Photo storage, what to do with the old ones

I was sorting through the cavernous cupboards we seem to have, I have no idea however but they do seem to hold huge amounts of 'stuff'  I am sure when they're cleared out it will be covering up the motorway to Narnia!

I was picking through a huge plastic crate filled with photographs from years back, this was just as the digital age was arriving but people were still hurtling down to boots with excitement, thoughts of what was on their undeveloped film, more often than not they had photos with lots of of thumbs and family members without heads!  For some inexplicable reason I decided to keep every one, perhaps I was thinking I'd paid a fortune for developing costs so I was going to keep everything.   Amongst the photographs I had country scenes where I had no idea where they were, pictures of random farm animals and a host of pictures of my late great aunts next door neighbours.

I decided to be ruthless again,  I commenced 'operation photo,'  if it was a bad picture-binned, random scenery-binned, any picture of a relative (be it alive or dead) was put to one side.  Soon the pile had been whittled down to 5% of what it was!  I still had a large pile of photos, various ones of me at various stages of growing up, from early pre-teen to late 20s.  Oh my, how I've changed, I did feel a mix of emotions about what I was doing at that point of life, how was I feeling?  What would I tell that 15 year old Jonathan?  Mmm perhaps not making Mrs Standway my English teacher cry..... but no, all those events are in the past and they make me who I am today.  However these photos mean something, which is good,

I discovered, in the box, an unused photograph album still in plastic wrap, so sorting through the remaining 5% I have a memory album of Jonathan past along with relatives.  I know this album counts as one item, but the wash of emotion and feeling that it creates I know to me that it is important.  I know these photos could be scanned into my computer and kept on line, but there is something about the tangibility of these photos.  I can remember excitedly opening the developing envelope in the street just after I'd collected them,  and still relive the disappointment when I kept discovering overnight I had not become David Bailey.

With the current digital age, you can keep all your pictures on-line, albeit on a hard drive or on an online gallery space, the 100 Item Challenge isn't the 100 Gigabite Challenge so you can have as many as you like.  Rob and I recently tied the knot, and we had all of our wedding pictures saved on-line and set up a gallery www.lifewith.co.uk so all our friend could have a look, and have the option to download the ones they liked.  Oh no I hear you cry, 'I'd like a photo album of the day' well we have created one, there are marvelous application where you can create a hard back book of your day with a dust cover for a few pounds, so we ordered 3 copies, one for us and one for each of the parental units.   The marvels of sharing your pictures on-line with friends is that they can actually use them for their on-line profiles. I know we felt really proud and happy when a large selection of our friends were all using pictures of our day on their facebook accounts, we feel that each time they look at that image they'll think of our important and exciting day.  And an on-line picture doesn't count for your 100 Items so it's a win win situation.