These days, with all of the digital media out there, people often neglect to preserve actual photographs, and in many cases never even have photographs printed. Before digital cameras, physical prints of pictures were one of the only tangible ways to preserve your memories. Whether you had a fancy camera or a simple snapshot camera, or even if you just used a disposable, you still ended up with pictures in hand.

You did not see the pictures as you took them, and often you forgot exactly what shots you took. After a family vacation where you took four or five rolls of film, you would take them into the drugstore and have them developed. If you chose one-hour developing service, you often waited anxiously, checking your black sport watch every five minutes to find out if it was time to pick up the pictures yet.

The fun of looking through the photos was a great way to top off the vacation itself. You might find a shot of a gorgeous sunset above a lake, or a funny candid photo of your brother showing off the men’s sport watch he bought on impulse at a rest stop. Looking through the photos, and filing them in an album, you live the memories once again.

Digital cameras show us the photo immediately after it is taken, so we lose the element of surprise. Often times, if we are not satisfied with a shot, we erase it and take a new one. This may give us greater control over the finished product, but it means that we lose the fun of discovering that photo we forgot was ever taken.

Along with the surprise has gone the necessity of organizing photos into physical albums. Now, we just upload the pictures to a hard drive or a social networking site and put them in ‘albums’ there.

The advantage of digital photos is that they take up less space, and they are easier to share with people in other places. But you cannot have the same social experience around a computer screen as you can have sitting on a couch and passing around an album or a stack of photographs.

With some effort, though, we can take advantage of the convenient things about digital photography, and preserve many of the good things about print photos. Almost every drug store with a photo developing service will also have a machine where you can order print photos. You can adjust your photos before you order prints, by cropping them or changing the colors. With a few scrapbooking tools, you can make beautiful albums, using the convenience of the digital age to enhance them!