My wife and I (we are both 65) were just opining on the same about photos. We've got boxes of family photos from as far back as the 1930's. The current generation of kids and grand-kids love going through them passing them around, and hearing the stories and memories when we get together here.
Not so much with all the recent (10 yrs?) digital cell phone images stored "in the cloud" or on wherever else.
We've got probably thousands of digital photos that the whole family have taken and shared electronically but they are only seen once or twice, but not shared together in the same way. Something is definitely lacking.
My Dad and Granddad used to take 8mm movies at family occasions. We still have the originals and my son had them all digitized, and sent everyone a CD with the digitized copies. Sure, we look at them too, but I'll tell you it is not the same as breaking out the old 8MM projector and screen and having a "movie" night". Unfortunately, that old film is way to delicate now for much of that. I guess that is the only saving grace of digitization in my book.
I think all of that is why I am desperately sticking with my film cameras.
That being said, I've owned and used some digital cameras since the days of the early Sony Mavica.
Without judgment here, I've never considered film and digital photography to be the same animal.
To my eye and mind, I see a distinct difference between photographs taken with a film camera to images taken using a digital camera.
I've never gotten into developing my own film. I've had neither the strong desire, space , time or money.
I have a very good computer, excellent software and a couple of good quality photo printers and a nice scanner. However, side from some resizing, I've not been very interested in the manipulation and enhancement of my film or digital images using computer software.
The cost of ink and paper for a quality photo printer is exorbitant.I doubt very much that when you start printing very many digital images, the cost is less than developing and making film prints.So much for saying digital is "free".
Ok off the soapbox, I have and frequently use digital (both cell phone and camera) especially for snapshots. I still prefer photo prints to digital images.
Just sayin'....
Bill