One of the my biggest challenges with digital photos is aggregating them. This doesn’t even include time spent to review, delete, and organize. I recently went on a 3-week trip to India (trip posts coming soon!). Even from that short trip I have photos in at least four distinct places. Naturally I have photos on my phone. However, this also includes photos sent to me through social media from other people. Although all of them reside on my phone, they are not all stored in same place. We also took the digital camera, which has at least 300 photos we haven’t even looked at yet. And then there are the photos stored on other people’s devices when my camera or phone wasn’t readily available. In other words, aggregating is going to be a project.
A friend of mine recently showed me a beautiful photo album she made through Shutterfly. I’ve also made several albums with the same company, but I was curious to hear about her experiences. Without any prompts from me, she thought finding and aggregating all the photos from disparate sources was the hardest part. She worked on the scrapbook over a period of months, diligently chipping away at it. The photos, she explained, came from phones, email attachments, other people, etc. In other words, finding and accessing the pictures was almost a separate project. Then came the hard task of selecting which ones to include in the photo album. After that is creating the actual album. It’s almost like three mini-projects to produce one thing!
However, there are technological conveniences to make some tasks easier. For example, Shutterfly will place your aggregated photos into an album. Although you do have to be mindful if you want photos arranged chronologically. Sometimes moving photos from one place (device) to another, results with the move date rather than the create date. In some cases, this can be a significant difference. Though I have yet to explore the apps, I know there are some available to clean up photo collections. This will deduplicate photos. Some of the apps can also organize photos based on location, faces, or objects.
While there are some ways to make it easier, I still find aggregating the photos I want for my albums the most tedious part of the process. So far I haven’t found any good ways to make this faster.