A Different Drummer: Drowning in digital photography

Organizing my photography is about to drive me mad. I don’t know whether to digitize my print photos, or print out my digital photos. To do both seems thorough, yet excessive. Still something needs done. I’m awash in over 50,000 digital photos.
Let me first get the pros and cons in order. Security is the primary benefit of digitizing prints. Scanned photographs stored on a cloud, or in safety deposit box, are safe from physical damage at home by fire, vandalism, or theft. Another benefit is that digitized photos can be organized, duplicated, archived, resized, cropped, enhanced, edited, projected on a movie screen, and shared around the world.
Old and faded prints, once scanned, can be sharpened and cropped. Random boxes of prints can be organized. Space and money can be saved by not buying hardbound albums. Time can be lost by doing all that damn scanning.
The primary benefit of owning prints is the joy of holding them, gazing long at them, writing on the back, sharing them with friends on the couch, placing them into albums on bookshelves by the front door for easy rescue in an apocalypse.
Sharing prints is simple, easy and more personable than passing one’s phone around the room. “Oops. I touched something. Your screen went blank.”
I’m still driven mad by the ease and number of digital duplicates I’ve created and attempt to manage.
Whenever I upload high-resolution photos to my computer, I make two copies, the original full size files, and a folder of downsized duplicates for sharing online. I’m left with two of everything.
Then I upload my downsized photos to the cloud. Now I have three copies. Once photos are online, it’s easy to duplicate them again and again for use in social media and messaging.
When I take iPhone pictures, Apple automatically uploads every shot to iCloud because I allowed it to years ago when I bought my first iPhone and now I have so damn many photos on iCloud that I’m reluctant to shut it off.
With iCloud on, I also installed Google Photo, which does the same thing, because I like it better. It lifts duplicates of every shutter click, stores the pictures and videos online, and it syncs well with my PC. I can delete photos from my phone and they remain safe on the cloud. That’s swell. What if I want to delete all the copies?
The primary benefit to iCloud and Google Photo is security. If your phone is lost or stolen, your photos are safe.
The downside is that only a limited amount of storage is free, you have little control over the upload size, and every photo and video you take, even when trying to catch grandma smiling, it gets uploaded. Now to purge crappy photos and dumb videos, you must delete them from your phone and all your cloud sources.
In addition to paying storage fees for photos and videos, many people also pay data charges because every shutter snap is another uploaded file. Cute little videos can crush a data plan. Therein lies the madness.
But there are solutions. In settings, you can individually select which phone apps have access to your cellular signal. Turn off photo sources and they will only upload around Wi-Fi.
That’s grand. People who are out snapping pictures need only park a block from home and delete all bad photography before their network shakes hands with their phone.
One wrench into that dumb plan is that many of us are members of other Wi-Fi systems at Raley’s, Starbucks, Xfinity, ATT, Fred’s Pub. We can catch a Wi-Fi signal by fluke before we’ve had a chance to purge our bad photography.
Does one turn off Wi-Fi whenever one plans to take a sack load of photos? I do. Then I delete trash from the sack immediately afterward and turn my signal back on. Problem is, I often forget. Therein lies the madness.
On the sane side, we have been printing digital photographs as books lately. We wanted to keep the memories of our big, special adventures whole and tangible, easy to find, easy to share.
We started making books through online Costco. It began after our Manhattan trip with our grandsons. We put all the pictures, scanned tickets and receipts together with captions, quotes, funny remarks, and sidebar paragraphs describing our daily adventures. Everyone contributed photos to the process. When done, we printed three hardbound copies, one for each boy, and one for us. It looks nice and fits well on the shelf.
Next we captured our Yosemite hike when five of us in our 60s did seven days and ate well. The bookmaking program lets me add additional pages for a fee, so we made a bigger book with so many people contributing photos. We made three copies.
We made a book of our drive to the Montana Chainsaw Championships. The process was growing easy now, the book design went quickly, and the book got bigger still. We may do a book on our Blues Cruise, but we took a bazillion pictures and as the sole designer, a bit of exhaustion is setting it.
No deadline is mandated. I’m thinking, once rested, I may create a few books from adventures we took years ago. We have fantastic collections of memorable experiences languishing in some lost folders somewhere with names like IMG4629.jpg. Therein lies the madness.
If I wasn’t so busy building bird houses, I’d do it right now.