More either-or, but this one’s a pretty easy call for me: I’d handle losing the photos much better than losing the blog.
That brings up another question: do you back up your blog regularly? I need to set some sort of schedule for that, because I’m quite sure that I’m overdue. I’ll do that tonight. I’m just days from my fifth blogiversary, and losing nearly 1700 posts’ worth of book reviews, travel records, editorializing, and personal history now would be cosmically ugly timing.
Granted, the question is made a little more complicated by that fact that, like many other bloggers, quite a few of my posts are topic-specific online photo albums (and that’s not even counting dedicated features like Friday Foto). I’ve documented a variety of events here–from book signings to family vacations and local travels to Comic-Con to blogger meet-ups–in a mix of words and pictures, and I think those posts are more effective because they have pictures. I’ve also discovered that I really enjoy playing around with photo-editing software and apps, –although I’ll never be the Photoshop guru that my husband is–and I like that the blog gives me an excuse to do that.
Having said that, my Photoshop guru is one reason I’d be OK with losing the pictures. Tall Paul is the photographer in our family; aside from the fact that his photos are better-composed and higher quality than mine, he almost always has more pictures of anything than I do. As long as he doesn’t lose his photographs, we’ll be fine.
There are long stretches of my life that aren’t recorded in photographs–and there are some years that I’m quite happy aren’t documented that way, because I’d really rather not look back at them. Maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle, though; maybe my photographs really aren’t so much for me, and I should be more concerned about preserving them for the next generation. And maybe it’s wrong that I’m not. But for me, the thousand words are worth more. What about for you?
