It’s OK to get sidetracked on this nostalgic journey

READER Susan Dicks reminded me of something I have been meaning to do for ages. After a spate of rain, snow and freezing temperatures, she said: “I am not going out in this weather unless I have to, so have been using the time to transfer photographs from old albums into special storage boxes.

It’s a very nostalgic journey. A lot of happy memories.”

I started a similar project some years ago and found it such a nostalgic journey, I kept getting sidetracked by the happy memories.

This is probably not a problem younger generations have because they keep all their photographs on their phones rather than go to the trouble of having prints made.

The whole idea of home photography has changed.

Before smartphones and digital cameras came on the scene with the technology to store thousands of shots, people used cameras that used film and allowed 12, 24 or 36 shots to be taken. Few developed their own films.

Everyone took them to a photographic or chemist’s shop to be developed and printed. Part of the fun was the two or three day wait and then the excitement of opening the packet outside Boots and inspecting the results.

More often than not, they would go in an album or perhaps a shoe box for safe keeping. And in the years that followed, the shared memories they contained would be the source of fun for family and friends.

Memories much easier to share in a group than bringing them up one at a time on the four inch screen of a phone.

In this digital age, producing prints is easy and exceptionally good value if you use one of the online companies. I print my own which is why, while many of my photographs are stored in dozens of albums, I still have boxes of photographs waiting to be transferred.

Which is time consuming because you can’t just slap pictures in an album in any order. I like to use them in meaningful clusters such as Curry Club, St Patrick’s Night, Wdg anniversary, USA 1976 or Christmas 2016 (all the family getting together in Donegal and walks on the beach).

Everybody has a family archive, either in boxes or stored on the

Cloud, computer or phone. How much more accessible and safe they would be as prints logged in albums with notations before the identities of some are forgotten or your phone is lost without back-up. “Who’s that, then?”

“That’s your grandad.”

“Never.”

The problem is you have to expect to get side-tracked. I’ve just spent two hours looking at old photographs on my computer that I had forgotten I had.