It seems odd to think that digital photos and files would not last as long as paper or would need more maintenance.

Technology is changing so quickly and we do not often maintain our files, so that they are still accessible. My father-in-law was an English professor for 30 years. It was not infrequent that he would have a student once and then a couple of years later have that student again (he was a very popular professor) and he pointed out how once how a student had some papers saved on a 8” floppy disk, but a couple of years later could no longer access them because the new standard was a 5-1/2” floppy. Throughout my own education, I started with 5-1/2” floppies and technology advanced to 3” floppies, CD’s, flash drives, to various sizes of SD cards. My current laptop has an SD card slot and USB access, but no disk drive.

In regards to photos, when someone passes away, do we sort through albums and boxes and bins of photos or do we get on their digital devices and sort through the digital photos that they have?

Another problem with these digital archives is access. I have Amazon Prime Photos which backs up the photos taken on my phone; however, my children do not have my Amazon password (they are far to tech savvy to have access to my Amazon Prime account) and my husband cannot remember the password. My husband uses Google Photos and I do not know his passwords. My cell phone has a password, which my children also don’t have. (As a photo organizer, I do have back-up copies of files and photos.)

Lastly, digital files can be vulnerable. Computers crash, files become corrupt and it horrific cases ransomware can hold files hostage.

I have four children and it takes a while after the arrival of each one for a new normal to be achieved. Downloading photos was not high on the priority list when sleep deprived with an infant. Probably around the time my youngest was a year old, I wanted to go through the photos we had of her and make an album. When I got the card out of the digital camera it was corrupt and I could not access the photos. The only photos I have for October 2011 were those taken on my cell phone and not our nice digital camera, since I wanted nice quality photos taken of the day we got her, I had only used our digital camera. So no pictures of “gotcha-day” or any of her first month with us.

My girl after trick-or-treating. The only photos I have of her first month with us.