Unruly Photo Album
Once upon a time, I had a phone with very little storage. I had to download the images off the phone and delete the ones that weren’t super special to me to make more space. If you look back at the early years of my camera roll, they are the best of the best — fantastic images that I want to keep forever.
I got a new phone right before the pandemic. Even though I had more space, I behaved the same way, anticipating a time when I would run out of storage again. I would carefully cull out the blurry pictures or screenshots, download the good but not great ones to my computer, and delete.
But at some point during the pandemic, I stopped doing this because it felt like one more thing on my to-do list. And I wasn’t taking many images anyway. I would back up the images to my computer but leave them on the phone, too. And now my camera roll is an unruly mess.
For some unknown reason, I take a screenshot of my Wordle every day. I’ve played on this phone for 178 days. (Before that, I was on the computer.) I have 178 unnecessary screenshots that I will never look at again. I have three billion pictures of Beorn. Most of them look exactly the same. There are hundreds of pictures of the kids with masks over their faces. You cannot see their faces. Why do I need this many pictures?
Because I didn’t keep up with it, it will now take me a whole afternoon to clean up the camera roll so I don’t have to scroll past four thousand pictures of wallabies eating treats to get to those older, curated, best-of photos. It makes me tired to think about it, so I never begin.
Clean as you go, digitally.
4 comments
When I was transferring photos to my computer and deleting, I would get rid of all the nonsense and bad shots. Now that it all goes to Google, I don’t ever look at it again. Ugh. I hate it. (I do occasionally upload stuff from Google to my computer, and do some culling then.) Of course…I don’t have to make scrapbooks with all the photos from the store, so there’s that. 🙂
This is good advice. Unlike a lot of people, I back up my photos from my phone on a reasonably regular basis. But I don’t always delete the ones that need to be deleted. It’s the same with all my photos from my camera. I upload them, use the ones I want, but don’t always delete the ones that are worthless. I seriously need to do that, simply because it helps me negotiate my folders. Sigh.
I used to order prints of my photos and put them in photo albums. I actually kept that up until, well, 2020. Then I stopped seeing people and going anywhere. All of my pictures were of food and fabric, which is enjoyable to me, but… I guess I didn’t want to keep pandemic albums. I think, like you, it was just something else to do and I didn’t feel like doing it. But that reminds me- I should delete some pics.
I back up my photos from my phone to my laptop (and delete from my camera roll) at least once a month (I have a calendar reminder to do it!). I do delete the obviously bad/blurry ones, but otherwise I keep them all. I have a LOT of photos, lol. My phone also automatically backs up photos to Google Photos, so I’m doubly backed up. Although I’m starting to run out of Google storage…!
Actually, I’m triple-backed up, because I back up my laptop files to a hard drive once a month too. I’ve gotten much better about doing that since my laptop died suddenly last year, when I hadn’t done any backups in more than a year. (Thankfully, my sister’s techie partner was able to retrieve ALL my files for me!) Lesson learned!!