So here I am sat at the computer again.
Big screen, little screen, cardboard, fish, as they say.
The technology has changed, the cables have changed, the logos have changed, but the throbbing vein in my temple remains stubbornly consistent. We keep doing this, and it’s starting to get on my nerves.
The first time was almost exciting.
I’d plugged my iPhone 4 into the PC and discovered I’d somehow taken over 1,200 photographs.
Twelve hundred.
How?
I’d only had the thing a few months.
Right. Time to get organised.
Some were videos. Obviously those had to stay.
Some were photos of the pups. Obviously those had to stay.
Some were near-identical photos of the pups. But this one was slightly better. So that had to stay too.
By the time I’d finished being ruthless, I’d reduced the collection from 1,200 images to about 950.
A triumph.
Those 950 images promptly crashed into the collection I’d already accumulated from various cameras, phones and ancient bits of technology, giving me a beautiful collection of filenames such as:
001.jpg
001(1).jpg
001(2).jpg
This was going to take a while.
Still, I’d beat it.
I didn’t.
I spent the next few years bouncing between various bits of software, importing, organising, renaming and generally pretending I knew what I was doing. Eventually I had what could generously be described as a media library.
Job done.
Except it wasn’t.
A few years later the iPhone 5S arrived.
Time to upgrade.
Better back everything up first.
A quick glance through the photos revealed that somehow I still had:
001.jpg
001(1).jpg
001(2).jpg
I’d forgotten to delete one of the original imports years earlier.
Apparently I’d been backing up my backups.
Then came my brief adventure into Android.
Google Photos entered the chat.
Cloud syncing entered the chat.
Multiple devices entered the chat.
Soon I had JPEGs, different formats, duplicate formats, duplicate duplicates and a growing collection of mysterious black rectangles where photos should have been.
I convinced myself the black rectangles probably contained photos.
They were just… loading.
Forever.
That seemed reasonable at the time.
Then I went back to Apple.
By this point iPhones had become larger, smoother and considerably better at helping me create new problems.
HEIC files appeared.
Cloud migrations appeared.
Online conversion tools appeared.
At some point a badly thought-out migration copied thousands of images I’d already backed up and helpfully reintroduced them into my library for a third time.
I reached the stage where making a coffee wasn’t enough.
I needed a support group.
So I gave up.
The library continued growing.
Year after year.
Every now and then I’d decide this was the weekend I was finally going to sort it all out.
Usually this happened during periods when I should have been doing something else.
One of those attempts arrived around lockdown.
Armed with determination, coffee and an unrealistic amount of confidence, I began sorting.
Then I discovered something deeply annoying.
001.jpg and 001(4).jpg weren’t actually duplicates.
They were completely different photographs.
This put a substantial spanner in the works.
Naturally, I responded with calm and careful planning.
No I didn’t.
I renamed everything.
Every photo.
One giant sequence.
In hindsight this falls into the category of “things that seemed clever for about seven minutes.”
I tried folders.
I tried tags.
I tried stars.
I tried albums.
I tried clever software.
I tried systems designed by people who clearly enjoy organisation far more than I do.
Nothing stuck.
Folders immediately produced impossible questions.
If it’s a picture of Mum and me, does it go in Mum?
Does it go in Me?
Do I create Mum and Me?
Do I then create Mum, Me and Dogs?
This way madness lies.
After several days of effort I’d managed to reduce a collection of thousands of photographs into a completely different kind of mess.
Some photos were tagged.
Some were foldered.
Some were both.
Some were neither.
The library now existed partly in Google, partly in iCloud and partly in places I no longer remembered creating.
Progress.
Then came the bit that genuinely hurt.
While sorting I realised I’d deleted more dog photos than I should have years earlier.
One in particular stuck with me.
The blurry photo of Thug on the sofa had failed my assessment sometime during lockdown.
Out of focus.
Poorly framed.
Technically rubbish.
The committee had spoken.
Delete.
The problem is that Thug is gone now.
And it turns out that when enough time passes, technical quality matters a lot less than the fact the moment existed at all.
Of all the photos I’d kept, that’s one of the ones I wish I’d still had.
That was the moment I started questioning the whole exercise.
Because I wasn’t really organising photos.
I was trying to make decisions about memories.
And the trouble with memories is that you rarely know which ones matter until years later.
The final push came during a wider IT clear-out.
Between us we had over thirty thousand photos spread across phones, drives, cloud services and various digital archaeological sites.
I spent a week trying photo software.
Some were brilliant.
Some were awful.
Most were designed by people with the patience to individually rate, colour-code, keyword and categorise every image they own.
I do not possess this gift.
On a library of thirty-five thousand images, some of these workflows would have taken approximately the rest of my natural life.
Eventually I stopped looking for the perfect app and started looking at the actual problem.
The problem wasn’t the photos.
The problem was me.
I’m fast when I’m interested.
Forgetful when I’m not.
Distracted most of the time.
I revisit things repeatedly.
I make bad decisions.
I change my mind.
I get overwhelmed by large jobs.
And the more a task feels compulsory, the less I want to do it.
So instead of building a system for the person I imagined myself to be, I started building one for the person I actually am.
First it was a script.
Then it became a tool.
Then it accidentally started becoming an app.
A few more weeks disappeared into that particular rabbit hole.
But for the first time in years, something felt different.
The library started shrinking.
The clutter started moving.
The impossible pile started looking possible.
And here I am.
Sat at the computer again.
Big screen, little screen, cardboard, fish.
The vein is still throbbing.
But this time I think I might actually be winning.
A few thousand down.
A few thousand to go.