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.