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:
- take photos
- delete the bad ones
- file them consistently
- process them to get the best out of them
- 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.
Yes to the lost details in the backgrounds of photos. I’m going through both my own digital photos, but also my parents physical photo albums and collections. The nostalgia levels are high all from spotting a rug, or a book, or corner of a room.
Definitely. One of my regrets is not taking more photos when I was at university. I’ve got a handful, but how nice it would be to have even just one photo of each of the three rooms that I lived in during my time there.