You may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve added anything new here.
Life gets busy.
Summer trips happen. Family needs our help. Life events ask us to be fully present. Projects pile up. Sometimes the things we enjoy—including writing a blog—simply have to wait while we live the moments that matter most. I spend much of my time helping families with organizing photos, but this summer reminded me that before we organize our memories, we have to make them.
This summer took us to the Midwest to say a final goodbye to my husband’s mother. Along the way, we enjoyed long-overdue visits with extended family and dear friends. One unexpected gift from that trip was discovering a collection of photographs of my husband’s late father that no one knew existed. As someone who helps people preserve family memories, that felt especially meaningful. Those photographs arrived at exactly the right time.
Our travels also took us to Southern California to welcome a beautiful new granddaughter into the world. Between cuddling a newborn, helping entertain her energetic toddler brother, and watching our own children become parents, I was reminded once again how quickly one generation becomes the next.
There were long stretches of highway where my husband and I simply enjoyed being together. We explored places we’d never been, stood in awe of waterfalls, rivers, mountains, and beaches, watched wildlife with the curiosity of children, and found ourselves having conversations that wandered through the past, the present, and the future.
Some days were filled with rigorous hikes. Others were wonderfully quiet—like watching the clouds create stunning drama in the distance as we drove for hours across North Dakota with little else to distract. Or standing beside a lake, watching raindrops create ripples that stretched outward until they met other ripples. There were several perfect reminders that even the smallest moments can have a lasting impact.
And yes…we took plenty of photographs.
People live their lives every day, and sometimes life simply asks us to live it, trusting that we’ll organize the memories when things become a little quieter.
We don’t neglect our photos because we don’t care.
We neglect them because we’re busy living.
Every overflowing phone, every dusty box of printed photographs, every reel of film, and every stack of old home videos tells me the same story—not that someone failed, but that someone has lived a life full of moments worth remembering.
I have a confession to make: I still take far more photos than I need.
One thing my clients have taught me, though, is that only a fraction of those images become the photographs we’ll treasure years from now. The duplicates, the near-duplicates, and the ten attempts to capture the “perfect” shot can almost always be narrowed down to one.
Our story doesn’t need to be a frame-by-frame account of our lives.
The photographs that truly matter are the ones that make us feel something—the ones that instantly transport us back to a conversation, a laugh, a hug, or a season of life we never want to forget. Those are the images worth preserving for future generations.
I’m still working on breaking my own habit of taking too many photos, but I’ve become much better at curating the collection that will one day be passed on to our children.
Instead of leaving them thousands upon thousands of images to sort through, I want to leave them a thoughtfully organized collection of the people, places, and moments that helped shape our family’s story.
After all, they’ll have plenty of their own memories to preserve someday.
If there’s one thing this summer reminded me, it’s that preserving memories doesn’t begin with organizing photos—it begins with living a life worth remembering.
When the adventures settle down and you’re ready to make sense of the photos you’ve collected along the way, that’s where I love to help. Whether your memories live on your phone, in dusty boxes, or somewhere in between, my goal has never been just to organize pictures. It’s to help you preserve the stories they’ll tell long after today’s little moments have become tomorrow’s cherished memories.