My Grandparents came to visit this weekend. They were driving across the country, back to Maryland and each time they stop for a few days to visit me (but I know it is really to see my kids…I’m not fooled!). Anyway, so I was working on a project this weekend for a client that involved a slideshow on DVD. My Grandma was asking me about the project, and then started talking about how so many “people” at the CVS keep telling her to stop “developing” her pictures. Yes, by “developing” she means taking her memory card from her digital point and shoot camera, inserting it into the machine at CVS and printing each and every picture that she has taken in a given period of time. Anyway, back to the story. So these store clerks are telling her that she is wasting her money by printing her images; that she should just buy an external hard drive to save them to and that way when she wants to look at them she can just pull them up.
First of all, this is ludicrous. Who tells a seventy-something year old woman to buy any type of electronic equipment so that she can attach it to her computer and pull up digital images? Who says she even has a computer? (she does…and she has Facebook. Hi Grandma!!!) I promptly told my grandmother to keep doing what she is doing, and here is the reason why:
Technology changes. What is top of the line today is going to be obsolete in 10 years. But a memory printed on paper can last generations. Thankfully, when I was young, the technology was lacking…so I have actual paper photographs to document my youth!
My great-grandfather (Pop-Pop) and I, circa…probably 1983. He passed away a few days before I graduated college, in 2003.
And here is my Lillian and her great grandfather (Stevie), circa yesterday:
Memories are PRICELESS. I don’t know how else to describe them. I hoard photographs and I am not even ashamed of it. If one day one of those pictures that I have makes even one person smile I will have accomplished my goal. So, I guess my point here, and to my Grandma, was…don’t listen to those fools! Print out your pictures! Because change happens every day in every thing, and especially in technology.
So when you go to retrieve your favorite image of Uncle Jimmy John twenty years from now for his memorial service off of the super slick back up disk you bought it might just not work. But there will without a doubt always be a way for you to display a photograph.
Now you should follow the circle along to my friend Julie to see some of NYC and her views on change.
***DISCLAIMER: Please! don’t take this to mean I don’t think that you shouldn’t ALSO have an electronic copy of your photographs somewhere safe! Always keep a backup, preferably two!
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