An early casualty of the digital photo revolution was the traditional photo album. During our stay in the UK and Italy last year I took 4,626 photos. Of that vast number exactly none have been printed out.

They are all stored on my iMac, and on two back up drives that sit humming away next to it. If we want to show people the photos we gather around  the television and run a slide show with commentary provided by Jean and I as our guest’s eyes slowly glaze over.

We have lost the tactile fun that is a photo album – and we were reminded of this when my brother and his wife visited last weekend. They had just returned from a trip to Texas and the East Coast of the USA. Upon returning, brother Geoff had taken the memory card from his camera to the local photo printing place and returned with 6×4 glossies. All of which are now in photo albums.

Going through them was a pleasure. All of us huddled around the albums as they were passed around. Fingers pointing at certain shots and describing the situation that went before or after. Turning pages to connect one shot with another. We spent an hour going through them and didn’t realise where the time went.

So here’s the thing. If you’ve got all your photographs sitting on hard drives or CDs of DVDs, go non-digital and print off an album or two. I intend to.