Organization Fun (Part 2)

As I said in my prior organization post, I have time to spare. I’ve been meaning to organize my digital photos for well over a decade. It’s a task I’d occasionally start and stop, mostly using folders, only to be fairly uncertain where I was headed whenever I’d get back to it six months or a year later. Such is the speed with which I do things.

One of my goals, while home with nothing to do, was to finally aggregate (at least) all of my photos into a single place. Then I can organize them as time allows and when the feeling strikes. Because they’ll all be together, I won’t have the same overwhelming, where-is-everything/is-there-more-someplace-else/what-was-I-doing-last-time-I-started-this barriers to overcome. I can just dive in and pick up wherever I’d left off.

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I’d originally planned to use Lightroom, but it kind of locks me into Adobe’s ecosystem, as they say; whereas, Apple’s Photos app allows pictures to be edited anywhere – in the app itself, in Photoshop, in Pixelmator, etc. Perhaps Lightroom also does this. Another reason I didn’t go with Lightroom, which probably has loads of benefits over Photos, is I don’t understand it almost at all. But the organization of the Photos app makes perfect sense – for me, it basically functions as a dumping ground, which is precisely what I want. And, as I said, I can edit the pictures themselves anyplace.

Loading all the pictures into Photos by dragging and dropping – and dragging and dropping, and fucking dragging and fucking dropping – them by their tens and hundreds and (ultimately) many, many thousands, gave me a foundation on which to build greater organization and with which to triage pics as they are added.

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And so that’s how I started. Digging all over my iMac and MacBook, and both the external hard drives I have, to track down all the pictures I still own. After dumping them into Photos, I can now – slowly – sort thru them. I’m deleting bad ones, tagging and organizing reasonably good ones, and then editing them in other apps and posting them, when it comes to that, on Flickr or Instagram.

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This is where things currently stand. The photos to be sorted; the videos to be exported and dealt with during some future pandemic.

This is gonna be a longterm project – and I keep shooting more, which will make it even longer. But I’m cool with that because it’s good, clean fun. And I’m fucking great at organization.

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