Nostalgia at your fingertips.

Like most people, I love old, weathered-looking photographs, particularly if they are images of family members or me when I was a kid.  You need look no further than the image I'm using at the top of this page: me as a baby.  I adore this photo, mostly because of how cracked and yellowed it is.  Thank goodness for the digital age, since I can now save this picture on my computer; the original is not long for this world.

As much as I love being able to take hundreds of photos of the girls, and as happy as I am that they will (hopefully) always have all this amazing documentation of their childhoods, I realize that the chances of them having those old, beaten-up pictures of themselves is very slim.  I have started hard-copy photo albums for each of them, since they are always so enjoyable to leaf through, but the majority of their photos will likely remain on a hard drive, only to be seen while scrolling with a mouse, trackpad or touch screen.  As astounding as all this technology is, and as wonderful it is as a parent to be able to catalogue so much of my children's lives, I fear we have lost something tangibly nostalgic in this transition.

Enter a whole slew of Applications (Apps) for your smartphone that will instantly transform your favourite photos into blasts from the past.  I recently downloaded Instagram on my iPhone and I'm absolutely smitten.  And I know I am somewhat late to this party: a great many of my friends have been using these Apps for some time now.  But I feel like a kid in a candy store and I have to stop myself from converting each and every one of my thousands of photos into 70's-era memorabilia.

Case(s) in point:

Oh boy.  A whole new addiction...  I'll try not to go overboard, but I can't promise that you won't be seeing some more photos like this in the near future.  

This isn't meant to be an advertisement or anything, just 

a very excited nostalgia buff finding a shiny new toy.