T-Minus 498: Take A Picture And Keep A Memory

Purging is difficult. We look at something and all the memories come back. It might be some clothes that a child wore as a baby, or a book that we read each night. Nearly everything we have has memories attached to it. If we throw it away, we are throwing away all of those memories.

To make it easier to throw treasures into the garbage, we decided to take pictures of items so we could look at the pictures and relive the memories. It isn't the same as holding it in your hands, but it is pretty good.

We make a pile of the items we want for pictures (which isn't everything, but it is a lot) and then I line the picture under a good light and use my phone to take a photo. The last step is to do any necessary cropping and adjusting of the photo (which just takes a few seconds). I have probably done 1000 pictures this way in the past several weeks.

After a few days, our Apple iCloud starts to fill up. I download the pictures to my laptop and make a couple of backups. Then I copy the pictures into our Google Drive so it can live in the cloud. This process assures we have four copies of each picture: one in the cloud, one on the laptop, one on a USB drive that goes into our fire safe, and one on a USB drive that goes into my wife's desk draw at work (offsite storage).

It is very convenient to have everything captured electronically. It is a breeze to just flip through all the pictures, to be able to look at the pictures on any device, and to put the pictures into slide shows that act as a screen saver on our smart TVs. Instead of these memories being tucked away in a tote for a decade, never seen - we now have the memories at our finger tips. I share the pictures with our family, and the kids have access to all their old art work. I don't have to worry about it getting destroyed by fire or flood. And best of all? It takes up no room. We don't have to move it to Florida! It is in the cloud and it will go where ever we go.