I’ve posted a picture of a candle on the mantelpiece Mrs. D has posted four!

And Facebook may outlast quite a lot of us, so there’s a question mark over the usefulness of getting prints and putting them in a book. But there is still something extra about hardcopy. It’s there, and you can pass it around or leave it on a table at a family gathering, a christening or indeed a funeral. It can be a talking point in a way that a screen can never be.

So I offer you a new year’s resolution: at least once a month, make or get a few prints, by some sort of album, and stick them in. Maybe, even, make a few notes by them just in case distant grandchildren wonder who it was that you thought was worth photographing in the middle of the street wearing a traffic cone instead of underpants.