Why didn’t anyone tell me…

One of the things I’m constantly doing over the last month is trying to get to the point of organization regarding my digital photos. I’m an active photographer if not a good one. I remember someone stating that they weren’t great, they were persistent. If you write enough songs, you’ll eventually hit on a good one. Well, I hold the same theory with photos. Bits are cheap to keep and I have occasionally come up with a good shot. However, if you want to find a particular photo, you may be in trouble fast. I’m up around 60,000 images to keep track of (more later), and plainly it’s a mountain to move.

Without becoming an “article,” I’ll just say that I decided a year or so ago that I liked Aperture and was going to stick with that for a couple years anyway – my reasons will turn into another article later, trust me. But I’ve spent about a month now just going through my library, importing, removing duplicates, keywording, sorting, and so on. I think once I work through the last couple years’ worth I’ll feel done with it and go into maintenance mode – which I’m looking forward to greatly. But until then, I find that I’m paying more attention to getting things organized more than taking new pictures. I’ve already dropped some 4000 duplicates or JPGs of RAW images, or thumbnails that got kept, etc. It’s paring down the bits I have to keep and making it easier to compose the photograph-diary I’ve been mentally keeping.

Yay for bus time.