Cleaning Out the Digital Garbage

In my free time I’m a wanna be professional photographer. I’ve never sold a photo but then haven’t really had the time to do anything much with the photos.  And what to do with all those photos?

At first I was just keeping everything on the memory cards but memory cards are expensive for my big camera and it was impossible to know what was on the cards. I’d try to transfer a few of the good photos to the laptop but didn’t always have time so then the cards piled up. Then it was suggested that I put the photos onto DVD’s and make a page of thumbprints to go with the DVD. This is good except that my photos take up a large amount of memory so the DVD’s were being used up at a rapid rate.

Maybe a year or more ago I purchased an external hard drive, a 1TB to hold the photos as it really wasn’t feasible to just keep purchasing DVD’s or memory cards. I transferred all of my photos from the memory cards to the external plus everything on my laptop. Then I got called away to work and one day ran entirely out of memory on the laptop. Dale had to go immediately and purchase another external hard drive, a 2TB as I’d left my original one at home. I transferred over 25,000 photos to the new external hard drive at that time.

Now my youngest son and his wife’s family have a new cabin. They asked if I could maybe provide some photos for artwork on the cabin’s walls. Of course I said yes not even thinking about the new project I was embarking on.

I started 1^st by making sure that I had originals on one drive and copies on another. Then I started labeling the folders by dates with a brief subject title. I’d spent several days doing this.

A couple of days ago I heard a program which addressed those digital items we will leave to our kids. I’d already been thinking about my print film photos as we have many photos just in shopping bags. I’d thought that we should dump most of those photos; kids won’t care about piles of rocks from a site of ruins after we are gone. Now I realized that the same is true for the digital photos.

The new project is to go thru each folder and delete any photo that is similar to another, blurry, or just plain uninteresting. I’ve had to go back a couple of times just because it goes against my grain to delete everything but I’m getting tough. I don’t want for my kids to delete some great photos just because they were tired of messing with an overwhelming amount. And I don’t need an overwhelming amount to dig thru in order to find that one photo I’m looking for.