As I read one of today’s(13 Mar) Straits Times front page article, “National service : 50 years,  One Million Memories” with a photo of Supt Yep holding up photos of himself and fellow officer along with other photos layout in front of him and him commenting that whenever he feels nostalgic about his police service,  he looks for photos of himself posing with his fellow officer during his full-time national service days. 

This again highlighted to me that photos in physical prints truly stand the test of time when it come to reliving precious memory. In today’s digital era where images are so conveniently captured and in many more “copies” are on the contrary tough to retrieve to relive one’s precious memory. I reckon why this is so is the very convenience of capturing memories in digital format results in the end state of the digital image residing in countless storage like memory cards, cloud storage or some other data archiving devices. The literal countless images captured digitally makes the retrieval of specific events a tedious and unappealing effort having to scroll through the many directories to locate specific memorable events. It comes as no surprise that if one wants to look back on photos captured 10 years ago for any event,  most will be put off in doing so if he needs to scroll through the many directories in his storage device just to locate it or most may have forgotten where those images resided in.

However if memories of events were printed out in photo books and proudly displayed in cupboard, the efforts needed will be minimal as the uniqueness of each photo books make the retrieval of photo books of any event from any storage cupboard an easy task. In the past, we tend to archive our printed photos by category in shoe box or in small photo albums with slip in slots for single photo and paste-on for our commentaries. Not only does p;log photo books do away with all of the above, p;log photo book also provide user the ability to professionally create themed photo books for every single event with user commentaries printed in any desired pages from a long list of available selectable fonts.

The advancement of technology is a double edged sword, while it make the capturing of memories a lot easier, it make the retrieval a lot more tedious. The efforts needed to create photo books of memorable event no doubt double that of digital archiving but the returns in enjoying those memories far outweighs the efforts needed. 

I am sure most will agree that passing your kids a collection of photobooks of the many holidays and memorable events in their life make the memories more close to heart and relivable compared to handing them a storage device or Cloud address of where those images reside which may run the risk of incompatible format 10 years on. 

The nostalgic feeling when one flips through pages of a photobooks can never be replicated by the clicking of a mouse to scroll through the digital images on a monitor. Like what is depicted in the Straits Times article on Supt Yeo 50 years on,  whenever he feels nostalgic about his police service,  he looks for photos. 

The convenience of p;log photo book is what make us all want to flip through and relive the pleasant recollection of our past history. Let us make us of technology to enhance our ability to recollect our pleasant memory with ease vs being a victim to losing it among the constant flood of information.

Clara Chua

My boy is in Secondary 1 this year and a marked difference I notice between his secondary and primary school days are that secondary school teachers are more proactive in broadcasting students activities via online or mobile media to parents along with photos attachments on every major class events. Though a mobile phone is not a stated pre-requisite for every secondary school child, it is nonetheless a necessity and it can be qualified that every students carry one. 

With teachers constantly pictorially updating parents on major class events, a good project for every secondary students will be for the students in a class to combine broadcast photos from their teachers along with photos taken with their mobile to pictorially document their activities along with commentaries in p;log photo books on a termly or bi-termly basis. This is a good “archiving” class project which will enable them to pictorially document and literally look back with fond memories of the activities they had carried out as a class. 

Clara Chua