I DECIDED to tackle another one of the things on my ‘to do’ list last week – a serious sort out of the family photographs.

We can’t be alone in the fact that we have hundreds and hundreds of images of our family taking up digital space in phones or in cameras waiting for someone to come along and finally do something with them.

It seems a real shame that, despite always taking pictures  - because it’s so easy now - when we’re out and about, we rarely ever get around to processing them. And really, what’s the point in that?

A very limited number of them might, if they’re of interest to wider family and friends, get uploaded onto social media in some format but most of them languish in files for months, and possibly even years.

The only major exception is our annual family holiday pictures, which I develop into a soft cover photobook as a gift for my parents, with whom we spend the vacation, and I purchase one for ourselves while I am at it.    

Our daughter loves to look through these books, and talks about the pictures and what she remembers of the holiday. The pleasure she takes from this, clearly enjoying her memories, is a real reminder of why photographs can be so wonderful when they’re finally released from their digital prison.   

So, one evening, rather than achieving nothing, I decided to roll my sleeves up and get on with it.... and it took hours. It was midnight by the time I sorted and deleted and organised two-and-a-half years of images into two photobooks.

It made me think that, when my daughter’s older, I’ll be boring her with tales of what it used to be like getting pictures developed.

The latter routine is the reason that there are so many terrible images of those of us of a certain age or older in homes everywhere.

We had to survive the days of having our picture taken and having no power to delete, edit or perfect the image.

We took cameras out and about and enjoyed the delayed excitement of leaving pictures in to be processed only to pick them up a few days later to find out what the end result actually looked like. There were quite often blank black shots in addition to many other imperfections. 

Whilst recently at home, I looked through some of the old albums stuffed with relentless shots of me out enjoying myself with my friends.

I realised that, honestly, if I applied the criteria I currently adhere to re the images of me I permit to exist in the world, only about ten of them would have made the grade!