I still miss my old plant journal from 2018 - the one with actual pressed leaves in it

I used to keep a thick spiral notebook where I'd press leaves and flowers between wax paper and tape them in with notes about where I found them. Now I just take a photo on my phone and save it to a folder, but it doesn't feel the same. The colors fade in digital pics after a couple years anyway, and I lost 30+ species photos when my old phone died in 2022. I started a new paper journal last spring and already filled 40 pages with pressed specimens from my backyard. Anyone else go back to analog plant tracking after trying digital?

3 comments

3 Comments

drew79125d ago

The phone thing is a pain but honestly digital works way better for me. My pressed leaves from 2019 are all brown and crumbly now, barely recognizable. The photos on my Google Drive from three years ago still look crisp and I can zoom in on details. I back everything up to two different cloud services so losing a device isn't an issue. Paper is nice for the tactile feel but it degrades way faster than people admit. Those pressed specimens will be brittle dust in another year or two.

the_willow25d ago

Oh jeez yeah the cloud vs physical thing is a real headache. I've lost so many phone photos to dead batteries and cracked screens that I started doing this thing where I email myself important pictures every month. It sounds stupid but Gmail never deletes anything and I can search "leaf collection october 2023" and find exactly what I need. Plus with file formats I just save everything as .jpg since that's basically been the same for twenty years and prob won't change anytime soon. Honestly having both a folder on my computer AND a printed copy of my favorites is the only way I don't lose things.

avery_fox9325d ago

Drew791 makes a good point about cloud backups but the degradation thing goes both ways - digital files get corrupted or lost when services shut down too. I bet those perfect photos from 2019 will look dated when the compression formats change in another decade. There's something to be said for having a physical object right there on your shelf that doesn't need a password or subscription to exist.