One of the pleasures I’ve found in the empty-nest season is the time to tackle projects I’ve put off for years. After my granddaughter was born, I finally finished the counted cross-stitch quilt I had started 32 years earlier, when I was expecting my first child. During the pandemic, our quarantined little family of four took on the monumental task of organizing our attic storage area, where stuff had collected since we moved in 23 years earlier.
For the past couple of weeks, with heavy snow and frigid temperatures keeping me inside, I’ve been working on another long-overdue project—I’m culling and organizing nearly 70,000 digital photos!
Technicalities (If you don’t care about files, photo platforms, etc., you may want to scroll past this section!)
We purchased our first digital camera in 2002, before our first family trip to Disney World. During the early years of digital camera use, I averaged around 1,000 photos a year, ranging from 850 to 1500.
Over the next five years, that range jumped to 1800-2200 photos/year. And since 2015, I have taken between 3,000 and 5,000 photos per year! I blame the ever-ready cameras we now carry in our pockets for the skyrocketing number of pictures.
I often go through my phone and delete the extraneous stuff (e.g. duplicates, text screenshots, or pics I take at Costco asking my husband which coffee brand he prefers). But everything else eventually gets dumped into my storage system.
“Dump” is the appropriate word here, since there is plenty of garbage I no longer want or need. And the more garbage there is, the harder it is to find the real gems I seek from time to time. Not to mention how cumbersome it is to maintain and back up the extensive files that hold my gems and garbage.
Simplifying and Cutting Costs
I’ve been wanting to clean up my photos for years, but the straw that finally broke this amateur photographer’s back was a new $5/month charge. My current photo storage system (Adobe Lightroom Classic) increased its monthly fee from $9.99 to $14.99. And while Lightroom is great for the photo-editing aficionado, it’s really several levels above my pay grade. I originally wanted it for its facial recognition tool, as I had spent countless hours tagging faces on my previous platform, and didn’t want to lose all that hard work. But I use only about 10% of the features this robust program offers.
A few years back, I discovered the easiest way to move photos from my iPhone to Lightroom was to use Google Photos as a go-between. But it’s a hassle to offload my photos every month or two. Over time, Google Photos has added automatic facial recognition (that works very well!) and other basic and easy-to-use editing tools.
In summary, with the extra work of moving photos from one program to another, the complicated platform that was far more than I needed, and the added cost of $5 a month, I decided to give up Lightroom and use Google Photos only.
This meant I needed to move about 20 years’ worth of photos out of Lightroom and into Google Photos. And since I would be handling all my old photo files, I was determined to clean them up, painstakingly going through them year by year, month by month, and often photo by photo.
The Surprising Rewards of Tackling the Photo Cleanup Project
Although it has used up much of my free time over the past two weeks, the end is in sight! And the process has brought unanticipated bonuses.
Practical lessons learned
With 70K photos to move, attempting one big photo dump didn’t work. I soon discovered I needed more storage, and found a personal Google account—rather than the shared Workspace one I had been using—was the most economical way to get it. I signed up for 2 TB of storage, which should last me a very long time.
ChatGPT did an incredible job of guiding me through the process, step by step (by step by step). If I had a question midstream, I simply asked it and got immediate clarification.
The only mild annoyance was how ChatGPT kept reassuring me with phrases like “You’re doing great!” and “You’re exactly where you need to be.” “You’re officially past the scary part now.” 😱 🤣 I also didn’t like the condescending way it assumed I was getting flustered. “Take a breath 😊 — this is not a real glitch, and you did nothing wrong.” And “The key is not to panic or redo work you’ve already done well.” (Thanks, Chat, but I was never panicking.)
Unexpected fruits of the labor
When I turned on some quiet music and clicked through my photos, going backwards in time (from around 2016 to 2002), I was surprised at the emotions that surfaced. I laughed out loud at the hilarious moments I found. And I felt a tightening in my throat when poignant memories flashed before my eyes.
Moments with my children I had forgotten about,
amazing adventures (too many to list) we’ve had as a family or a couple,
my kids performing in school programs, concerts, recitals, marching band, and musicals; plus soccer, volleyball, cheerleading, climbing, ping-pong, and juggling,
heart-wrenching photos of loved ones gone too soon,
precious times spent with my parents and siblings,
me with my mom and two aunts (all now deceased) chatting by the lake one summer afternoon,
and countless winter snowstorms, spring blossoms, summer sunsets, and autumn leaves, reminding me of the faithfulness of a loving Father who is with us in all the seasons of life.
Looking back at the good times and people that have enriched our lives can fill us with renewed gratitude for life’s blessings. Seeing evidence of struggles we’ve endured reminds of of God’s presence through it all.
Inspiration for next steps
Seeing these memories—many of which I’d forgotten—made me wonder how best to share them with my family and friends. Should I make more scrapbooks? Put together slideshows? Share online albums?
There are many possibilities, but I want to use these memories to instill love, joy, and gratitude NOW. Keeping them locked away in my laptop until I’m gone (and my kids need them to put together a slideshow or photo board for my funeral) just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, and what about those shoeboxes full of traditional, hard-copy photos I’ve stashed away? And the many scrapbooks sitting on my bookshelves? Should I digitize them to protect them from fading, mildew, or fire?
The answer, of course, is YES! But that project might have to wait for another winter’s day (or week, or month)!
What are your methods of choice for photo storage, organization, and sharing?
Do you have any tips that have helped you stay on top of things?
How do you use old photos to bring joy to your life and that of your family and friends?
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Great read. I have been trying to decide the best organization method for my photos for 20 years! And I don't know why it hasn't struck me until I read this that I can put past photos onto my google photos not just the stuff I have taken since I started using it. I have all of my daughter's early childhood on a portable hard drive that is hard to access and I live in fear of losing. I do worry about losing my ability to access my google someday. Or my children losing it when I die and then losing their childhood photos but I guess that will need to be solved another day. In the meantime I am actually thinking about printing some things out to create a physical photobook for my daughter, just a few highlights, not everything, but something to hold and point to and pull out. It seems like after a few years of digital albums her generation is longing for something to hold on to.
Digitizing videotapes and photos prior to 2000 or so, is a project I would love to do. I have made a few attempts. It gets overwhelming quickly! I want to get all the photos out of photo albums, to help minimize our possessions.
We have a small scanner, which has worked for some of the older paper photos, but it is slow and tedious. I sent out 1 box of videotapes when I had a coupon.
I am pleased that all my photos since the early 2000s are in Google Photos, which categorizes them by date, search by person, etc. So it's everything from 1962 to 2000 that needs attention.