This fear also has subtle dimensions: sad feelings, on looking at the photos, about "what used to be" ... leading to fear of the future.
The other day I hunted through about six months' worth of photos for a particular one, and got increasingly frustrated - and got angry with myself for not doing anything about this chaos, this muddle, this superfluity. I know that about 90% of these photos - well, 75% for sure - can and should be deleted. Why do we keep them? Do we really look at and enjoy them? Does there come a time when we recognise they are a burden? (That was definitely a rhetorical question - as well as 25,000 digital pix I have 8 shoebox files of prints.)
Less is definitely going to be more - but where to start? There are free organising programs for digital photos. I already have Bridge, and my son has been filling my ears with how to use it, so I've watched a short video (there are many such). But mostly I've been thinking about what I want to use the images for, which will influence not just how many get deleted, but how the survivors will be categorised, or rather, labelled - how detailed does a description have to be for retrievability?
Looking through all those files the other day did give me an overview - landscape, family, events, art, and lots of quirky things - setting up a file structure isn't the problem. If, that is, a file structure as I know it is the solution. Nowadays we have metadata and tags - this "new stuff" requires a different mindset; it requires change. Change is hard, change is frightening. We're back to where we started, feeding in to the fear loop.
Time to make a plan. Today: research. Tomorrow: starting. Next week: progress.
The wisdom is that you start with the current stuff, and work backwards. Set the timer for 15 minutes ... little and often!
Think of the OED and be comforted. And the original editor of the OED, whose name is in the other room and not in my brain, thought it wouldn't be until he got to "C" that organization would be firmly established. As it turned out, he was optimistic -- estimates are that it was "G" that finally settled things. Now when they add new words, they start with "M."
ReplyDeleteSo of course you can't get the organizational rules right at first. But it will be be ever so much better than the tension of not-starting is:-)