1.28.2011

this might be long winded.

27/365

but for some reason it needs to come out, and i haven't visited this space in months so i'm just going to type and leave it at that. it just feels kind of nice to be back here.

i am horrible at organizing and editing my photos. i upload and run. i rarely delete. and i've been this way for 4 years now. this behavior adds up to a lot of crap photos taking space on my computer. apparently a lot of space. so, i've been slowly working on organizing my photos with the intention of then going back through the folders and tossing out the junk. and oh my, is there a lot of junk. i mean how many photos of baby food or carpenter bees do i really need? and the blurry ones? thousands and thousands of photos of blurry children run rampant on my hard drive. (have i mentioned that i've also never backed up my photos?)

so, i go to upload some photos and they won't upload. i'm out of space. then weird things pop up saying there was an error in trying to save my photos in iphoto though i don't even have that program open. panic starts setting in and mass deletion (on my part) begins. i'm trying to go ahead and delete the tens of thousands of photos i don't deem worthy of taking up space before i back everything up. which i really am going to do. i've lost photos before (though i think they could be lurking in the trash somewhere. i don't know because iphoto won't let me open it). dealing with this task has been a bit of burden in my mind and putting it off has been my way of (not) dealing with it. anyway, rambling here . . .

and here i get to the tissues sitting there on the desk. going through this many photos and reviewing them has been extremely cathartic. at one point i didn't feel like i was emotionally capable of going through certain folders, like ones from thanksgiving where there were so many photos of my grampa, or all the pictures of the kids with our dog mason (who passed away in september at the ripe old age of 15). i had to stop several times because i was a blubbering mess hoping that i didn't wake up the kids from their naps, but i kept going (and i didn't wake them up). i still have a lot more pictures to go through, but going through these en masse i'm also figuring some things out. for example, i don't need to take any more photos of carpenter bees or baby food being made. or that i've come a long way, baby. it's a big deal to me that i'm more comfortable shooting in manual mode than any other mode. i would not have even thought that possible two years ago. maybe two years from now i'll be impressed with myself for having a decent organizational system for my photos! who knows?

so, that's what i've been doing the last couple of days and will still be doing for the next few days. if you don't see me around too much in the next few days, you'll know i'm busy hitting that delete button with no regrets. unless i mess something up somehow. because that is very possible too.


and hey! i remembered my blogger password. that's something!

11 comments:

  1. Please don't delete 27/365 (or whatever the picture of the keyboard and tissues is called). It's like a story I heard about the movie "Paper Moon".

    Peter Bogdanovich directed it, and his friend and mentor, Orson Welles, said "That title is so good, you shouldn't even make the picture, you should just release the title!"

    This picture, like many others of yours, conveys a story very clearly. Pictures are worth a thousand words, but often times yours are worth more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It feels good. I remember the uneasy feeling right before I hit "Delete", but that freeing feeling after I did it trumps everything else.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I realized that when I transferred some photos from my laptop to my jump drive, I didn't copy them but just transferred. And I'm okay with that. If I really, really need them, I can figure out where they are. Go grab a portable hard drive. They're relatively cheap these days (I spent over $150 less on the latest one for three times the amount of memory), and you don't have to worry that you might have deleted something that you later want. And I think you'll figure out the organizational system really quickly. Seriously, it won't take two years.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm in the same boat- for awhile I had to delete some photos every time that I wanted to transfer them from the camera. I do a decent job organizing documents but have not figured out a system for photos. We just got an external drive, I transfered the photos over and then deleted them from the computer- also did the weeding of the out of focus and unwanted photos. But my next step is to set up a way to organize-

    ReplyDelete
  5. i've got the external hd, but still working on deleting before i back up. i don't want to have garbage taking up space on it. thank you all for the encouragement. good to know i'm not alone in this too : )

    ReplyDelete
  6. About every 6 months I go back to iphoto and delete. I have lots of repetitive photos... and like you lots of photos of certain things/ like my hostas... but I need the time away so I can see them more clearly.

    ReplyDelete
  7. i'll be following in your footsteps soon...MUCH organization to be done on my end. Thank you for the inspiration!

    ReplyDelete
  8. oh, i SO am with you on this...
    i try to spend time deleting... and although i have 30 photos of the same child doing just about the same thing.. i can't seem to let any of them go... it's a big problem.

    glad to see you!

    ReplyDelete
  9. oh man i need to do this very thing and figure out how to organize.
    help.

    ReplyDelete
  10. i can so relate to this. looking at older photos pains me. i can't reconcile the babies, toddlers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, etc. with the two big children i currently live with :) how did they get so big? where did all that time go? did i properly appreciate it? i'm afraid to save photos to my computer (always fearing a big crash), so once a month, i download all my photos to a dvd, then back it up with another dvd, and then all those dvds live in a stack above my computer disk, labeled by month and year. i've had to go back to them a few times, and while there are probably a lot of junk photos that should have been deleted, i'm able to find the photos i need among the few hundred.

    ReplyDelete

Compliments, grievances and any other general feedback