I’ve now pretty much abandoned the idea of using years as a way of measuring progress towards my goal. I’ve now completed 2024, and so the only “year” that I have left to do is 2025, but there’s also a bunch of photos that lie outside of the chronological archives that need to be integrated. I have been working through those in parallel, but there’s still some way to go. A more useful measure of progress is number of files – I started with about 25,000 files, and have managed to eliminate 10% of them through discovering duplicates and deleting photos that aren’t worth keeping. I now have about 6,400 files left to sort, of which roughly half are in that 2025 pile, and half are outside of the chronological archives. Most optimistic estimate for completion is two weeks. More realistic would be four.

My pixelfed profile is now up to 120 posts. I do have 47 followers but I don’t really set much importance in that number given that I suspect that a lot of them are scammers or bots. Gaining followers and likes has never been the purpose of this project. This is about being able to take pride in my photography, to rediscover my motivation. In my mind, there’s a multi-step process that goes roughly as follows:

1. take photos
2. delete the bad ones
3. file them consistently
4. process them to get the best out of them
5. publish them

In the absence of a step 5, there’s no point doing step 4, and so on, recursively up the list. And that’s why my photos have tended more and more towards snapshots taken on my smartphone for immediate sharing. It’s often a dilemma as to whether I want to keep these or not. I’ve been tending to err towards keeping them, as I do enjoy going through old photos and discovering minutiae and little gems of inconsequentia. A photo that’s of nothing in particular, but includes background details that capture the essence of a house that I used to live in, or a street that I used to walk down.

During the early stage of this process, I was posting a lot of my old photos to pixelfed as and when I found them. I’m being a bit more selective about that, these days. I felt a bit like I was spamming peoples’ feeds, so what I’m doing now is copying the nice photos that I discover into a dedicated directory, so that I’ve got a little stockpile on quiet days. This approach nicely smooths out my uploading so that it’s less bursty. It also allows me to choose which photos to upload based upon what suits my mood, rather than just simply which year I happen to be processing at the time. This week, for instance, I’ve posted a couple of caterpillars. I really like caterpillars. I need more caterpillars in my life.

If I were to tell you that I’ve now completed 2021 and am working through 2022, you’d probably think that that sounds like terrific progress. But, as I pointed out before, there’s caveats. I blasted through the first 10,000 photos in two weeks, because they were already very well-curated, but it’s taken me two weeks to get through the next 3,000. There are about 10,000 photos left to process, so that’s going to take me about two months, assuming that the pace does not drop any further (which I think might also be overly optimistic).

I’m continuing to take new photos, upload plenty to Pixelfed (now up to 108 posts), and keep those new photos well organised. There was a part of me that was briefly worried that I might find myself deterred from taking new photos, as dealing with those takes time, resulting in less time for progress through the photo archive. But so far, that does not seem to have manifested in any noticeable way.

One of the really nice byproducts of this process is that, by moving photos from a very haphazard system to a more structured one, I’m actually finding and eliminating quite a few duplicates.

Finally, a thing that I may later regret is my decision to treat short video clips as if they were photos, for the purposes of filing. Right now, it feels like if I have a directory full of JPEGs from a holiday, then if there are also one or two MP4s then it makes sense for them to be in there too. Time will tell if this decision was justified.

Not a great week for progress here. I haven’t had many opportunities to sit down at my computer, and so I’ve only managed to make it as far as 2017. However, I am staying on top of the new photos, which is the most important thing, and I’m taking lots of photos, which is also a very important thing, and the portfolio on pixelfed is now up to a very groovy 91 posts.

While progress through the archive might have slowed drastically, I remind myself of the following wisdom:

“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

Progress on the photo archive continues to be satisfactory. I have worked through my photos as far as the end of 2015, and there are now about 10,000 files in the section that has now been completed. But, as I mentioned before, I haven’t yet hit the real challenge. Those 10,000 were generally already reasonably well curated and organised, but the 15,000 files that remain include a lot of messy nonsense. The directory that is most daunting is the one for 2025 phone photos, of which there are about 2,500. Now, a lot of these I think I’ll be able to delete, but it’s still too much to do in one sitting. I’m going to need to find a way to break that down into smaller chunks, and be prepared for the fact that organising those 2,500 alone might be a week’s work.

It has, however, been very satisfying watching my portfolio on pixelfed growing. The combination of uploads of old photos, with my photo-a-day challenge, means that I now have 76 posts to my account, and I take some pride in scrolling through them and thinking “I did that. That’s good stuff.” I haven’t felt such pride in my photography – in any creative project, in fact – for quite a long time.

I’ve also been doing a good job of staying on top of new photos that I take, both in terms of keeping them well-organised, but also being selective about what I keep. Obviously I want to keep all the photos which are artistically interesting, but I also need to remember that there’s value in minutiae as well, and a photo that seems mundane today might bring back happy memories when I look at it in ten years time.

