May is National Photo Month. Photographs are easier than ever to take and to share—with cell phones and social media we can record our lives by the day or by the minute. But will we remember what every snapshot depicts?
The digital image might record the date and time of the picture. But unless we let a facial recognition program determine who is in the picture, we may forget who those people are. And unless we let our GPS post our location along with the photo, that, too, could get lost.
Plus, the sheer number of pictures we take today can overwhelm us. I must have hundreds of digitized pictures on my laptop—including the one depited above of the Columbia River and Rattlesnake Mountain near my hometown. Most of my pictures are from trips and family events over the last twenty-plus years. Others are digitized images from slides my father and grandfather took.
Then there are the boxes of prints of pictures that date back even before my birth. Most of these pictures are meaningless to anyone other than me. Even I won’t care about many of them in a few years.
I should identify the pictures I treasure, so I’ll remember why I took them and why I saved them. I am grateful to my parents and grandparents who labeled many pictures of generations past. And I wish they had labeled more of them.
How good are you at organizing and labeling your photographs?
Theresa is the award-winning author of historical fiction about settling the American West. Before she turned to writing, Theresa was an attorney, mediator, and human resources executive.
Follow Theresa on her website, https://TheresaHuppAuthor.com, or on her Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/TheresaHuppAuthor.