Too many photos? Yes it is possible

There’s a line you don’t want to cross. It’s when you realise that the time needed to manage your life has overtaken living your life.

I think I’ve crossed it.

There are 489 image files in a folder titled “Sorting phone photos”.  There are another 534 stored on the phone’s memory card and 66 in the phone’s own memory. This means too much living and not enough managing.

It was so easy before the phone, because it was an effort to get out the camera. As a result, it only came out for events. After the event, I’d plug into the laptop, download the files, delete the mess and label the remainder, process the better ones into something useful and maybe even pop them in a blog post.

With the phone, it’s too easy to take photos of anything and everything. And too hard to find the time to store, sort and process.

Which means it’s time to re-evaluate. Why am I doing this?

Last time I re-evaluated, I created some storage folders:

• Family history
• Social history
• Web published
• Insurance
• Projects

It seems I photograph both for practical purposes and creative endeavour. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed and is unlikely to change. No opportunity there to save some time.

How I want to manage the photos is also unlikely to change. Archive. Process. Publish.

Perhaps WHEN I manage them is the critical factor. As with many things, doing a little often is easier than finding the time to tackle a huge job.

And it’s better to start today as I mean to go on, rather than wait until the backlog has cleared … cause that just might never happen!

So here is the result of a random creative moment while watching TV this week, freshly archived, processed and then published.  I’m calling it ‘Spaceman’.