I have spent more than a few hours over the holiday period in sticking some three years’ worth of photographs into albums. There have been periodic catch-ups before, but never quite so big. It all started to go wrong in 2008 because, first, I landed a very busy job; second, ownership and use of cameras in the family expanded; third, cameras started going digital, so there were no longer simple sets of negatives to be rounded up; and, fourth, a lot has been happening. Why do I do this (nobody else in the family would)? Is it a muted expression of the hoarding gene (my brothers and I have inherited scores of albums from our mother)? If not therapeutic, it is certainly meditative; after all, we tend to take photographs of happy or significant occasions – seeing the images again triggers pleasant memories or retrospective reflection. I know, also, that at least one of my children is a frequent traveller through the albums and the memories they contain. But for how long can I can keep up my secret raids on hard disks and computer files, in an effort to keep it all together? Why bother, when everything can now be filed and stored electronically? Well, the more electronically-inclined of my brothers had a ghastly experience in Prague. An insistent burglar did his house over with a pneumatic drill and took everything, including the back-up hard disk salted away in a hidden safe. Now he and his family are bereft of a whole slice of their recorded life. Does it matter? Probably only marginally. Earlier, I put the question to my Facebook crowd. The consensus seems to be that I should just leave the prints (to the extent that there are any anymore) in a shoebox and get on with life. So complete is the digital revolution that I sense I’ll shortly have no choice anyway.