Digital Photos And Scrapbooking

Looking for material for a new scrapbook page the other day, I found an old ’single use’ camera at the back of a drawer — the shots were all used, but I’d never had the film developed. So I took the camera to Walgreen’s and had the photos printed out.

There was the fun and surprise of finding pictures from a holiday five years ago, of course. But to be honest, there were only a handful of shots that I really wanted to keep — the rest were pretty uninteresting. And it made me ask myself the question: just when did I last take a non-digital photo?

Digital cameras have taken the world by storm over the past few years, and I suspect that, like me, many people have forgotten how quickly they’ve changed the nature of home photography. No longer do you have to use up a whole film to find the few pictures you actually like and want to keep — you can just delete the ones that don’t work for you.

Digital photography has had an impact on scrapbooking too, and now there are services that allow you to upload your photos, design a page online and print it to be included in your latest album.

But the digital revolution means that scrapbookers probably have hundreds of photos sitting on the hard drive of their computers — pictures that in the past would have been put in an album or photo box and been readily available to leaf through during leisure moments.

So I’ve made a resolution to take time this holiday to sort through the photo files on my laptop and start collecting groups of snaps that could form the basis for some new scrapbook pages. I’ll be deleting uninteresting files and trying to be better organized.

Could be inspirational — and I’ll free up some hard drive space into the bargain!