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Can you make too many digital memories?
And will future generations even have time to look through stacks of CDs containing tens or hundreds of thousands of photos, and even if they do will individual memories become less precious because there are so many?
What if disk drives fail or software formats change, rendering photos unreadable by tomorrow’s computers? Will CDs even work? Think of those reels of 8 mm home movies with no projectors for viewing them.
“If you look at your parents’ or grandparents’ belongings, you can find old negatives, ... and negatives are still reproducible,” said Greg Miele, a Bethesda, Md., father of two, ages 9 and 17. “Yet if you have a hard drive fail on your computer, it’s all over. It’s a huge risk to maintain your photographs in a digital medium.”
After two years of shooting digital, Heidi Grunwald has started returning to film, overwhelmed by the prospect of cataloging all the photos too easily snapped.
“It’s taking a lot of enjoyment out of photography,” said the mother of a 9-year-old. “I find myself not even using the camera, thinking that if I take photographs of this school event, I’m now going to have to spend a whole week processing them. Why do you need all those pictures? Who’s going to look at them all at the end of the day?”
Many parents acknowledge their kids may never want all the photos, but they say they’d like to have them available just in case they want them — particularly as they become parents themselves.
“Now that I have children of my own, I would love to see baby pictures of me to see if my daughter looks like I did, what characteristics I share,” said Thea Jankowski of Saint Charles, Ill.
Until that day comes, many of the photos are being distributed to family and friends via e-mail and photo-sharing Web sites — in some cases exposing their child’s most private moments to the entire world.
Some parents buy additional disk drives to archive photos, burn them on CDs or keep copies online — not always mindful that photo sites often make it difficult to retrieve the original, high-resolution versions necessary for quality prints.
Brian Gilbreth of Louisa, Va., simply buys new memory cards for his camera. He has four already, each holding 2,000 shots of newborn Ava, including “every outfit she’s in, every facial expression, every hairdo she comes out with.”
Nie, who lives in New York, has been taking monthly shots of her child in the same armchair, each with a birthday cake. It’s today’s equivalent of the formal portraits past generations took at J.C. Penney or Sears.
Alexa Schmid, mother of twins in Plymouth, N.H., snaps shots of her daughters “recognizing each other, playing with each other.”
She stores the images on the computer with separate subfolders for each month, and she renames some files — as in “Isabella Playing” with the date — in hopes of remembering the context years from now.
Jennifer Lucas, of Frankfort, Ill., makes prints of the best photos and keeps them in a traditional album. She keeps the rest by month on CDs.
“Looking back at what my parents have of me, there might be 20 to 30 pictures from my entire first year,” Lucas said. With Jack, born four months ago, “we already have hundreds documenting everything he’s already done. Chances are those discs are never going to be looked at again when he gets older, but they will be there in case.”
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