I walked by my shelf today with photos on it. I'm pretty organized. Its just the volume of photos that's killing me. I have boxes dating back to 1991 on my shelf and in my mother's basement, I can show you photos from my childhood. Last week, my mother came to me with photos of my great grandmother from 1875. I should be glad. How many people have access to this kind of information?
The problem is, I don't have access either. I need to sort through them. I need to catalog and identify them and mostly I need to throw out and edit. I just put 45 digital images from this weekend's ski trip on my iPhone. I stored them in iPhoto. Shall I put them on Facebook? I have over 7000 images in iPhoto right now, dating back to 2005. I like that I can't see the piles of albums, but they're all still there, taking up space in my computer, like dust mites–clutter that's almost imperceptible to the human eye.
Where do I start? I'm scanning images from family history for my mother. I'm taking pictures for my class I'm teaching tomorrow. Tell me what you think.
My feeling is that, back in the old "film" days, we were careful about what images we took because the film was so expensive. Now, with the digital age, we snap like crazy and not all the pics are worth keeping. I'd cull the ones in iPhoto and just keep the ones that are high quality or meaningful to you.
ReplyDeleteAs for the family pix, I'd take them one box at a time. Do you have family who can help with the sorting and identifying?
I recently had a brutal session with my mother. We had STACKS of photos of people who we had no identity for. The people who could tell us are long gone. So, we ditched a bunch. *gulp* Nothing else we could do...
Good luck! And happy blogging.
If there's one thing that has stuck from Lia Rothstein's digital imaging classes, it is that "there are only two kinds of hard drives: those that have failed and those that are about to fail." All of the photos that you care about should be backed up on an external hard drive and on archival cds--not the ones you can buy at Staples for $10 for 100. They should be gold archival discs made in Japan, not China. After you've done all that, delete them from your computer to free up space. So I've learned more than one thing from Lia, I guess...
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