FOUND PHOTOS.

Think about those two words for a second.

Chances are, most of you imagined someone finding a box of old prints or possibly a stack of photo albums, or perhaps a few old cans of undeveloped film. You might have even imagined some deterioration that occurred to them over time.

^{This was the last photo on the day my parents were married in December of 1969.}

After my father passed away a few years ago, I gathered all of the photos on both sides of our family's collection out of the boxes and tubs in the basement and out of the garage and began scanning them, which I finally finished earlier this year. Many of the photos in that collection were of moments I completely forgot or had no idea even happened, and in some cases contained people i've never seen or met before. I scanned most of them anyway.

A lot of the photos ranged in age between 5 to 10 years, some of them 50 to 60 years, and a few of them could be pushing the hundred year mark.
It was actually quite an amazing experience to be able to scan all of them. It taught me a lot about my family's past and moments that seemingly had been forgotten and lost. All told, I scanned nearly 4,000 pictures. That's a lot of history of a time when taking pictures every few seconds was not as ubiquitous as it is in today's digital age. And that very idea is what got me thinking about my next point.

Unless we print our digital photos, our succeeding generations will likely not be able to experience "found photos".

At least, not in the same way we do today and have for many decades in the past. In fact, with the way that many of us take and save photos, a huge majority of them will not get a chance before they are lost to be stored in a way where someone can just stumble upon them years and years later.

Having had this conversation about image archiving in the past, I would inevitably bump into the opinion from someone that while printing can be good, the quality of the original photo (the original digital file) is king. However, having said that, when one loses a large digital photo collection, they will cling to any version of those lost photos that they can. And, given enough time, I have a distinct feeling that most of us are going to discover that prints are king in those situations.

^{Me, my sister, and my grandmother, circa 1982.}

It is much more likely to find an album full of paper prints 100 years down the road than it is to find a shelved hard drive with those same photos that will both be able to connect to any machine that far into the future, and that has functionally survived all that time and actually still legibly contain that information. A JPEG file may be so far removed by then that most devices might not even be able to read them. Paper, however, will always be easily - and instantly- accessible despite whatever digital technologies may come and go. Photo albums don't crash.

^{Me, amid the scattered remains of the wrapping of my Christmas presents, circa 1986.}

And of course, yes, time is the thing that will eventually bring the end to all things, including digital storage technologies as well as paper prints, but you are still way more likely to find those paper prints safely tucked away in an album on the top shelf of your closet many decades down the line, ready to view and without the need for a power outlet than you are to find a functional and compatible hard drive after that same amount of time.

Print what you want passed down.

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