Erin Yarwood is a journalism senior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
Every quarter, I take hundreds of photos. Nights out, sunsets, screenshots, selfies to my mom, the list goes on. My memories live in my Photos app, and yours probably do too. But when was the last time you scrolled back to actually look at them?
We’re taking more photos than ever, but we’re also forgetting about more of them. Our digital habits and easy access to snap a photo mean our most meaningful memories are getting buried in a sea of blurry shots, memes and duplicates.
Especially in college, we should be more intentional about how we store the moments we’ll want to remember years from now. Scrapbooks, photo albums or even a flash drive are more secure and worthwhile ways to do this.
Every few months, I find myself doing a much-needed camera roll cleanout. Sometimes, I’m forced to go earlier than needed when my phone runs out of storage (yet again).
But even with these camera roll cleanouts, I still find that there are just way too many photos on my phone to store effectively. Sure, they get saved to the cloud (whatever that means), but the cloud runs out of storage, too.
Eventually, I turned to Google Photos. But as someone who lives on Google Drive for classes and clubs, that filled up fast. It was frustrating, and it made me realize how easy it is to just lose memories. Not because we didn’t capture them, but because we buried them somewhere we’ll never look again.
An endless stream of full storage eventually led to me buying a hard drive where I saved my most important photos–the ones I thought I would want to look back on in 10 years or show my kids one day. A loose hard drive sitting around didn’t seem adequate to carry my fondest memories, so I decorated it. Suddenly, it felt like something worth keeping safe.
Looking through those photos reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in a while: flipping through old albums as a kid.
For me, these were the times in my life when photos meant the most: pictures of my parents’ wedding, my dad backpacking through Europe in his twenties and baby photos on Halloween every year of my brother and me. And while there may not have been thousands of them, their scarcity is what made them meaningful. They were the best of the best.
It wasn’t about printing everything but choosing the ones that mean the most.
A scrapbook or album, or even a decorated hard drive, should be a practice that doesn’t die. Especially during college, when life moves fast and every quarter feels like a new chapter, saving those moments on purpose matters.
You don’t need to make a photo book for every party, but putting one together with your roommates senior year? That’s the kind of thing you’ll be grateful for later.
If you’re not into printing, make a shared album with all your friends to keep your favorite memories or get a small hard drive and decorate it to match the memories inside. Now, you and I both will have that hard drive with a select group of photos from the past 5 years forever. Not to mention, by getting rid of the rest, I cleared up a ton of space for new pictures… before, I do it again.