We’ve heard it time and time again– a picture is worth a thousand words.

I think that’s so true. There’s so much that you can learn by looking at a picture. They tell stories without having to say anything. It’s a moment stopped in time. Pictures are the perfect way to remember moments and feelings that can never really fully be explained to other people. And there’s something special about looking back at a picture and reliving that moment over and over again.

Nowadays every picture that we see is stored on a smartphone. People will pull their iPhone out of their pocket to show you a picture from a recent trip or so you can see how cute their kid is or for other various reasons. We will collect photo after photo, scrolling back up each time we want to see a memory we have made. Photos may be moved from our phones to our computers to make more room to take pictures, growing our collection.

The sad part is that most of the pictures we take only live a digital life. They are stuck on a screen and never get the chance to be printed. Sure, there are some pictures that only you need to see but there are some pictures just begging to be developed. There are events waiting to be hung on your wall but most of them won’t end up there. They won’t end up on a scrapbook page or in a photo album. They will end up on your Facebook page or in an album on your phone. This is the way we live life now– on screens.

I have personally grown up in a family where pictures were taken of just about everything, whether we liked it or not. My life has been heavily documented since I was 2 years old because my mom picked up a camera all those years ago and decided that she never really wanted to put it down. She jokes that I’m “trained” because every time I see a camera I flash a smile automatically.

There are scrapbooks upon scrapbooks full of moments that the Nemitz family has been through. There are pages and pages full of lost teeth, birthday parties and holidays. Sure, there are some old pictures that I look at and cringe but I am so glad to have those albums to document special moments in my life. All those moments stopped in time. A lot of those scrapbook pages were created before the time of iPhones everywhere and the ability to instantly post a moment online for anyone to see.

I have seen such a technology revolution within my lifetime. I remember the days of dial-up internet, where I had to make sure that no one needed the phone so that I could use the internet to go on AIM to chat with friends. I remember when flip phones were cool. Now my iPhone and I are attached at the hip and it gives me contact access to just about anything I want to do or know about. But I can still see the importance of printing your pictures.

I still think that it’s important to not let pictures stay trapped on a screen. It took one event a few years back to make me realize that (mom, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry in advance).

Back in about 2011, our computer got a sneaky virus that basically ended up wiping everything out. All the pictures that my mom had kept on that computer were gone. Anything that wasn’t printed was now lost. There are graduation pictures that we were never able to see again. Moments disappeared because technology failed. Sure, we can still look back fondly on those life events but there is little to no proof that they happened, and that’s sad.

I say sorry to my mom because this was a VERY hard thing for her to experience. I saw her get very emotional about those pictures that she had been collecting that were suddenly gone. She is one of the biggest advocates for printing pictures that you want to look back on because she has experienced the effects of not doing this firsthand. This has also caused me to be an advocate for this because I saw how upsetting it was for memories to be wiped away like that.

Whenever I am with friends, I am always the one who says “let’s get a picture”. I want to make sure moments are documented even if it bugs my friends that I’m always making them pose for pictures. As an early birthday present, I got a digital printer that allows me to have little prints of pictures from my phone. It’s my new favorite thing because it lets me save some of my favorite memories.

I can’t stress it enough: print your pictures.

While it is unlikely that something will happen to ruin your scrapbooks and photo albums, you never know when technology may fail you and those precious moments will be gone in the blink of an eye.