SHE’S pulling tongues on the photograph – eyes scrunched up behind milk bottle lenses and a tumble of curls veiling part of her face.

It’s the sort of image you would rush to delete, despite others insisting they like it, that one that would cause you to invoke a Facebook ban.

I wonder what her reaction was, when my grandfather pulled it dripping from the developing fluid and pegged it out to dry.

Did my grandmother try to prise it from his grasp as he stuck it carefully into the small green album, or did she laugh at the memory of that day?

Now there is nobody to ask. There hasn’t been for many years – I never met my Dad’s father and his mum died when I was three.

But this photograph, and others in the same album, show a side to them I wish I had got to know.

Once, long before they wondered at the wrinkles in the mirror, they were young and free – performing handstands on the beach and twirling giant paper parasols round and round for the camera.

It’s a new task of mine – going through the boxes of old pictures in my parents’ loft and preserving them digitally for family members not yet born.

The most magical are the negatives – thread them anonymously into the scanner, and wait for the image to flash up on the screen.

What will it be? A moment in time captured in the blink of a shutter – me standing arm in arm with a friend since lost; my sister blowing out the candles on her fourth birthday cake; both of us on stage in the old Irish Centre, on Mount Pleasant, a pair of crepe paper-cocooned Christmas angels.

If I’m really lucky, I find a picture that captures a memory or reflects an old family yarn repeated to me throughout my childhood.

There are older photographs, too, of people from a place so far in the past that I have never heard their names or the stories that bind them.