I have a little bit of an organisational problem and I am sure I am not the only one. Yesterday when Steem was down it gave me a chance to have a flick through some of my older photos and I realised that they are stored all over the place. Just in my Lightroom folder there are 70,000 photos (including originals and edits) but, there are many more in various folders and spread across about 5 external drives. I have no idea when I am ever going to get the chance to sort through them all.
However, What I must do is run through at least quickly and pull as many of the 'definitely keep' photos. I have so many and my plan has always been to organise them into themes and have each printed in books. Of course, this alone is a monumental task to organise. However, it is one that I think that I am going to have to do at some point soon because as we are all aware, technology tends to fail at inopportune times and I would hate to lose series of photos such as the birth of our daughter and all of the little events that have led up to this point in life.
It is a funny thing these days though as there is this kind of feeling that, unless it is in a picture, it never happened, but it wasn't so long ago that essentially nothing was captured on film. These days though with the ubiquity of cameras of all sorts, everything is captured whether it is meaningful or not. This in my opinion somewhat cheapens the value of the moments as it closes the gap between special event and lunch making each worthy of a photograph.
Of course, this leads into the idea of personal branding and life curation in order to continually stream content to our audience of friends, family and complete strangers to signal that we are moving, doing, experiencing and living. Perhaps this is what many of the photos have become, evidence that we are alive which makes sense considering so much of our actual life is spent in near solitude buried behind screens of various sorts or, confined to cubicles.
We are constantly told we should live in the moment but when there are so many pressures on us that require our attention combined with all of the attention sucking activities that draw our attention away, the moment itself is very difficult to maintain. For most of us, we face the trials of life and try to balance them with moments that we end up sharing with the world. Perhaps this sharing makes makes a meal seem grander than it is to counteract the crushing pressures of life in another area.
Now I am off to my accountant to see if she can help remove some of the unavoidable burden I have incurred... tax. But, it is nice to remember enjoying a beautiful sunset before life changed forever.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Posted with Steempress
I know what you mean. I spent my last 2 weekends sorting, filing, and organizing my photos. I made back ups on external hard drives, thumb drives, and discs. So now I have numerous exteral drives, thumb drives, and discs that I have to keep track of! Many of my pictures are irreplaceable so I have made several copies of each.
It is just... so much work! I have to really sit down and get it done though. I have lost pictures before and that is much worse than the time taken sorting them :)
And once you lose them, you can never get them back. I think that this is the reason I am so anal and back them up in so many devices!!
Wow I doubt I take 70000 shots my entire life. It's gonna take a while to sort them all
I know your feeling, I'm filling 2nd external 2TB drive now, but I always try to back to older photos. I trying to see if I can do better correction or retouch, or figure out what went wrong back then to not make same mistakes in future. I also have feeling that with modern photography value of single frame is smaller, yet outcome of it is that we can create even better work. Still some of the magic is gone during the process. Nowadays everyone with mobile is photographer and it's even harder to stand out from the crowd. I keep getting lost from time to time, but I believe everyone else trying their steps into photography world have same problems...
Also, your taste in editing can change over time quite a lot. There are 'trend' editing styles I think that aren't as timeless as they first seemed :)
I am hobby only so for me it is just a journey of my life. Sharing them on Steem is fun though and it means in my articles I only use my own photos which hopefully means less copyright issues in the future :)
Your shots are stunning.
What you say is indeed true, I use platforms to document and really just store photos somewhere other than local storage which could get damaged. Just for prosperity sake. Future generations will have an easy task of looking up long gone relatives :-)
What I do think is that @steemit and @steepshot actually have a somewhat positive influence on humans, I think it has regenerated a keen interest in our surroundings, and even though we spend a lot of time in front of screens,
We actually do go out and enjoy our surrounding and pay closer attention to little details we may not have done before :-)
Happy snapping :-)
I liked those pictures a lot. Taken at Santalahti boat harbour? Those above are definitely keepers.
I have about 1,600 pics on Flickr, the vast majority of which have been taken since March this year. Before that, I was utterly clueless as to how to take a decent photograph. I've been seriously considering to buy a Nikon D3400 for my first DSLR. Rajala sells a package containing Nikon D3400 + AF-P 18-55mm VR + Sigma 70-300/4-5.6 DG for €499.
sounds like a pretty decent deal. I have never used a Nikon (fiddled with a friend's a little). Check what prices are of other lenses you might want to add later too, just o make sure they aren't extremely high. Pretty much all SLRs are pretty pricey on lenses which is one of the reasons I went mirrorless.
Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. I need to go to a store to see the camera and hold it first. There is no Rajala shop in Lahti.
Posted using Partiko Android
Well, if you make it my way, drop a line in Discord tarazkp#5792 and we might be able t have a coffee meetup :)
I'll keep that in mind. :)
You're right sometimes one looks at these old photographs and the beautiful shots, memories can be really very vivid. You should become a professional photographer, added to your other talents
I love the photos with the reflections in the water! The last pic is very cool!
Holy crap - are you on speed?
Now I feel better about having 30 000 photos!
lol. 30,000? pffft.
It's why I like having photo managers XD they're then at least ordered by date!
I'm actually pretty glad photos and videos are so easy to do these days. Would have loved it if they'd come along sooner so I could have loads of videos from when my three were younger. Only got one video of the youngest as a toddler and it was nice being reminded of how cute they sound at that age and even when they have the higher pitched little kid voices.
I don't think it's cheapened but do think it's part of the brain outsourcing/ indexing thing that's been going on since teh interwebz became a thing :)
Ps good luck sorting ;D
Posted using Partiko Android
I use a precise naming pattern that means I have no bloody idea what is in what folder.
I have found that both my wife and I have slowed down a little with the photos to the point I have to remind myself to take some :D
Wow first of all amazing photos!!
And 70,000 photos ??? The hell, wish you good luck with sorting those. I have sorting problems too with my post. I just put them in a document randomly.
Try this tool from @eonwarped
https://eonwarped.github.io/steem/allposts.html
Well mate, you probably would like to start a nice hunt season and shot towards a bunch of many freeware targets to help you out to organize that mess on your table with 70,000 preys to spice up, eat & digest. Hurry up! and click the picture below. One never know with how many bullets you'll need to load this beauty to accomplish the goal. };)
The managers are good but the problem is also the storage of them and, the handling of RAW and ORF files. There is no way I can put them all on one drive.. I am going to have to buy a tower of drives soon :D
I will check if there are solutions there though because I haven't looked for a few years :)
70000 photos, wow. Well I suppose it's no surprise, you always include a ton of photos in your posts.
I agree, when we banalise something like taking pictures of our moments and experiences we take the risk of removing something that makes them specialI figure too much of anything' is going to suffer diminishing returns.
Humans are wired to share information: I think it might be a by-product of the natural laws of the universe which dictate that everything must be moving even when things look still to an unaware observer.
Electrons spin, quarks jump around, the Earth rotates at a frankly dizzying speed, the universe does too...
We "transfer our charge" so that those around us will carry a bit of it with them, imprinting a bit of it into the world, so that there is proof that we existed. So that we may exist when our lives are no more.