BL suggested that I blog about how-tos on this new orientation of Marketing Excellence and Mack blogged recently about adding customers’ posts to corporate blogs. That gave me the idea of starting to feature posts and experiences with our products from bloggers that I meet randomly in the blogosphere. I will feature primarily Moms, our primary customer basis, but not only. Hopefully that will give other readers ideas on digital photography.

Meet Kendall who is preparing to retire and live very frugally and simply on social security. She is downsizing for retirement, getting rid of boxes of photographs taken between 1945 and the present and cumbersome albums. Here are extracts of her Snapfish experience.
 

I’ve spent the last couple of days sorting through my life in photographs, from birth to the present moment, preparing to let go of yet another big box of artifacts. An online photo processing center called Snapfish is offering 30% off what they call “memory books.” That spurred me into a new phase of my continuing effort to lighten the weight of what I haul through life with me.

I’ve taken digital photographs of the best of my old photographs (using the macro feature, trying to avoid glare and reflections, which is no small task), then compiled the photos digitally and arranged them into pages of a variety of formats which Snapfish will print in a “linen”-covered book. Lighter still is my Flickr account, where the pictures can stay for as long as Flickr lets them. I made the most recent set of photographs private, to protect my daughters’ privacy mostly, but the rest are all public, and I put all my “favorites” together in a set called (who would have thought of this?) “Favorites,” making juxtapositions that made sense to me and sometimes made me gasp. The stories behind those juxtapositions are all the books I haven’t written–fiction, of course. All my stories are fiction. If the people who appear in the pictures with me could speak and tell the story they remember, it would be completely different from mine. 

Loading pictures up to Flickr is easy. Leaving them there and disposing of all the originals requires a certain amount of trust. Could Flickr crash and lose them all? Will Flickr suddenly start charging people to store their photographs? I wonder. That’s why I went for the Snapfish book as a backup.

Creating the book with Snapfish took endless hours, even with DSL (I don’t know if this is a universal difficulty or if my new DSL modem is malfunctioning), because every time I added or subtracted a photograph, added a caption, or deleted something, the computer stopped, whirred, made grinding noises and grunts, and often froze up entirely, making it necessary to restart, do a few yoga stretches or make a cup of tea, and go through it all again and again. But after about 32 hours of effort, I have it. In a week or so, when I get the book, it will be possible for me to whip through the last 62 years in 26 glossy pages and to throw an entire bin full of photographs into the nearby dumpster. This whole process has been rather like a ten-day meditation course. My children’s childhoods are there, of course; all the old romances that crashed and burned; some friends who still send me emails are there, along with many who have died or disappeared; my acting and writing careers are there; my career as a college professor. All the joy and attempt, all the love, all the sound and fury: signifying something. One small life. Mine. The only one I can ever really know.