What are 640 photos worth to you?

So as some of you may know, Yahoo! Photos will be shutting down for good come September. Before we finally decided to go Flickr Pro a couple of years back, we had been using Yahoo! for all our photos and little did we know, that amounted to almost 640 pics over the course of 2 years. Thankfully, Yahoo! has just completed moving all those photos over to our Flickr account, and everything's finally in one place! :)

Although all the sets, titles and descriptions were retained in the move, I went through a bunch of them just to make sure. And we never tagged them in Yahoo! so I did a whole lot of tagging too. Going through the photos was a little surreal though... These were all taken in 2004 and 2005, so most of them captured us during our Masters program. Those were fun times :) Not that the last two years haven't been fun, but it was just a different kind, with a different group of friends who are now scattered all over the country- well, mostly in the West Coast (actually mostly in a very specific part of the West Coast...) I thought I already had very distinct memories of things that happened in those two years, but these photos just made them even more vivid.

First, there was the time when everyone (literally, I think everyone we invited turned up...) came to celebrate us moving into our apartment (where a grand total of 45 people squeezed and jostled in our little nook), then the many, many, many, many, many, many birthdays that were celebrated over the course of those 24 months; there was Spring Break in New York, rock climbing in Kentucky; and who can forget the utterly indulgent and debauched weekend, otherwise known as Jude's MSI graduation where we had no less than four parties over a span of three days (see here, here and here)? :)

Just thinking about how many memories are captured in photos, and how tenuous online archiving of photos can be, I'm now seriously thinking of 1) getting them all backed-up on discs; and 2) printing some of our favorite ones out and then putting them in albums, like it used to be done in the old days... ;) Ultimately, scrolling through web-pages of photos will never be the same as flipping through a photo album. Ten or twenty years down the road, I want to be able to pull out a dusty old album from the shelf and say to my kid, "Look, at one time, your dad and I survived on only $1500 a month, and we were happy." :)