Not really an argument against digital cameras

This morning, while driving my husband and my daughter to school (this isn’t a weird confessional; he’s a teacher), my husband announced that he was going to copy all our daughter’s pictures onto our new computer, so that we could have them all in one place and backed up.

That sounded reasonable, so I said, okay. Then our conversation went something like this:

Bobby: Then I’m going to e-mail them to myself one at a time.
Me: …whuh?
Bobby: So that they won’t ever be lost.
Me: …you realize how many pictures and how many MBs that is, right?
Bobby: Yes.
Me: Even if you don’t explode our ISP connection, you’ll explode your inbox.
Bobby: So I’ll make up a new gmail, just for the pictures.
Me: You know how long that’s going to take? Why not just get another flash drive?
Bobby: We might lose that or it might become corrupted.
Me: …you’re a freaking nutcase.
Bobby: But if our apartment burns down, I’ll be a nutcase with pictures.

On one level, I really understand this: We upgrade our computers every few years, and more than once we’ve had computer mishaps where we lost everything on the hard drives. But although I could say, “Hey, maybe we should go back to using film,” it’s not really an argument against digital pictures. If we had a scanner, I know that we’d probably back up our print-pictures digitally, too.

But HOLY CRAP that’s a lot of pictures.

…and five bucks says that, within a year, he forgets the password to the new e-mail account.