OF all the niggling jobs I have been putting off forever - applying for PPI, updating my address book, learning what the little symbols on my mobile actually do, shredding all the bank statements and other documents that I fill endless plastic bags with - there is one which has involved the most procrastination.

Instead of increasing my pile of photographs that now go back several years, possibly more than a decade, I keep telling myself I'll arrange them all into albums. Maybe not chronologically, since I'm no longer sure when most of them were taken, but in order of particular holidays, city breaks, special occasions, family get-togethers etc.

I will get around to this soon, I promise myself. All I need is a rainy Sunday afternoon. I've been promising myself this since about 2005.

In the meantime, the box that I keep shoving photographs into is now so full I can barely lift it. It would take a week to sort through it all, rather than a spare Sunday afternoon.

The very idea of a photo album seem so dated in an age where a photo is something to be shared on Instagram and immediately forgotten. I doubt that anyone under the age of 25 will even know what an actual photo album is.

I feel like a dinosaur for still getting my photos printed, but I don't like the idea of storing them all on a disc. What if the disc disintegrates? What if your back-up fails on your laptop and you lose all your family photographs? That would be unthinkable for me. My photographs are the first things I'd reach for if my house was on fire (and if I could actually lift the box they're stored in).

Call me old-fashioned, but I love looking through photo albums, I like the feel of them and the fact that they've been around for a long time, and will still be there for future generations to look at. I love the old sepia portraits of my grandparents as young people, black and white photos of my parents in the Sixties, and early snaps of my siblings and I as infants.

There are holiday pictures taken throughout my life, photos of my schooldays and student years, hairstyles I'd rather forget, clothes that make me cringe, boys whose names I no longer remember, friends I haven't seen in years, captured forever in youthful, carefree snapshots of a life once lived.

In the past I took the time to put photos into albums, and alongside them I'd include things like ticket stubs, leaflets, postcards and handwritten notes; treasured reminders of holidays and happy times. I once went to an exhibition at the National Media Museum of Victorian photograph albums, and was delighted to see tickets, scraps of fabric, locks of hair and other treasured items arranged alongside the photos. They were a sentimental lot, the Victorians, but they put a lot of care and love into those albums; and now they are slices of social history.

And that's what I fear will be lost if we no longer preserve physical photographs. It's all so instant now. It didn't seem like that long ago when we were taking rolls of film off to be developed, then waiting for several days to get them back.

Pictures taken over the years reflect photographic trends. I have one of my grandad as a toddler in a formal Edwardian family portrait, and one of my dad and his sisters as teenagers walking along Blackpool front, taken in the 1950s by one of the seaside photographers who took group shots of people on the prom, in the days before everyone had a camera.

These photographs are part of me. I just need a spare Sunday afternoon to sort them all out.

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