I’ve never been shy about suggesting to my readers that the act of updating, migrating, and curating old photographic content is important. A phrase popped into my head the other day that went something like, “No one has ever taped a Facebook post into a scrapbook.”

It is a sobering, even depressing, truth that social media isn’t designed to help you share your lives or preserve your memories. It is designed to make money. I know that sounds painfully obvious, but we all know it’s true.

Scanning and archiving photos from our past can be intimidating, because it can often involve getting organized, a difficult and even stressful undertaking. At the same time, though, I always enjoy digging in to old photos, both from my personal life and from my photojournalism, since I almost always find people and events I had entirely forgotten. I find myself smiling and saying things to myself like, “Wow, that was the time that…”

If you don’t have a scanner and don’t want to pay a service to archive your film and prints for you, there are some smartphone apps floating around in the web space that say they can do it for you. You might have to try two or three or ten of them before you find one that’s right for you, but there is a way.

I don’t know if I have a strategy I can give you to get going on a project like this, except to say that every journey starts with the first step.