70,000 to sort

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 ]
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