I’m not a professional photographer by any means, but I do enjoy taking pictures. I’m the default family photographer, and for work, I shoot almost all of my own photos.
That’s why I wasn’t too surprised when I noticed that iPhoto on my new iMac was running slowly. It does have to look after 20,454 photos that are sitting on its external hard drive. Couple that with the 3,349 photos and 266 videos on my iPhone, and that’s a lot of media – some 217 GB on that little portable drive.
Believe it or not, I’m reasonably judicious with the photos I store on my computer. Every so often, I go through and trash the very similar pictures, and even if I shoot 100 photos for an article, I delete all but a handful.
On my phone, it’s a different story. I snap so much, then forget to go back and weed out the bad ones. My phone used to fill up, but now that it’s more integrated into the cloud then ever, I can keep shooting and shooting and shooting.
This can’t be good.
In my defense, I curate the best photos into several shared photo streams. I print out the best into photo books for framed gifts.
But I’ve been shooting digitally since 1998. That’s 17 years of accumulated files. They started out as one megapixel files and are now up to 16. The quality and file size will only keep growing.
What am I supposed to do with all of these?
I remember helping a friend out in college after his grandmother died, and one of our tasks was going through her old photos and deciding what to keep and what to toss. This was a really sad task, and I felt like I was intruding on someone’s life, throwing away memories that meant nothing to me.
What will it be like for our generation? If everything fits on a tiny hard drive, or in the cloud, or on Facebook, will anyone bother throwing it all out? Will anyone care?
These are some deep thoughts, but I’ve been considering our collective digitized future a little more lately. Maybe it’s time. How many photos do you have sitting around, printed or digital? When does it end?
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
