My children have never known a world without cameras. They are photographed constantly — at school, at play, at every milestone and mundane Tuesday in between. They exist in thousands of digital images scattered across phones, clouds, and hard drives that no one will ever meaningfully look through.

And yet they have never sat with a photo album in their laps, turning pages, asking questions about the people in the pictures. This, I realized recently, is a genuine loss.

The Problem of Abundance

We take too many photographs and do too little with them. The average smartphone user captures over a thousand images per year. These images exist in a state of suspended meaninglessness — never deleted, never printed, never arranged into anything that tells a story.

The One-Album-Per-Year Practice

Select fifty to seventy photographs per year. Print them at a proper size — 6x4 at minimum, but larger where the image warrants it. Place them in a simple album with space to write dates, locations, and the small details that memory will otherwise lose.