There is nothing quite so special and emotional, almost magical, as looking through an old family photo album. It is a precious thing to see your nan’s teenage face and recognize a likeness or glean a precious hint of personality from a photo of your late great-aunt on her once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome. Having a photograph of yourself used to be something important and rare. An album filled with pictures of your ancestors is an immense privilege even now, and always a much-treasured keepsake for future generations. 

Not anymore! One of the wonderful, terrible problems of our modern age is that we are all constantly taking photos. I, myself, have collected just over 22,000 photos on my phone, the product of seven years of selfies, screenshots, and blurry pictures of the moon. Apple informs me I have taken roughly 3,750 this year alone. If I keep this up, I am on track to have 300,000 photos by the time I am 90 years old. Perhaps one day my entire life from womb to tomb will be compiled into an computer-generated Apple “memory” and set to patronizingly upbeat royalty free music.  

The task of curating this ever-growing collection into something manageable and easily accessible to my future self only gets more difficult with each passing day. I can’t help but procrastinate. Yes, maybe the best of the most Instagrammable might be curated somewhere on social media, where they can be easily accessed and flipped through, but many others sit unloved and excluded. Not to mention the existence of my photos are not guaranteed! I am unavoidably reliant on the incorruptibility of Apple and Meta corporations to not only keep them safe but outlast me and my heirs.  

All of this is in defense of what is an inherently an egotistical project dedicated to the preservation of my personal memories and fleeting good looks: my beloved travel scrapbooks. A physical, tangible, flip-throughable set of acid-free tomes containing miscellaneous curiosities, intineraries, and of course plenty of photos from my travels over the last few years. They are collectively my favorite thing that I own and certainly my most expensive! They are a creative outlet, a way to curate my many thousand photos down to a few hundred, and place to note down memories I never want to forget. Going through even now, with the oldest only being three years old, it is like  reliving the experience. Truthfully, I am immensely proud of them. In that great and ancient tradition of gathering hostages around the projector to show slides of your most recent seaside holiday, I too have been known to pull them out for unwilling party guests.  

But think of the children! My potential, non-existent children and the smiles on their faces- and yes, maybe tears- as they flip through illegible receipts and Snapfish Prints to enter the world of a distant past when their mother got sloshed at a tourist hot-spot in Dublin. So grateful will they be to have this curated selection of memories in their hands after all digital photos were accidentally wiped in the Great Apple-Google Wars.  

So, I implore you: go get a scrapbook now! Print out that photo you wouldn’t put on Insta! Glue down those Italian McDonald’s receipts! This is no time to be bogged down by aesthetics, anything and everything will do just fine. It is an urgent matter for the historical and personal record. You, your children, and your children’s children will be glad you did.  

Photocredit: Kirk Cameron on Unsplash