Picture Overload!

Welcome Alicia Pritchard, our guest blogger this week!! Alicia was born in Winter Park, Florida and spent most of her school age days near New Orleans, Louisiana. After graduating college at Georgia State University with a Business Degree, she ran her own real estate business until … well, you know what happened there! Alicia is now the insurance industry. She is married to Greg and they share a wonderful 3-year old son Aiden, along with Luxor, their very spoiled Maine Coone cat. Alicia’s hobbies include traveling anywhere and everywhere, reading fiction, and being a full-time cruise director for her family and friends.

I must admit, I am obsessed with taking photos of my 3-year old son … well, not just me … but my husband, and especially his grandparents! The first day Aiden was born; there were more camera flashes than a mob of paparazzi! I think we all just want to make sure we remember the moment and enjoy those special times.

In the digital world, I can take hundreds of pictures within one visit to a children’s museum but my dilemma is always what to do with the pictures afterwards. Here are some of the options that run through my head:

(a) Do I upload an entire album to Facebook … only for the Grandparents to view (because, let’s be honest – they are the only ones that I have the time and interest in looking at 527 pictures of my son at a museum! Ha!)?
(b) Do I select a few pictures to upload to Instagram and play around with the colors and special effects? (This could take me hours with all the special little features)
(c) Do I go to a scrapbooking store and try to figure out what to create with my pictures? (And let me just say … I can spend days and a ton of money at a scrapbooking store – honestly though, I have browsed scrapbooking stores in the past and they are just simply overwhelming, I leave with less hope than when I entered!)
(d) Do I save them on my phone and continue to worry that one day I will lose my phone and won’t have access to them ever, ever again? (Even though I have “the cloud” – it still doesn’t give me any relief because I can’t really see this magical “cloud”?)

And my answer is usually “d” since I have no time to do anything else with them.

I remember the good ol’ days when my Mom and I would drive up to the incredibly tiny Kodak store, typically a drive-through, and pick up a package of developed pictures that we had waited possibly weeks for them to arrive. We were so anxious to look at them we would drive a couple of feet away from the Kodak store and start going through them. More than likely, a fourth of them were blurry since we couldn’t preview them like we can today. But at the end of the day, we had our photos printed and even though we put them in picture album that eventually made the pictures yellow … we still had a way to look back and enjoy those special times.At this point, I have hundreds and hundreds of photos saved on CDs, flash drives, laptops, phones, etc… and nothing to show for it and no way to sit down and enjoy them all in one place. I guess I’m showing my age – but at this point – I’m longing for the Kodak drive-through again, I could shove all my storage files in one of those envelopes, tear off the top tag after filling out my name and phone number, and sit back and wait a couple of weeks for someone else to do the work for me …Well, no such luck … I just Googled to find the nearest drive-through and Google doesn’t even come up with an answer… not even one! Not even a sorta, kinda-right answer! Guess I can still hope the “magical cloud” continues to deliver its magic and save my photos until I have more than 3.3 seconds in the day to get organized!