So many photos!

The proliferation of photos on my phone - I use the phone camera exclusively these days, as so many people do - continues to be a concern. As does the clunkiness of google  photos, which kindly accumulates them on my computer, and it is on my computer that I try to tame them. 

Why oh why does google photos not have an easy way to put in album and archive with one click? This is what takes quite a lot of time; I try to do several sessions each week.

"On Tuesdays I polish my uncle" went a Raffi song from my son's childhood, or was it a poem we liked - well, on Fridays I file the week's photos of Freya. It's a bit like putting "real" photos into an album regularly. 

And while I'm at the computer, on Fridays and most other days, I file a few(!) more photos. It's a daunting task: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time ...

(via)

Some Rules have evolved.

Rule 1: only one month per session.

Rule 2: only three categories per session.

Rule 3: write down what you did.

Rule 4: delete duplicates as you go.

Rule 5: limit the time spent to an hour.

Rules 1 and 5 make for manageable chunks. Rule 4 makes for an easy task if you don't have much time or energy (but DO follow rule 3 - writing down you've done it is visible proof of progress). 

Rule 2, only three categories, is a recent implementation, and is my small way of overcoming some of the annoying clunkiness of google photos. Because...

...first you have to find the category, aka as Album. They are listed - in a small pop-up box - by date of earliest photo. Only vaguely, though -

And how easy is it to read that list?? There's no way of changing the type or enlarging the box. Grr.

(Still pondering what the secret, hidden, incomprehensible organising principle might be - date album was created? latest album added to? )

I choose a month - today it's Feb 2018 - and the three albums choose themselves. The easy ones, and sometimes I have to make new albums for them, are big projects I was working on, certain kinds of exhibitions, exhibitions in a time range, places (re)visited, that sort of thing. Also easy are classes (painting, woodblock printing, art history, etc) and types of work - textile collage, ceramics, book arts, etc. 

Then I go through all the days, deleting duplicates and filing pix into the three albums, only those three, and then re-selecting those pix and archiving them. It's easiest to do this one day at a time, rather than gather a lot over several days (I take dozens of pix on some days). Crikey it gets boring!

The three albums conveniently appear at the top of the list:

which saves unnecessary rootling around in the murk below.

Sometimes there's a photo that needs downloading for an upcoming blog post, or just to be able to find it again. This little distraction can waste a lot of time ... for instance, today I found this pic of the very beginning of my Footballers piece - 

It looked intriguing as a thumbnail ... and I can see possibilities for using the combination of outlines and random text, but that's another story for another time.