What do you DO with your pictures?

This is the third and final post in my series sponsored by Windows Phone.

I have no data to back me up, but I’m going to assert that on the very day one becomes a parent, the number of times per hour she snaps a photo increases tenfold. What do you think of my guesstimate?

My husband bought a new fancy camera to prepare for the birth of our first baby, though we quickly realized we weren’t going to master all of it’s functions or carry it around with us, and we exchanged it for something pocket-sized. This was before smart phones had kick-ass cameras.

I remember going to meet an old friend for dinner in San Francisco about five years ago. My son was two and stayed home with his dad. My friend asked if I brought any pictures, so I pulled my huge MP3 player with a video screen out of my purse and showed her a short video of Julian singing Wheels on the Bus.

“You’re such a geek!” she said about my power usage of the new-fangled device.

Now, I think if she asked me to show her pictures, and I pulled an envelope from CVS out of my purse to reveal prints, she might say, “You’re such an old lady!”

I’m sort of at a loss right now with what I should be doing with all the pictures I take. I love that they’re on my phone, with me all the time. Some are marked as “favorites” so that it’s easy to show off a smaller set, ie no pictures of my shoes.

It’s easy to share the images right from my phone on Facebook, Twitter, or via email. I do these one-click actions every day. I even edit the photos, cropping them, pumping up the colors, blurring out the edges, and playing with filters on the Fhotoroom app. But still they remain trapped behind a screen.

I think like many moms, I have a nagging feeling about photo albums I’m not putting together, the scrapbooks that will never be made. If once each year, I order a print or two and put it in a frame in our house, that seems like a success.

On the other hand, maybe that’s enough. Maybe the digital photo album we carry in our purses is not just the means, but also the end. Isn’t the sharing of images easier this way? My parents certainly get more photos sent their way via text message and email than they would if I had to mail prints. When I have dinner out with friends, we can all pull out our phones and give each other little slide shows.

Just like everyone has been saying that the best camera is the one you have with you, perhaps also the best memory book is not the one under your bed, but the one in your purse.

What do you think? Do you have dreams of doing something fabulous with your photos? What happens to your pictures after you take them?

Sponsory information: My Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone is the phone you see above and it’s large glossy screen is fabulous for viewing photographs. If you want to see how your own stuff will look on the phone, play with their Facebook app. It lets you preview the phone with your own photos.

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Whitney

RookieMoms.com co-founder Whitney lives with her husband, son, and daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area where she writes about parenting, crafts, and activities that moms can do with babies in tow. She and Heather also publish 510Families.com, a site for East Bay parents.