The Dilemma of Digital vs. Traditional Scrapbooking: What's a Memory Worth?

By Veronica Rosman, Owner of Have Cricut Will Travel

Last weekend, right after New Year's 2024, I decided to tackle the crazy boxes of extra photos that has been sitting at the top of my closet since we moved to our new house in 2021.

To be clear, these were the leftover photos from all the scrapbooking that I did starting in 2000 when my oldest child was born. These same pictures are already glued into at least 1 scrapbook in my collection. Back in those days, you always printed doubles or triples of your pictures because that was probably the only time you would print those photos. It wasn't like now with digital photos and you can resize and reprint whenever you want.

I went through all the extras and purged all the out-of-focus, dark or just plain boring pictures. I tossed the photos of other people's kids because most of the time, I had already given copies of said children to their parents. And I limited myself to keeping just 1 or 2 of the extra photos from an event, holiday or occasion. . The keepers went back into one of the extra photos box, and the rest went into the discard pile. In the end, I was still left with probably several hundred to-be-discarded photos. The pile was nearly 8 inches tall.

While I expected to feel accomplished for purging the excess, that's not at all how I felt. Nope. When I looked at that huge pile of wasted memories and paper, I felt ashamed and sad. Back then, printing pictures was expensive, not including the cost of buying and developing the film. It got better when digital photos came along, but the quality wasn't great until around 2008 or so. And because of that cost, we didn't take pictures all willy-nilly like we do now. That pile probably represented a $1,000 or more of hard-earned money that I was about to toss in the trash. It was a serious gut punch.

What is the best alternative, you ask? Well, I don't really know. Because now, we simply don't print pictures. They stay on our phones or mobile devices, and sometimes just in "the cloud." Once a year, our social media tries to remind us to remember that cool pool party from 2 years ago or that funny thing our kid said 5 years ago. Seriously, funerals are sadly one of the few reasons that we print photos anymore. We take 100 times more photos in a month now than we did even 10 years ago, but very few will ever become ink on paper. In fact, I have printed less than 200 pictures from the years 2015 to 2020 when I started to switch from traditional paper scrapbooking to digital photo albums because the thought of printing all those years worth of photos was too daunting.

Right now, I am at a fork in the road when it comes to scrapbooking -- using the digital app Project Life is so easy. I design pages nearly the same day that I took the photos. I even journal right on the photos -- some of the old albums still don't have journaling in them. At the end of the year, I print the pages and put them in a 3-ring binder just like I did with my traditional scrapbooking. It's really slick and I get that accomplished feeling. And I don't have a stack of extra photos that didn't "fit into" my pages.

But that's the thing -- I don't have ANY printed photos to pass onto my children. They have a book, and that's it. Plus, I simply don't get the same enjoyment from digital scrapbooking. I miss picking out the papers, matting the photos, and using my Cricut to make die cuts to embellish the page. I miss touching the textures, sniffing the paper smell and even hearing the sound of a paper cutter. I even prefer looking at my traditional scrapbooks over my digital-designed books by far.

So, which is worse... printing photos that you know will waste money and resources, or never print any photos at all?

P.S. My kids went through the discarded photos and took what they wanted. Then, they took pictures of the photos with their phones and tossed the printed picture back into the pile. 

P.S.S. That box of “discarded photos” is still sitting under a chair in my office. I just can’t seem to actually discard it.