Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Never Too Old





Posting on this blog has ranged from sporadic to almost never in the past year or two and it's been about six months since I've even bothered to check in. Imagine my surprise when I finally do, I discover a lot of my photos have gone missing. After checking back through old post I have come to the realization that my big mistake was uploading photos directly from my Dropbox photo file. When I later deleted photos from my Dropbox folder, I inadvertently deleted all traces of them from anywhere I had posted them on the web, my blogs, Pinterest  and perhaps even Facebook. For someone who loves photos, this was an important lesson for me as in this day and age everyone including me relies too heavily on saving everything in the "cloud." But photo sites are not forever, and just because you may have uploaded photos to other places online does not guarantee you will always have them.

I do save all my special photos, especially of family, to my hard drive as well as to those little UBS thingies as a backup, and I still get a lot of my photos printed because nothing will ever replace the feeling of having a physical picture in your hand, but I will from now on, make sure I save any photo I post to FB, Pinterest or my blogs to folders on my hard drive before uploading them so they don't disappear at a later date.

I have learned a valuable lesson, proving old dogs do learn new tricks, and would like to pass on some advice, especially for young parents today. The digital  age is wonderful! It never ceases to amaze me what we can do with a camera, the thousands of images we can take and edit online so we do not have to waste money on imperfect images, and the wonderful overlays and backgrounds we can add to make them even more special, especially as memorials to those who are no longer with us. But, unless you are saving them to your hard drive, backing them up or having them printed off, you risk loosing them as soon as the the editing site you are using goes belly up. I have shelves lined with photo albums filled with pictures of my kids that I consider some of my most valued processions and cannot imagine not having them. Take the time, save your special photos, and print them off so you will have them to enjoy later.

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