A High Tech Shoe Box

I don’t know about you but our family has a ton of pictures that have been taken over the 30+ years since my wife Judy and I walked down the aisle. For most of that time, we, like many others, took our photographs using various types of film cameras. You never knew what you got until you fetched the prints from the drug store. Remember waiting a week and then getting pictures of your thumb or the lens cap? The advent of one-day, and then one-hour, photo developing was truly awesome.

The photos were printed and ended up in albums. Thanks to Judy’s discipline, each kid had an individual album, although our third son’s album is much thinner than his older siblings…but that’s another story. She even chronicled our summer vacations with individual albums. As we got busier and busier, the time needed for sorting and saving the snapshots and placing them in appropriate albums got harder to find. Most ended up being stored in a big shoe box on the top shelf of the hall closet. Periodically we would pull them out when we needed to find a picture or just reminisce, but that was not very often. Of course our filing system was non existent, so finding one special photo was next to impossible. How many T-Ball or Soccer team pictures can one family save? Don’t ask!

About six years ago, like many families, we embraced the digital age of photography. No more running to Walgreens or Kroger, no more trying to find negatives, (for those of you under 21, ask someone what a negative is) no more shoe boxes filled with photos. Is this better? Yes and No… The problem is that the photos are now “virtual” and stored in the computer or on CD discs and/or media cards. In order to see them you need to have a computer. This is really not much better than the shoe box. Perhaps we can call it a high tech shoe box.

I have a possible solution to alleviate at least some of this hassle. It is called the digital picture frame. Perhaps you have seen one in stores or in catalogs. We gave one to each of our kids for Christmas and they seemed to be big hits. With the graduation and wedding season upon us, you, too might find this a good gift idea.

Essentially this device consists of a LCD screen (like the ones found on lap top computers) and a card reader. You store the pictures that you want to view on a small media card and insert the card into the picture frame. The pictures are displayed on the screen. You can set the device to change the picture each minute, each day or each week. Some even play back video clips.

The frames come in various sizes from 5”x 7” up to 10”x 14” and can be placed on a table or on the wall like a traditional picture frame. They do need electrical power so you do need to have a wire connected. They cost between $50 to $200 depending on the size and the clarity of the image.