The buzz stirs you from your slumber. Bleary-eyed you reach for the iThing that you know you left down there somewhere, key in the security code and take a look at the notification that is calling for your attention…

‘[Your friend] has tagged you in a photo’

…you scroll through the pictures quickly – sighing, laughing, groaning as appropriate – before locking the screen and rolling back over to try and grab a few precious extra minutes sleep.

We document our lives nowadays in a finer detail than during any time in history – thoughts, films and photos captured with the press of a screen, sent over to the user’s platform of choice and stored…well, nobody really knows where their media is kept do they?!

Hundreds of images, thousands of words. Everything stored in what’s commonly known as the cloud – all of us guilty of being digital hoarders, the pace of technology providing us with easier ways to constantly add to our electronic footprint.

The irony, of course, is the more that we’re sharing the less we’re all actually seeing – social media giants such as Facebook taking the decision out of our hands as to what appears on our news feed. We’re left hoping that friends and colleagues see what we’re uploading but deep down we know that we’ll be lucky if our handiwork is left on a smartphone screen for more than a second’s thought before it’s swiped away forever.

Because when was the last time you went back to look at those photos you were tagged in? Sure, you’ve taken a quick look…whether it’s when you first woke up, during a short coffee break at work or whilst you were sat on the bus with a bit of time to kill but that’s it. We’ve got the ‘instant replays’ a day or so after the event, but we’re lacking the post-match analysis.

Do you remember those trips to Boots, Jessops or TruPrint to pick up the results from the film dropped off the previous week? The feeling as you opened up the sealed packet and pored over the twelve, twenty-four or thirty-six prints that you’d taken with real care so as to not waste one? How you filtered out the ones you didn’t like, but put those that you did in carefully curated albums you went on to show others when you had the chance?

Suggesting we return to doing that is a little excessive but, having become more interested in self-publishing over recent years, I do believe we should be doing a bit more to preserve our memories than simply leaving them in the hands of an online service.

The ease of self-publishing through companies such as Lulu, Snapfish and Blurb has meant we no longer need to slot prints into ring binder sleeves to show them off – anybody’s able to produce professional quality photo books that can be left in the living room, ready to be revisited.

So, next time you find yourself at a loose end with some time to spare have a sift through your smartphone, your social media and those ‘to sort’ folders that litter your computer’s desktop. Collate the snaps that make you smile as you reminisce. Lay them out, place an order and look forward to the feeling as you open up the sealed packet and pore over the finished book that arrives a week later.

Memories like that belong on a coffee table, not in a cloud…