If you are reading this from the pages of The Sullivan County Democrat or on our online site, please take a minute and look around the room. Like so many of you I have photographs arranged all over my house. Whether displayed on table tops or hanging in frames on the walls they represent snippets of memories.

As an aside, my opening paragraph contains the first time I have used the word snippet in a column. It derives from the Dutch word “snippen.”  Originally used to describe a piece of cloth cut with some scissors, it has come to mean a small part or piece of anything.

Stored in boxes and crates in my basement are hundreds of loose photographs and albums that contain images of my family’s history. They bring back cherished memories. Looking at my photos, I get a Ringo Starr song in my head. It starts like this. “Every time I see your face it reminds me of the places we used to go, but all I’ve got is a photograph and I realize you’re not coming back anymore.”

Before the cell phone, you actually used a camera. You loaded it with film and made sure you had batteries in it. After a few photos, you took the roll of film out and brought it to a store that processed it. A week later you would go pick it up. Opening the envelope, you hoped that a few didn’t show your friends with their eyes closed. I guess that’s one advantage of the cell phone. You know immediately if it’s a good picture or a bad picture. Let’s face it, instead of having thousands of pictures stored on your cell phone you had thousands of pictures in envelopes that you will probably never look at again.

Cell phone cameras changed how we keep our memories. But there should be an easier way to access them. 

My cell phone camera pictures are taken and stored on my phone. I checked them this morning and found out that I have pictures from over eight hundred different locations since I started using my cell phone. Most of them are stored in something just called my “album.”  However, it’s so random that I rarely find anything.

For example, I have an iconic picture taken of me and Derek Jeter during the filming of his Gatorade tribute commercial when he retired. Whenever I meet a Yankee fan, I scroll through hundreds of pictures to locate it. I have a solution that would help.

I think it would be a big advantage if the cell phone gave you an opportunity after you took a picture, to press a button and verbalize college, family vacation, friends etc. Instead, I have to go to the cell phone to look for the picture that needs to be kept. Then I decide where to store it before typing in the location. It’s so bothersome I very rarely do it. So, it joins the other photos in the generic album.

One advantage of cell phone photo storage is giving you the option of deleting duplicates. I don’t know what they mean by duplicates. Are they exactly the same or are they similar? In any event, that makes me go through the hundreds of pictures I have on my phone to assess the duplications.

I suppose I should create a category called “selfies” on my cell phone. In 2001 a group of Australians created a website and loaded the first digital selfies on the Internet. That website was so popular that it became a global phenomenon. Since then, celebrities, influencers and everyday people share their self-portraits across all social media platforms.

Perhaps the most famous selfie occurred during the 86th Academy Awards over 10 years ago. During that broadcast Ellen DeGeneres spontaneously gathered a star-studded group including Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, Angelina Jolie, Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and Kevin Spacey. That candid moment resulted in a photo that broke Twitter records amassing over two million retweets within two hours. To this day that remains a record.

Hudson Cooper is a resident of Sullivan County, a writer, comedian and actor.