The Deletist

One thing I always find challenging about organizing photos, regardless of format, is how subjective the whole process feels. Typical options tend to be more subject-based and include things such as event, place, people, pets etc. But for some people, like artists, there might be other considerations such as color, texture, mood, shapes or patterns, all of which illustrate that selecting descriptive terms is subjective.

Having said that, it never ceases to amaze me how often I see photos organized by date. Even on my MacBook, iPhoto naturally groups photos into “events” by date, unless I go in and merge/separate them manually. This puzzles me because I think that the human memory is most fallible when trying to recall the exact date of an occurrence, unless it happens to be for something exceptionally memorable like a wedding or birth.

I go to NYC often to visit friends and family. When searching for specific NYC pictures I’m likely to remember where I was, the time of year and the people instead of the exact date of the photo. I instinctively search for an event like New Year’s Eve or Thanksgiving, or a person’s name, rather than the exact year/date the pictures were taken. For this reason, I prefer to organize my images by place, event, or people. The dates are part of the organizing, they’re just not my primary method.

Introducing the ease with which video is created adds a whole new dimension. With a photo, you can look at it and tell right away what it is about, even if it’s organized by date. With video, however, this isn’t always so easy to do. For example, my brother made three videos of the penguins on the Patagonia trip. Each one is completely unique, but when describing them, I find myself at a loss about how to distinguish one from the other. One video shows a penguin entering the water. Another video has a great closeup of a penguin shaking its tail. Without watching each video in its entirety, or having a detailed description telling me which second each thing happened, I’m not quite sure how to easily find the moments that I want to watch again and again. Video includes so much more than a photo that it increases the need to have even more ways to describe the content.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, how many words is a video worth?

I purchased my first digital camera in 2005.  At the time a friend of mine advised me to splurge on a 1GB memory card for $90.  Now, I could buy a 64GB memory card for the same amount.

The low cost of digital storage, coupled with the easiness of creating content, has changed the dynamic of how we interact with our photos.  As I have mentioned in previous posts on the topic, when I was growing up my parents used to limit the amount of film on our vacations.  I suppose the main reason was the cost, but maybe they just didn’t want large quantities of my crappy pictures taking up space in the “photo drawer.”  This definitely impacted my experiences in the following ways:

1. I was more careful about when I would take a picture and choosing my subjects.  
2. I spent less time taking photos.  
3. I was cognizant of the cost and the effort involved.  
4. Organizing was prioritized because the photos took up physical space.

The availability of cheap storage and readily accessible picture-taking devices makes it easy to amass large volumes of images.  And it’s fun!  I love being able to take as many pictures as I want of anything.  But I have discovered that going through them later is sometimes less fun, mostly because there is so much content and that somehow detracts from the meaning.  I often feel overwhelmed about how to manage and organize everything.  Finding a starting point can be challenging.

The maintenance of digital photos takes a huge amount of time.  I’m guessing that most people would rather spend the time creating more content, than going through images to weed out the bad ones or organize them.  Sometimes it can be difficult to decide what’s important, or what’s going to be important, and that can also be a deterrent for getting started.  And it’s also not necessary to get rid of things because the space is available.

Here are my quick rules for digital photo management:

1. Put everything in a folder, or tag it with details (event, location, people, etc.) immediately. Editing and purging can be done later, but I tend to forget critical details if I don’t label things right away.
2. Make rules about what you want to keep.  Cheap digital storage affords us the luxury of being able to save everything, but sometimes I don’t enjoy spending the time to scroll through 50 photos of a sunset when 2 or 3 images will suffice, especially when bad ones get mixed in.  Not every photo is a winner.  I aim for quality over quantity. 
3. Select a small amount of photos to organize and purge, something that can be accomplished in 10-15 minutes.  

Happy organizing!

Armed with a digital camera, or dorky-looking tablet, I find myself faced with a decision: do I want to fully immerse myself in a situation with all my senses, or document it with the camera.  Taking pictures means I’m seeing everything through the camera and my attention is focussed on taking pictures instead of engaging fully in the event with all my senses.

After thinking about this and discussing it with others, I really don’t have a good answer, only a personal preference.  One Patagonia trip highlight was seeing Magellenic Penguins.  At the time I hadn’t been able to figure out the video on my camera (embarrassingly enough, it was purely user error), so I committed myself to snapping a few pics and then sitting in the boat to observe.

Penguins are incredibly animated creatures, but also noisy and a little bit stinky from all the guano.  I was so thrilled to be near these captivating animals, that I just wanted to fully immerse myself in the experience: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel of the wind on my face, etc.

I discovered later that my brother had taken several penguin videos which he later shared with me.  I was excited to have the videos because it meant that I could keep enjoying the penguins long after we had left Patagonia.  I mentioned this to my brother and he said “Yeah, but while you were busy enjoying the penguins, I only got to watch them through my camera.”  What can I say, in this situation, I got the best of both worlds.

During almost every hike on the trip, we would collectively take a few moments of silence, without cameras or devices, to just experience what was going on around us.  I think this is a nice compromise.

In future situations, I will continue to document events.   However, I will make a point of not using my camera once in a while to capture the experience in other ways. Some things just don’t translate to the digital world, such as the way something smells or feels or my emotional state.

A new alternative is Google Glass, a product designed to allow users to experience and document simultaneously.  If you haven’t heard about Google Glass yet, get ready.  It’s coming – stay tuned for a future post on the topic.

One of my favorites!