I got a voice mail from my aunt -- somehow my wedding album from 10 years ago had ended up in her two-car garage in Orlando. Amazing how money that had once seemed well spent (your grandkids were going to look at those pictures) had turned into a plummeting stock.

But where else could that photo album reside? Those certainly weren't photos that I wanted to see again.

Then it struck me -- what do you do with an old wedding album? Or photos with an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, ex-husband or wife?

Do you just throw them in the trash? That doesn't seem so eco-friendly. Do you delete them permanently from your hard drive? Shouldn't Kodakgallery.com or Picasa.com come up with an option to handle this situation?

In the movies, women gather together and throw old photos into a bucket, chant malicious words about the ex and then set the photos on fire as they sip wine and watch them burn. But who has printed photos anymore?

The digital era has changed how you document your relationships. As I view friends' pages on Facebook, some have endless albums of themselves on various trips or with their better half.

One friend had more than 100 photos of himself and his girlfriend. So I sent him a message, saying they looked happy together and asking why I had never met her. I figured from all the photos that they had been together for a long time. I was wrong. They had only been dating for two weeks; the photos were all from one afternoon on Lincoln Road.

So what happens if my friend ends this relationship? Will he just remove the photos from his Facebook, but save them in an archive folder on his computer? Or will he delete them altogether?

What about those vacation photos -- do you Photoshop out that certain someone standing next to you under the Eiffel Tower? At a recent photo-op with some of CoolGirl's cousins, I made sure to stand on the end, just in case she ever decides to clip me from the print.

Perhaps before the digital camera explosion, it was an easier time. You were limited to 24 or 36 exposures on one roll of film. Your biggest concern was whether to get single or double prints, and you always chose double so you could share the photos with whomever you were dating. You could build an album or a memory book to remind you of the good times. And if those times ended, you could take your disappointment out on the photos -- shred them, wad them up, throw darts at them -- or just toss them into a box and forget them.

Curious, I asked CoolGirl how she handled this dilemma. Aside from the Orlando discovery, I had a box with photos of women I dated after my divorce and wondered what should become of it.

She said that as more time passed after her previous relationships, fewer photos remained. As she would go through her stuff, the photos didn't have the same meaning, so she would toss them.

''They are memories that should last in your head, not in an album,'' she said. ``The only time you really want to see those types of photos again are when you are 87 years old and recounting your life history.''

I guess there's no picture-perfect answer.

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