Armed with digital cameras, America is clicking away at every wobbly toddler step, every tenuous Little League swing, every picture-perfect vacation stop.

But many of those images are being lost in the black hole of cyberspace, says a survey commissioned by independent photo labs.

Dan Marsula, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version.

The Harris Poll survey of 3,021 people nationwide reports that 61 percent of digital camera owners said they had lost images -- by computer problems (20 percent), deleted from camera by mistake (14 percent) and deleted from computer by mistake (13 percent).

Even when they aren't lost, most images aren't being printed. "We estimate that of the digital images, only 13 percent are being printed," says Steve Lasher, director of PicturesMatter.com, an association of independent photo labs that commissioned the Harris Poll. "The longer you put it off, the less likely you are to do it. The job gets bigger and bigger. You get in the habit of not printing, mothers in particular."

Beth Anne Edwards, a Mt. Lebanon mother, has a photo of her 11-month-old daughter, Ali, on her desk from when she was a 6-week-old baby. Edwards hasn't gotten around to replacing it with one of the hundreds of updated digital images.

"I take tons of pictures and I love taking them and we love looking at them and the kids love looking at them. But then I never print them out," she says with a laugh. "I even have the capability to print them at home. It's just time."

She is not worried about losing the computer images because her husband backs them up on a CD.

Scott Richards, a Highland Park father, prints out maybe two of his favorite digital photos out of every 100 he snaps. He backs up the rest of his digital images every month, but he worries about losing photo files in the interim.

"I am terrified of a computer crash," he says. "It would be like a home fire."

That's a growing issue now that digital cameras outsell traditional ones, 73 million vs. 47 million worldwide, says Chris Chute, senior analyst at IDC, a Framingham, Mass., research firm. Of 36 billion digital images taken last year, Chute says, 8 billion were printed out.

Whether the proliferation of e-mailed and computer photo images has given us more family memories or less is debatable.

Kodak, the leading digital camera maker and online photo service, says the number of family memories is exploding with digital cameras. "People have the opportunity to capture memories wherever they are and can print them out whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them," says David Lanzillo, Kodak spokesman.

But the squeezed independent photo lab owners say personal memories are being zapped despite the click, click, clicking.

"We are losing history with digital photography," says Bruce Klein, owner of Bernie's Photo Center on the North Side and owner of Photo Antiquities museum. "Example No. 1 -- there's a family reunion and you take a photo of Uncle Bob with his eyes closed. You delete it. Two weeks later, Uncle Bob passes away. That is the last photo of Uncle Bob. And you deleted it."

Klein said young people in particular tend to look at each other's photo images only on Web sites. His store has offset some of the loss of photo printing by selling home printers and ribbons and ink.

Bernie's is part of Pictures Matter.com, the group that launched a campaign to get people to resume printing photos. If computer technology changes, they argue, people may not be able to read their CDs in the future. The group also warns that CDs can deteriorate and some home-printed photos fade over time.

Other memories are flushed away. When people interviewed by the Harris Poll were asked, "Do you know someone who has dropped a cell phone or digital camera in a toilet?" 28 percent said "Yes."

The group even presented a child psychologist who says the lack of printed photos may hurt a child's self-esteem. "The family photograph album is slowly disappearing from the family scene," says Dr. Kenneth Condrell, child psychologist and family therapist in Buffalo, N.Y. "We have lost the tradition of sitting down and having dinner together. We have lost the time to be a family and have fun together. Now we parents are unwittingly giving up the photographic album."

"I never met a child who didn't like photographs of himself," he said. "All kids need to feel desired and admired and appreciated in order to develop a good sense of self-esteem. Photographs are like concrete proof that they are desired and appreciated and important to family."

But Chute, the analyst at IDC, calls such arguments "scare tactics" by mom-and-pop photo labs who are the losers in digital photography. Chute said he doesn't think electronic photographic images are necessarily a bad thing. "What will benefit your child is how much time you spend with them rather than how many photos you have. Of all the pictures taken in the film world, how many are looked at more than once and put in a shoebox?"

Richards is constantly taking photos of his sons, Jacob, 7, and Matthew, 4, on his digital camera, and even though he only prints out a fraction, he doesn't think they are photo-starved because they watch digital slide shows on TV.

"My kids see more pictures than I ever did," he said.