nina_hall48•1d agoProlific Poster

12 years of digital photos and I finally went back to paper albums

I used to be the person who scanned EVERYTHING, kept 4 backups of each file, and had 80,000 photos sitting on two external drives plus the cloud. Last month my laptop died and I realized I hadn't actually LOOKED at any of those photos in years, I was just hoarding them like a digital squirrel. So I spent a weekend picking out the best 300 shots from the last decade and printed them at a drugstore in Denver, cost me about $45 total. Now I keep a couple of physical albums on the coffee table and my family actually sits and flips through them together. The cloud storage is still there, don't get me wrong, but I don't stress about organizing it anymore. Comparing the two approaches, the paper albums win for actually enjoying memories, while the digital pile just made me anxious. Has anyone else gone backwards like this or am I the only one who feels lighter after deleting 40,000 files?

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shane_bell1d ago

Heard a photographer on a podcast talk about how we spend so much time taking photos that we forget the actual point is to look at them. That hit me pretty hard. The whole 40,000 files thing sounds familiar, my phone is basically a black hole of blurry food pics and my cat. Knowing you can just print the good ones for pocket change and ignore the rest feels like a weight lifted. Maybe the goal isn't to organize every memory, just the ones that matter.