Good old fashioned photo album

I am a rather organized and conservative person in most aspects of my life, but digital cameras have corrupted me.  I have become a glutton for hording thousands of digital photos. It’s crazy that even after I edit a photo, I have to save the original ~ just in case. In case, of what? I have no clue but I just have to save them all. With old fashioned film, I was very conservative when taking photos and tried to put them in albums before I forgot where and when they were taken. That simply does not happen with digital photos; some come off the camera onto my computer but are rarely printed and they certainly do not find their way into a traditional photo album.

Sure, there are photo albums that can be created online from digital photos but, frankly, I have a very difficult time making them. They simply don’t look good to me. Perhaps it’s the company I use but, frankly, every digital photo I have ever printed looks like a digital photo. I really miss the detail and warmth of photographs made the old fashioned way. The first and last time I made a digital photo album was in 2010. It covered our trip from New York to California and back again, and spanned two years of traveling and exploring. It preserved our wonderful memories, but I hated the way it turned out. And it took countless hours to create. I spent tons of time cropping, editing and setting up each page and yet, it didn’t look that great.

My computer and camera are both full of images, but there isn’t a tangible album to page through and reminisce. The other day, Mathew and I went through the albums I made of his first four years. It was wonderful. He had no desire to look at the digital photo book. See, he doesn’t even care for it and he is of the digital age. I still don’t have a true photographic record of our family’s adventures since 2010. This makes me sad, but not compelled to make another digital album. They say if you don’t like something or a situation, change it. Well, I guess I am simply too lazy. Truth is that the idea of organizing and creating another photo album is too overwhelming to even consider right now.

This past weekend, the time to purge my pictures had come. My computer was operating very slow and sluggishly. Mike believed that all my photos took up too much memory and was too much of a burden for my computer to carry anymore. Since he gave me an external hard-drive several years ago, I decided to finally transfer them. When we started the process, it became very apparent that I had never adequately sorted and organized the bulk of my photos. I had treated the picture folder like a junk closet. You know the kind that if you open the door, there would be an avalanche of random stuff flowing out. I started to reduce and reorganize but it was simply too mind boggling so I decided to move all the photos to the external hard-drive and tackle it another time: like when hell freezes over. Then came the moment when we needed to delete all the photos that had been transferred, but my computer refused to let them go. We tried several different approaches but it felt like it was behaving like me ~ it couldn’t let them go. Finally, we figured it out and everything is now transferred to the external hard-drive and deleted from my computer. Although the external hard-drive is plugged into my computer, it’s not the same. My computer allowed me to retrieve photos two different ways: by folders or dates; which made finding photos easy especially ones that had never been edited and renamed (which probably fed into my lack of organization, since it wasn’t necessary to be organized). The external hard-drive does not have this wonderful feature. So now, I have to scroll through all the numerous unedited photos. Perhaps, it really is time to organize and purge, or not. Time will tell. Regardless, I think my computer is running better since it is no longer burdened with over 7000 pictures. This is a very good thing.

How do you manage your digital photos? I would love and obviously need some suggestions. Please share!