I have been thinking a lot about digital photographs lately. It occurred to me that with the advent of cell phone cameras, our pictures (and the associated memories) have become economically worthless in a sense. Since we now have the ability to take, edit and store potentially hundreds of photos in a month, there is no scarcity. There is no special skill required to capture a moment. In the past, we had shoeboxes, photo albums or scrapbooks full of physical photographs. There was time and money invested in getting a good shot and getting pictures developed. I think we balked at throwing photos away because they represented a physical object with some intrinsic economic value. We even kept overexposed, garbage photos if they were the only snippet of an important memory that we had.
Digital storage (to me) is not the answer. Formats change (try finding a computer with a CD ROM now). Servers get wiped. People accidentally delete stuff. I believe that the chances of my grandchildren being able to view any photo that doesn't exist as a printed copy is nearly zero.
I also don't believe that shoeboxes full of crummy photo prints is necessarily the answer. So I tried something out. Below are some shots of a photobook that I designed using a print on demand service. It also includes some of my original (but admittedly goofy) writings that accompanied social media posts with some of these pictures. I think I will be working towards compiling and printing one of these for each of my kids every year or so...

That's an excellent project. Thank you for sharing.

I have a friend whose wife is a hobby photographer. She has very nice hardbound photo books made quite frequently by some company that offers that service.

Nice to be able to share good photos and memories like this. Perhaps this might entice others to start taking more pictures.