It started out as a conversation we’ve had with our students about our middle school years. How the fashions have changed, and how we were obviously cool kids in our teenage years. Jenn mentioned that she had a photo of the two of us during civil rights while we were in middle school and it had COOL written all over it.

I immediately wanted to see said photo and we proceeded to induce photo vomit all over her apartment living room. We looked through stacks and stacks of photos that she had from when she was a little kid, all the way up through high school and some college years. We looked at notes that we had written to each other and notes she had passed during band with some of her friends, and we laughed.

A lot.

We never did find that one photo we were looking for, but we found many priceless others, like the ones above.

It made me really sad to realize that I don’t think that I actually have any photos printed from my high school years. They really were some of the best years of my life because I had an amazing group of friends that had a ton of fun together. I don’t think I’d ever go back to high school, but when I remember those years, they make me smile. 

I don’t really have any photos printed from college, either. I have some, but not enough. I have spent a lot of time over the past year or two really scrapbooking and printing photos from the past years in my life. I LOVE sitting down and looking through them all and just remembering. It’s nothing fancy, but they bring me SO much joy. 

We live in such a digital world now. Photos live on cell phones and hard drives and social media, but they are never printed. When we have children and grandchildren, they won’t have anything to look at to help hear our stories about our adventures. Inevitably, phones will die, computers will crash, and social media will go away.

A ton of my photos from high school are on my MySpace… See what I mean? I don’t even know how to get those anymore.

PLEASE. Please. Print your photos. Even if they sit in a shoebox, PRINT them. I promise they will bring so much joy later on. Put them in frames, on canvases, or in scrapbooks. Don’t let them live on a cloud or a computer. It may take time, just like it’s taking me time to do it all, but it’s time well spent and worth it.

Since I feel SO strongly about this, I include wedding albums in all of my collections. When I got married, it took me OVER a year to get them printed and put somewhere – and I’m a photographer! I know it gets away from people sometimes, which is why I take care of it for them.

Don’t you want to be able to pass on your story? Your legacy?

I know I do.

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