I am the youngest of five children. My parents carefully made separate photo albums for each kid, and to this day I am still very aware (but understanding) that there is only one or two albums of pictures of me, and many many more of the older siblings. As much as I'd always wished there were more albums with just pictures of me when I was a kid (because who wants to look at pictures of other people, I ask?), I still appreciated that I had my OWN albums, where I could be assured that I was in every picture.
Fast forward near-on thirty years. I have been keeping my son's pictures on our web site in a /jared directory. Naturally, when Audrey was born, I created a /audrey and started putting pictures there. What to do when I have pictures of both kids, then?
I hadn't decided what to do, so in my indecision I then decided to make copies of those pictures in each of their directories. This means I then re-generate the HTML pages from the raw images multiple times, and I re-upload the same files to the website, and I use twice the storage for a fair amount of pictures than is technically needed.
Tonight I finally sat down to think about it, and realized that that was exactly what I wanted to do for my kids (and hey, it is only two after all). Jared and Audrey will each have their own website and they'll know they are in the pictures on that site. Disk is cheap.
When my daughter graduated from highschool, I wanted to put up some photos of her at her party (which is the tradition here), but I couldn't find too many photos of her alone. In almost every picture, she is with her three brothers or some cousins.
Posted by: jo(e) | November 28, 2005 at 11:50 AM
Not to mention that there will be probably about 100 times as many pictures of our kids as there were pictures of us as kids. With digital allowing us to take 17 pictures of an event, where our parents probably used up one precious flash-cube for an event, we end up with zillions more.
Posted by: Suzanne | November 28, 2005 at 05:10 PM
jo(e) - good thing to remember, I've been taking a fair amount of pics of each of them alone but I haven't been doing it on purpose really, it's just that they're not always together. I'm sure this will be important to them later in life.
Suzanne - indeed, and we're worse than usual in that respect, we're camera nuts =)
Posted by: Cynical Mom | November 28, 2005 at 05:16 PM
Interesting post. I worry that my digital photos won't last as long as the film ones that my parents took. I did start a photo album for both of my kids (in our pre-digital camera days), but I haven't been updating them that much lately (since we got the digital camera--coincidence? or no...).
Posted by: landismom | November 28, 2005 at 08:31 PM
Landis: We keep several copies of our digital photos (But admittedly we're both geeks). One copy is our 'current photos' storage. Periodically we archive a group of those photos to DVD, and then keep a copy of the DVD on a separate hard drive. Then we also upload the HTML web pages to a separate server, so technically we have 4 copies of each photo (only 3 of which are suitable for printing though).
There's a variety of cheap, small printers that can easily do 4x6 prints, just feed them the list of photos, if you're interested. Also there are services like shutterfly and snapfish, I use those when I'm with my family and they want prints of what I shoot. Of course that requires a decent network connection in order to upload, but at least they'll store the photos for free! I especially like snapfish because for a minimal fee they'll let you re-download the original photos you upload, so it's like a nice backup "just in case". So I guess that makes it FIVE copies of some of my photos =)
I do a lot of scrapbooking with our photos, so I do end up having them digitally as well as in hard copy. Of course, I enjoy it, it's not a chore.
Posted by: Cynical Mom | November 28, 2005 at 11:04 PM