Lorem Ipsum

I’ve now labeled all 39,801 photos and videos in my collection. Whew.

…I don‘t know if I ever really explained what I mean by “labeled” in this project. I mean that each item now has a descriptive title (although often the titles are just things like “View”), and each item has one or more categorization tags, and all the people who I can identify are labeled with their names, and the time/date stamp for each item is as accurate as I can make it.

And any item that I especially liked is tagged as a Favorite, though this was only a first pass at Favorites. At some point, I’ll probably do a further reduction pass on the Favorites, because there are 6,700 of them, which is a little unwieldy.

And anything that I want to do further stuff with (like posting it, or finding out more about it, or deciding whether to delete it, or getting the printed version framed) is marked with a tag like TODO or TODELETE or TOFRAME.

I haven‘t done any editing at all on the vast majority of these photos. In a few cases, I used Apple Photos tools to improve them slightly (usually by making dark photos a little brighter), and in a few cases, Google Photos has automatically generated enhanced versions (usually by boosting the saturation way up). But I haven’t cropped them or done anything else to improve them; that would have added a huge amount of time, and would have required a lot of artistic decisions that were out of scope for this project. I don’t make decisions easily or quickly, so I wanted to do as little decisionmaking as possible for this project. :)

The dates of the photos range from about 1860 to the present. But the number of photos per year went up by a lot around 1997, when I got my first camera and went on my Wanderjahr, and then went up by a lot again around 2002, when I got my first digital camera, and then went up by a lot again around 2005 (my father’s death, various weddings and trips, etc), then again in 2007 with my first iPhone. In 2009, I bought a house and sold my condo (about 1,400 photos), and copied photos Kam took of Mary Anne, Kevin, and Kavya (about 300 photos), and flew in a zeppelin, and so on, so the numbers went even further up. In 2010, more house stuff, a trip to Australia, various other trips, a wedding, etc.

Interestingly, in 2011, the number dropped to about a third of the 2010 number, and volume has only gradually been climbing back up since then.

…Part of the increase over time is that I continue to slowly get used to the idea of taking lots of photos, especially on trips, and I continue to incorporate digital photos that other people have taken (at events we’ve been at together, or posted on FB, or whatever).

…The numbers did go down somewhat in 2018, when I started labeling photos as I took them, and started to be aware of just how much work labeling them was going to be :), but it was still the sixth-largest year ever.

So far in two months of 2019, I’ve taken about 550 photos; if that continues, then 2019 will end up among the largest years ever too. But 350 of those were from the Sri Lanka trip, so it’s hard to extrapolate usefully.