I hooked up the good old external hard drive to my computer and discovered that it held around 72,000 images. After a bit of deleting I am now at just under 60,000. This was after a few massive purges last year. My Google Photos account supposedly has over 17,000 pictures, although it is claimed that the “dashboard” is unreliable. Those are exclusively phone photos and for the last two years they are dominated by pictures of Luke. It is difficult to delete any, even when I have a sequence of 20 with nearly identical expressions. Mixed in are hundreds of videos of him that I have yet to watch closely. Before Luke, camping photos make up the bulk of the files. They are difficult to delete as well, but I need to keep reminding myself that I always have better photos taken with my “real” cameras, and these are just visual notes, so only keep a few. Speaking of real cameras, I need to use one in order to take some pictures of Luke.

It’s not that I don’t have ample computer and cloud storage for all of the photos, I do, it’s just that I want to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Most of the crappy pictures get deleted upon import, but there are thousands of decent ones just cluttering things up and obscuring the good ones. So in Picasa (an outdated, now unsupported former Google program that I was able to bring over from my old laptop) I am starring and creating galleries from my favorites. Maybe I will print some or at least make some little photobooks. That is more fun that looking a them on a screen. Once I have deleted a lot more pictures I need to do a backup to Amazon drive. Probably should copy to a second hard drive as well.

Fortunately I cleaned up most of my non-picture files a few months ago when I upgraded to a new computer. So there isn’t much to do on that front. Next I will try to organize and purge my physical possessions.