Digital photo album7/14/2023 ![]() Preservation (aka, commemorating your photos in whatever way best suits you and your family).First, two notes: – There are really three separate steps involved in clambering out of the picture swamp: What follows is equal parts how-to and inspiration (read: do as I say, not as I do). We’ve put together the best tips and advice culled from experts, professional digital content organizers (this is a thing?!?!) and super-parents-who-actually-do-sh*t-with-their-pictures. One Boston-based digital organization company told the New York Times that their average client had 15,000-20,000 digital photos… Or, like Charlene, 68,027. It’s a truly exponential growth rate, and the literal increase in photos taken in recent years is staggering: we snap more than a trillion photos annually, compared to some 80 billion twenty years ago. With the advent of smartphones, more people are taking more pictures than ever before. To be fair, the problems of excess and unmanaged photographic media are not necessarily unique to the digital age (anyone else recollect boxes and boxes and boxes of unorganized and seemingly random photos in their grandparents’ basement?) - but the extent of the problem is undoubtedly… mounting. Because having the photos is less important than what I choose to do with them. It will not fix the last seven years and it will not be perfect, but it will be better than nothing. This year, I’m promising myself: I’m going to do something. There are SO many reasons to do something about this situation (how much time do you have?), but the standout (IMO) is this: I want to memorialize our life as a family in a way that is actually accessible and MANAGEABLE and that we can, in fact, enjoy. Plus, to me there is something very different about flipping through an actual album compared to smartphone scanning, the latter of which can quickly begin to feel akin to social media death-scrolling. Every photo is a reminder of both the extent to which I have failed and the enormity of trying to dig myself out of a seven-year memory pit. But honestly, these days, looking at pictures (an activity which by default must take place on my phone) just makes me feel stressed and overwhelmed. I’ve read that looking at photos can be an immediate mood boost, a quick hit of happiness - and I get that, really. Where do you store them? (Because I keep upping my iCloud storage and vowing I’ll “figure something out” before the space runs out, only to repeat the process again six months later…) How do you cull them? (Because is it really worth it to have eight thousand photos? Or ten thousand? Or twenty?) When are you supposed to even look at that many pictures? I mean seriously, what the f*ck are you supposed to DO with all the pictures? And the videos, omg. When our team started talking about this^^, there was a lot of nervous, yes yes nodding. Nothing, that is, except a stressful and steadily-mounting digital hoarding “situation”… We have more pictures than ever, more moments to remember, more memories to encapsulate, and absolutely nothing to show for them. Now, seven years and two kids later, to say that we have fallen off the wagon would be… a gross understatement. ![]() And we were (are) always so happy to have them. I won’t sit here and tell you it was fun - often it was my husband who ushered us through the sometimes-draining process, in fact - but it was doable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |