Anytime I go visit my parents in Kerrville, one of my favorite things to do is pull out old family photo albums and sit on the floor with my sisters and pour through all the old family memories.  The snapshots are housed in these giant 12″x12″ plastic albums that stick together, the weird peeling sound the plastic makes when separated after all this time is totally part of the experience!  I really don’t know how many times I have looked at those same photos year after year.  Nothing else gets me to connect with my family and my past like these albums, makes me feel  that I belong here on this earth more than doing this exact thing.  I even enjoy the older photos from before I was born, reminds me of family members who are gone now and what their lives must have been like.  It is also something I hope my kids have a chance to enjoy as they get older and return to visit Greg and me.

Flash forward to our lives today.  Our kids are the most photographed generation up to this point in history, but they will have no photographs of themselves in 10-20 years.  This seems really startling (but really not that surprising) to me!  As a mom, I hate this for my kids.  Think about how fast technology is moving on right now.  Do you have a 3.5 inch floppy disk with files on it?  If so I don’t know of any computer built/sold today that will still read one….the USB thumb drive and burned CD are headed to the exact same fate as a VHS tape and cassette tape (my wedding video is on an old VHS and I NEED to do something about that!).  You know what doesn’t go out of style?  Paper photos!!  Heck we have some prints that go back to the early 1900’s and although faded, those are what have been passed down in my family for at least 3 generations that I know of.   So my next few blogs posts are to help you have a plan to get those photos off the phones, backup up in case something does happen, and GET THEM PRINTED!!

The TWO major problems with iPhone Family photos

The first problem with your family’s photos being on your phone- What if you loose your phone??  I have a confession to make, I probably loose my phone twice a day, and while I find it…there will come a day when I don’t, and its really gone!  Also (another true confession) a few Christmas Eve’s back, I dropped it in the toilet:(  Gross and it stopped working.  So I am going to be blunt here and say it: just suck it up and pay Apple’s $2.99 a month for an iCloud backup.   Is it really worth the cost of ONE PEDICURE to make sure that your daughter’s first soccer goal photos or prom photos don’t get lost forever?  No, its really not.  And if you loose the phone, or break it, all you have is the hassle and cost of replacing it, but the images will be safe and on the new phone waiting for you.

The second problem, is that phone photos are really only there to be enjoyed by the owner of that phone.  Sure you can post them on social media….but I know that some of the photos are not things I want to share with the world, and I totally get that it is possible to “overshare”  photos, not to mention a fear that some stranger could be looking at your kids photos online….but we won’t go into that scary stuff! I have had both sets of my kids grandparents mention to me that they hadn’t seen any recent photos of the kids- how can that be, I had a ton on my phone.   Also, I know that my kids and my husband have phone photos of the same memories as well that I would like to see and enjoy too.  So stay tuned to the next blog post when I go into a couple of best practices to “share” with friends and family members!