Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Cleaning Up Photo Files

Digital cameras have undoubtedly made a great impact in my life. It's cheap and relatively easy to capture all of my important (and banal) life moments, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate.

After our travels last year and the wedding, I've amassed over 9,000 from the last two years and have over 16,000 photos over the last decade or so.

How many other people take dozens of pictures only to leave them languishing on a memory card or computer never to be seen again?  Blogging has helped with this some because I've been able to share some of them here, but for every picture I've shared there are probably 10 that I haven't.

To combat this, I've decided to go through every photo on my hard drive and delete any bad photos or near repeats.  Thankfully all of my photos were already well organized as I keep them sorted into folders by year, month, and event with the exception of my college years, which are more awkwardly organized since they span calendar years.

Deleting crappy photos has been much more time consuming that I ever thought, and it was hard go through all of them because they're all so sentimental.  Even though I've gotten rid of over 6400 photos (40% of my photo collection!) not one of my event folders was emptied completely.  It's so much easier to enjoy them now that there are fewer old photos and way fewer repeats.  It also makes all the memories that much happier because I'm not coming across bad photos that make me grimace.

Right now I've worked up to September 2010, but that still leaves nearly 6,000 photos to go through.  When all is said and done I want to take all of the photos that are left and make photo books for each year, but I think that's a project for 2013 because that's going to take an immense amount of effort to do.

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