Fifty years ago I was looking towards the future; my photography was "capturing today before it changes and becomes tomorrow" - the results of my efforts went mostly into organized collections of slides, but small amounts went into photo albums {especially after I had a wife who is more organized than I am}. Today I am busily scanning media and creating computer files that reflect the slide files they replace. I hope that one of my daughters will see value in this, but once I'm gone that won't be my concern.

I too was collecting a huge number of photos that I felt were sitting, unseen, on SD cards and hard drives. But I came up with a solution that lets me and my houseguests enjoy the photos on a daily basis. First, I bought an 8TB Netgear network attached storage (NAS) drive, which has wireless capabilities, regardless of whether or not the computer is turned on (the NAS is always on). I copied all of my photos (over 250,000) onto the NAS drive. I then bought over a dozen Pix-Star digital picture frames that also have wireless capability. I then set it up so that each frame displays a particular group of photos. Two of the frames are 15" and are turned on via remotes -- I use those to display special collections, usually recent photos from holidays or vacations (I had custom wood frames made and hung these on the wall; I also had wall outlets installed right behind those two frames so you can't see the electrical cords; the quality of the display is far better than the attached photo can show). The smaller frames I set up to display all my other photos -- not all 250,000, but over 100,000 (so I rarely see the same photo twice in a short period of time). Also, the smaller frames sit on tables or shelves and turn themselves on via built-in motion-detectors, so I never have to bother with them. Guests are always fascinated by all the photos and I'm constantly surprised to see photos I may have forgotten about long ago. Was this expensive? Yes. Was it worth every penny? Absolutely. Now, every day, I know why I take photos. It's not enough to collect -- they have to be seen. I think of the old philosophical question: if a photo is taken and it only exists in digital form and nobody ever looks at it, is it really an image?

Funny you should ask. I was just thinking about me and my photographs, and my mind wandered into existential territory. Like many here, I now have probably 40,000 or more. All but a few dozen are in electronic format on my various hard disks. A few hundred are on my FineArtAmerica.com account.

What occurred to me the other day is that all this work over the last dozen years is so ephemeral. A couple keyboard commands and all is simply gone, kaput. The only thing that keeps them real is me. And when I'm gone? Oh, I have a couple daughters, but they have their own lives. They won't fret over my work.

This mental epiphany has led to a decision. I plan to create a series of photo books using some of my best shots, hopefully in some sort of rational order. Not a whole library of thousands of photos, but just 4 or 5 books of the best. I realize they may end up in a landfill some day, but at least they will give me a little comfort in my waning years.

I like to carry around a real silver dollar in my pocket. Money has become nothing more than electronic numbers that go from one computer to another. I guess the photo books will give me a similar feeling of reality.