I’ve been sorting through boxes of old photos recently, including pictures of my folks when they were kids.

Comparing them, of course, with images of what Mom and Dad looked like when they aged.

Yikes!

It doesn’t help that my wife’s undergraduate college degree is in genetics, so she keeps reminding me that genes are destiny.

I beg to differ. I found a Web site that lets you amend the future.

It’s called Face of the Future (www.faceofthefuture.org.uk), an imaging project of the Computer Science Department at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. You can plug in a recent photo of yourself — or one taken when you were younger — and get a computer-generated prediction of how things will turn out.

I can’t show you a picture of my warts-and-all-to-come because the Web site’s images are copyrighted, but you can easily try it out yourself — or on anyone you know.

Seeing my future image caused me to curl up in a fetal possession on the couch and whimper for quite awhile, but I discovered that faceofthefuture.org also contains a face transformer — you can see what you’d look like as a different race, age or gender — and a face morpher. For the latter, you need two pictures — yourself and someone a lot cuter — to cast off unappealing features and substitute a straight nose, subtract ear hair and add dimples.

There are even Web sites with software that reimagines your visage as painted by famous artists.

I’ve seen the future, and I’m Whistler’s Mother.

Unless you have a whole lot of discretionary income, you’re not going to be able to do much to alter the way your mug looks when you’re 64. But we can all Photoshop.

I have some friends my age, a couple who send out Christmas cards with their faces on the front every year. When they started about 15 years ago, Donna looked every day of her 43 years. This Christmas, I expect to see freckles and pigtails.

She’s a university researcher with her own page on the college’s Web site, on which she’s posted her passport photo. Remarkable that they’d give such a responsible job to Hannah Montana’s little sister.

Some plastic surgeons these days even customize the future.

The client chooses a look and decides how that look is going to “mature.” If things don’t work out as planned, a scalpel and collagen do the rest.

That’s way too ambitious for me. I’ll be satisfied just not to have a carbuncle the size of Wyoming on my nose, like my Great Uncle Hugh had when he was an old man. Teeth would be nice too, and a discernible neck.

I don’t know what happened to Hugh over the years, to tell you the truth. I have his baby picture right here. Just take a look at that cute little fa ...

Oh. Never mind.

Steve Crump may be reached at 735-3223. Hear him on KLIX-1310 at 8:30 a.m. on Friday.