The processing is complete.

The final count of files is about 20,500 which suggests that I have eliminated nearly 20% of them along the way, most of which will have happened through looking at the last couple of years. And this is exactly why I wanted to sort the photo archive – because I knew that I’d taken thousands of photos in the last couple of years, of which only about half were worth keeping, but the sheer disorganisedness of it meant that I was facing a big task.

I’m satisfied with the result, and I feel like I’ve now got some better habits in place so that I won’t end up back in that situation. And in a strange way I now feel more connected to myself, because to have a disorganised photo archive – a disorganised computer in general, in fact – doesn’t feel like the Pete that I know.

So that seems to be where this particular series of blog posts is going to end. I didn’t know how long it was going to take, and I was prepared for it to take all year, but in the event it was barely more than a month and a half. Pixelfed is now up to 145 posts and 52 followers, and this will continue to grow as I continue taking and uploading photos on an ongoing basis. While I figure out what my next project is going to be, I’ve purchased and installed Death Stranding, which is a computer game that I’ve had my eye on for years, and it’s about time that I gave it a go.

During this last week I’ve been working through photos from 2025. Far too big a job to do in one sitting, I’ve been taking it month-by-month, and am currently sat at the start of September. There are fewer than 2,000 photos to go, though not all of these are from the last few months of last year, because there are still a few hundred in that “unsorted” jumble that I’m still not completely sure of how to integrate into the chronological system.

The total number of files eliminated through this process continues to rise. Last week I said it was roughly 10%, and this week it’s up to 15%. But this is not surprising, because as I’ve already mentioned, I took a huge number of photos on my phone in 2025 and then just left them on my computer without doing any sort of curation. There’s been a lot of blurry shit to delete.

My Pixelfed profile is now at 133 posts and 51 followers. On average, I’m uploading two photos per day, and I’m making use of old photos to try and sustain that average. I have entertained the notion of trying to increase that average so that I hit 1000 posts by the end of the year, but this is such an arbitrary goal and I’m not sure what purpose it would serve.

I’ve also been turning my mind to what my next project could be, once the archives are whipped into shape. I do have a bunch of pre-digital photos, so it might be interesting to go through and scan a few of them. I think it would also be exciting if I could make use of further processing to give them a new lease of life. If you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment below!

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.