We are one week into 2026 and the photo project is coming along nicely, so I thought I’d give an update.

I have worked my way through the archives as far as the end of 2007. This sounds like really good progress, and I’m pleased with it, but there’s a few things to consider:

• Firstly, the archive was still pretty well curated back then. I’ve deleted a small number of photos, but mostly I’ve just been reviewing, reminiscing, and uploading to pixelfed.
• Secondly, I think that as I get closer to the present day, and we enter the era of me having a smartphone with a usable camera, the number of photos will increase. It’ll take me longer to get through each year.
• Thirdly, there are some photos that lie outside of the chronological archive. For example, I have a separate directory just for miscellaneous photos of my cat. That will need dealing with, and I’ll probably do that as a separate job once I’ve finished going through chronologically, and then try to find a way to pull it into the chronological archive. My current plan is to have a directory for cat photos within each year, and hopefully be quite selective about what goes into it.

I also had another realisation, which is that the top priority should be to stay on top of new photos coming in. Ideally, I don’t want to be chasing a moving target, so with that in mind I’m ensuring that the 2026 photos are well looked after, and curated and filed according to my preferred system. This also takes off the pressure to try and get the project finished sooner rather than later.

Last year I embarked upon a project of trying to get my photography mojo back, and this year I am intending to take what I’ve done and really start to develop upon that (pun not intended, but please give it some adulation anyway) and build some good habits. I’ve identified a few things that I want to accomplish for my ongoing grooviness.

Firstly, and principally, I want to take some photos. I have a friend who’s going to buddy me in this. We’ve decided that we’re going to have a photo-a-day challenge throughout 2026, with a different theme each week. We’ve already created our list of themes and we’re raring to go.

One of the problems that I’ve faced over the last few years is knowing where to upload my photos to. Once upon a time I used to upload to flickr, and that was great, for a while. Then I uploaded to twitter for a bit, but it wasn’t as rewarding, as it’s not a dedicated photo sharing site, so it never felt like I was really building a portfolio there. And then I stopped using twitter at all. I’ve never wanted to use instagram as it seems wholly awful and like it encourages a lot of antisocial behaviours and negative energy. Then, a couple of months ago, I discovered Pixelfed and realised that it aligned perfectly with my values – it’s just about sharing high quality photos and being oneself, so I created an account and I couldn’t be happier. My account is at https://gram.social/petedotnu

Another goal for the year is to whip my photo archive into shape. Back in the days before smartphones, I had a fairly robust system. If I’d taken my camera out with me for the day, I’d come home, I’d transfer all the day’s photos into a new directory, and I’d then go through a process of curating those photos. I’d remove blurry ones, of course, but I’d also look at instances where I’d taken half a dozen photos in pursuit of one good subject, and just keep “the good one” and delete the rest. I have fallen out of the habit of doing this. This is partly driven by the fact that so many of my photos are taken on my cameraphone, and automatically uploaded to Dropbox, so my processing workflow now looks something like the following:

1. Ooh, my Dropbox is starting to get a bit full
2. Best move all the photos from “Camera Uploads” onto my hard drive
3. Hmmm, there’s a few months worth there. Don’t really fancy looking at that right now. Let’s just leave them in the “unsorted” folder and I’ll do something with them later
4. Never do anything with them later

So as a result, my photo archive is in a dreadful state. But it can be fixed. One of the problems I need to address it that my previous system doesn’t work as well in a smartphone era, where photos tend to be taken in a more spontaneous fashion. Instead of having a day where I take a big batch of photos every few weeks, I have more random snapshots and one-offs. I need to do the following things:

1. Review the older portion of the archive that is well-structured and well-curated. Select photos of which I’m still proud – give these a bit of processing and upload them to Pixelfed.
2. Look at the slightly newer portion of the archive which is well-structured but poorly curated. Curate it. I expect this to be the quickest portion of the process, but this is relative. It’s still a sizeable undertaking.
3. Look at the newer stuff. The jumble. The aforementioned “unsorted” directory. There’s a lot to do in here…
   1. Identify “batches” of photos where I’ve taken many in one day. Collect these under the old system. Curate them as I go.
   2. For the rest, pull these into a new system that integrates better with the existing one. Be thoughtful in how I curate these. Don’t keep every single photo that I’ve ever taken of my cat.

I know that I sometimes have a tendency to chase immediate results. I need to set up this project in a way that is sustainable, that makes me feel comfortable with doing it as an ongoing process over the course of the year, and not trying to finish it all in one session. While I very much have a goal in mind here, I must also remember that there’s joy to be had in the process of going through all my old photos and spending a little time with the ones that bring back happy memories, or seem particularly aesthetically pleasing, so I need to remember to take it slowly and enjoy the journey.

I also know that I can sometimes have a bit of a “completionist” streak which drives me to keep everything, never deleting, just in case I need it some day. I need to conquer this. I don’t need to have a full and exhaustive photographic record of my entire life. Who would that even be for?