Whenever spring rolls around, all I want to do is air out, clean and organise my entire home. Every single cabinet and drawer gets submitted to a thorough inspection and all the maintenance that’s been put off for too long, finally gets done. A few years ago I started to include my digital life in this spring cleaning mania as well. The more time goes by and the more digital belongings I accumulate, the more the urge arises to make all those digital belongings neat, organised and usable. This year I’ve decided to tackle my ever growing and rather immense digital photo collection.
Digital photography gained widespread popularity when I was still pretty young, which means that most of the photographic evidence of my life beyond early childhood only exists in digital form. As I got older, I started taking photos myself, with my teenage years taking the lead in sheer volume. I had a little digital camera that I took with me everywhere, and if I didn’t have it on me at any given moment, one of my friends would’ve had theirs. As smartphones came and changed our lives, taking photos of literally everything became the standard thing to do. Taking pictures has never been easier than it is now. Since I’ve been running a blog and social media pages for a few years, I’m sure you can imagine the sheer volume of photographic material I currently possess. With the emphasis on currently.
I realised a while back how little it would take for me to lose all of that. I’m just one hard drive crash away from having all photos of my past erased, and that’s rather terrifying. Something needs to change there. When I graduated high school, I sat down for a few afternoons and compiled the best photos of my most memorable high school moments into a photo album. I had it printed and now there’s a concise little book full of my teenage years sitting on my bookshelf, which I like to look back on every now and then. Alone, with Robbert or with old friends who were there. The style of the album is already very outdated, but that’s part of its charm to me. Flipping through it is a great way to bring back memories and get lost in reminiscing about days gone by.
For all the years after high school though, my pictures are pretty much lost. I know where to find the ones I chose to share online, and I have all my photos organised well in folders. The amount of pictures I have though, and the fact that they’re only digital, means I rarely ever look at them. Especially since the good ones are buried in a sea of awkward selfies and blurry food shots.
So this year I want to change that. It’s a massive job, but I started going through all of my digital photos and weeding out anything that isn’t worth saving. I’m removing duplicates or photos that are too similar, I’m deleting anything blurry or just horrible quality, and I’m only saving the photos I think I might like to look back on in a few years’ time.
Not only will this leave me with an archive of usable, memorable photographs, but it’ll free up a bunch of space and make the whole archive a lot easier to back up in several different places. That’s going to be step two: backing the whole thing up and updating the backup at least once a year.
Then as the next step, I’d like to go back through my photographs again, pick out the best of the best and get more photo albums printed. I’ve yet to decide how I want to categorise them; whether I want to make one album of my time in university and a separate one for the time after, or one album for every year, or one album for every three or five years. I guess it depends on how many photos I’m left with. I do know I really want to have them in physical, tangible form so that I can flip through them and share them with my loved ones.
I feel like physical albums will stand the test of time better that a digital collection. I can’t remember how many times the popular method of saving data has changed in my lifetime already, let alone how many times it will change in the future still. That is, presuming I don’t lose all my files one way or another in the meantime. I’m not comfortable with uploading everything onto a cloud the way things are now, so that’s not really an option for me. I’d feel good knowing I have all my most important photos right there on my bookshelf.
So that’s where I’m at right now! Like I said, it’s a massive job and it’s going to take a few more evenings to get everything organised, compiled and printed. It’s something that I feel I really should do though and I’m glad I’ve already made a head-start. Hopefully this post encourages you to do something with your digital photo collection, too. It’s a shame to let those beautiful images just sit there, never to be looked at again!
How do you currently organise your photos? Do you print out physical photographs, or is your entire collection digital? How do you determine what to toss and what to keep?
Digital photos came around when I was in my twenties (an 80’s kid here!). By 2010 physical copies of photos grew less and less due to financial reasons.
I take a lot of photos and store them on on external hard drives. Since one of them broke in 2013, I lost 3 years or photos and videos (I wish no one has to go through that!). Ever since then I have kept duplicates of everything. I buy new external hard drives in pairs nowadays, always keeping double copies of everything. Worth. Every. Penny.
Photos taken with phones or cameras all get stored together and filed by date. A folder for each day with a small description of the insides, for example 2014-09-01 (Wedding of X). That way I know with a glance what’s inside and everything stays organized.
Mobile phone photos do get backed up in a cloud, but that’s just about it. Otherwise I don’t use clouds much, because the sheer volume of space needed alone would be impossible to afford, plus I prefer having access to my photos without the need for internet. I also prefer the folder system on computer.
The whole system is quite a hassle to keep up, I won’t lie, but so worth it! 😊👍🏻
a couple of days after new years eve I always go trough my photos from the previous year, and send them in for print. I have been doing this for three years now, so the years before that is still a mess.. But I am slowly working myself backwards to have them printed too!
My “inspirational pictures and quotes” folder is another chapter… I am going to tackle that right away, thank you for the inspiration! <3
Since my wedding 3 years ago, I started printing 100 photos each now and then, I do it once or twice a year, and I include everything I feel that’s important that happened like having our daughter, trips, birthdays, etc. Like you said, I also like having photographs I care about on my bookshelf rather than the cloud. Clouds tend to disappear soon. :)