"I had no idea I had that picture!"
How many times have you said that?
I just said this to myself today as I set about on a project I gave myself to do while waiting for baby on "maternity leave." It came to my attention that I have a ton of pictures of my first son. And I'm not doing anything with them. I have more than a year of his life on my computer and half of it I don't remember ever shooting on my camera.
Our digital age has made some things much easier for us. We are able to create a wealth of knowledge and art. With the dawning of the camera now available on every single cell phone we are able to take pictures of loved ones, food, places and events without worrying if we have film in the camera or if we even remembered to bring it along. And there is virtually no reason to hold back on how many pictures we take; we'll never run out of film. Not only are we able to create at whim but we are able to hold on to all of it as well without question of where we're going to keep it all. No worries about shoe boxes full of negatives and prints or where to keep all the photo albums. They are all kept in one simple place.
But there is something more to be said about this "make everything easier" technology that we have. And it dawned on me even more so this week.
We are currently helping a friend clean up their computer because there is absolutely no more room on it. It is completely out of memory. So much so that they are unable to run any programs on it, not even a text document. The computer is more or less useless because of all the stuff that was able to be saved and created "without question of where we're going to keep it all." We have this notion that because everything is digital and can be compressed into smaller files sizes that we don't need to worry about storage space. A computer hard drive has a lot more room that the top shelf of your hallway closet after all. We assume that computers can hold a boat load of information. Until it can't anymore, before you even realized that you can't anymore. And then we have to pick and choose which memories to keep in order to free up room for more.
But wait! What about third party storage services like iCloud!?
We do live in a time of amazing technology. There are facilities all over the world that can store information for you. Terabytes worth of information. But I always wondered exactly how safe my information, my memories were, in the hands of someone else. And then the scandals with the leaked naked celebrity photos saved on third party storage clouds happened. And I knew I was right. My memories, and yours, are not safe in the hands of others. These storage clouds were meant to give you access to your files from anywhere, but because it's saved on someone else's network that means with given the right patience and know-how anyone and everyone else can gain access to them as well. Just as easily as someone posted the nude photos of some of our beloved celebrities online, someone could steal your photos and create a new life using your cherished memories and important documents. And that is a scary thought.
Well, what is to be done, you might ask. I'll get to that, but first let's get back to how I began.
When I was focusing on traditional portrait photography I did not give away the digital copies of the images I took. Many will say that photographers do this in order to make more money off their clients. Perhaps some do. But for me it never was really about that. It's because I knew that if I gave my clients a disc with their pictures all that would ever become of those pictures would be a quick download onto their computer, a quick share on Facebook and then the pictures would never be seen again. The memories that they paid me to capture would be forever forgotten on their computer, added to the rest of the clutter on their hard drives or left out in the open on a cloud. And I didn't want that for my customers. So I only gave prints. I wanted them to be able to see their memories every time they sat down in their family room or walked down their hall. Because let's face it, how many of us are actually good enough to where we print out our pictures on a regular basis? And with the digital age we are in, how many of us actually think it's worth it?
But here's the real question. With all the pictures we take, how many of us actually sit down regularly in front of our computers and look at all of them? Honestly. Do you ever just sit in front of your computer and browse through your pictures? I sure don't. I'll be the first to admit it. So I wonder how often others do. And that's the real sad part. We have all these pictures on our endless storage devices and we never look at them. There are pictures on my computer that I didn't know I had. It's this that has spurned me even more to practice what I preached to portrait clients and print out all the pictures I've taken of my son's two years of life and put them in an album. Because I am more likely to pick up that album and spend hours looking through them sitting on my couch with my son next to me than I am to sit for hours at my computer to just look at pictures. And that is what's more important to me than a collapsed hard drive, that those memories don't go forgotten. There is nothing more sad to me than a picture that never gets viewed.
So here are some suggestions I have if you find yourself in a similar situation with a computer full of pictures that you don't look at and no more space to save more:
- Move them over to a USB and get them printed! Simple as that.
- Delete the digital files once printed. Your hard drive will thank you. You may be scared by this because we think that once the digital is gone we can never get it back. Have you ever heard of a scanner? If ever you need to make another copy of the picture or if the picture is damaged and you need to send it off for restoration just have it scanned and there you have a brand new digital file again to clog up your computer's memory. (If it's a picture taken by a professional this is of course a big NO NO. It is illegal to scan or reproduce a photograph taken by a professional without their permission. Contact your photographer in order to obtain more copies or for permission to reproduce the photograph.)
- If you simply can't send your digital files to the trash, rather than saving them forever more on your computer save them to an external hard drive that is reserved for PICTURES ONLY. This way you will always know where they are and they won't clog up the valuable memory on our desktop. Please, please, please do not use third party cloud storage systems if only for the safety of your identity and photos.
- Delete all of the unusable pictures from your camera/phone BEFORE you download them. If you are a "dump and look later" downloader chances are your "look later" is much much later. And much much later your computer will be full of pictures, many of which you can't use. (I'm guilty of this myself.) If there is a chance that you won't get to your pictures right away delete all of the bad pictures before they even make their way onto your computer. This will ensure that you have more space for the ones you actually want to keep and print off.
- Print your pictures off monthly if not immediately. If you take a lot of pictures having them printed at bulk stores like Costco (while I detest their print quality) can make it fast and cost effective if you have a lot to print off at once (which is what I've been doing, and while I hate the quality of the prints at least they are off my computer and in my hands). Once you've gotten your stash of pictures under control I would suggest moving up to a higher quality printer.
So I'm going through all of my pictures. I've already printed off over 700, I've got about 500 more ready to print on a USB and I've still got over 500 more to sift through and make ready for printing. I did this to myself. But after they are all converted I am pitching all of the digital files in the trash and freeing up my computer for new memories. But I am vowing to not let these new memories sit on my computer. Every month I will print off the pictures I took in that month. As a professional photographer I will never delete my clients' photographs. I will always back those up on some sort of external storage device. This rant about the digital age ruining our memories is more about the millions of snapshots we take every month, the moments we have to take a picture of because we don't want to forget and then end up forgetting them away.
Print off your pictures. Don't let your memories go forgotten.