How Can a Digital Photo Frame Revive Old Memories and Connections?

[anorlunda]

I discovered something really fun, that I would like to share.

I bought a cheap ($30) digital photo album. It is cheap because it has no memory, just a USB port for a thumb drive.

I also have more than 29 thousand pictures in my folders, some on the hard disk, some in the cloud. I even have digital copies of my parent's photo albums. But editing, pruning, and annotating so many pictures is tedious and an impossible chore. So for many years, that collection grew and sat unused. I never looked at those pictures because there were too many of them.

So I put all 29000 on a thumb drive, and set the picture frame to run on a never-ending slideshow in random order 24x7. What fun! My wife and I have discovered many delightful but forgotten pictures and moments.

The follow-up steps made it even more fun.

1. I chose one picture per day to post on Facebook. Most of the choices were of relatives, and I posted them as "Guess who?" challenges. My relative Facebook friends loved that. It is so much more fun than endless advertisements and reposts of jokes and political stuff that one sees on FB. The original idea of FB was for people to publish their own content, and their own pictures, not to publish likes and shares.
2. I keep another copy of the thumb drive contents on my PC. Several times per day, I see pictures that need to be rotated, or deleted from the collection. So over the period of years, the collection will become refined and improved and I'll be able to hand it down to my descendants.
   
   Doing that for all the pictures at once is tedious, but doing it for individual pictures a few times per day is fun.
   
   I wouldn't need the PC if the remote for the picture frame included a DELETE button and a ROTATE button. Too bad, maybe then next version will do that.
3. When I see a picture of a friend who I haven't contacted in years, I email it to them. That renews old acquaintances, which makes them happy and me happy. For many modern people who do not live in the village of their birth for their entire life, keeping up with old friends is difficult. Sharing pictures is a lubricant.

Anyhow, it is a small way to alleviate some of the boredom brought on by COVID.

 

[chemisttree]

Taking new ones is fun too.

 

[gmax137]

When I see a picture of a friend who I haven't contacted in years, I email it to them. That renews old acquaintances, which makes them happy and me happy.

I did this yesterday. By brother found an old photo (1969) of us with one of my friends; he snapped a photo of the print and texted it to me. I tracked down my old friend and emailed him the photo. Its probably been 20 years since he and I communicated, now we're sharing news and other photos.