Taking a huge photo dump.

I’ve spent the past several days trying to ramp up my “photo dump” project and get enough stuff put together to fill a whole CD – and to my amazement, I haven’t come up with 750 megs worth of pictures yet. I’ve even gone back and organized all of the pictures I have on floppies from my older digital camera, and I’m still not there – and we’re talking about basically every digital photo that I’ve taken (and saved) since 1999. Something else I’ve discovered is that, anyone or anything you think you’ve taken a zillion photos of, you probably have, in reality, two or three dozen. When it came right down to it, I was amazed at how few photos I had of Chloe, or of Iago, and especially of Chelsea. (Conversely, you find that you’ve got a zillion photos of the most insignificant things imaginable.) What I do have so far is 4,057 pictures in 125 folders (which divide everything up by subject or sub-subject). Just about every critter here and at the farm has his or her own folder, though there are exceptions (cows and ostriches have “species folders”). There are folders for everyplace my wife and I have lived, and even my apartment in Green Bay. I have plenty of photos taken at work here (and in Green Bay), every gaming expo I’ve been to, and guest critters like Sampson and Gabby Cat. I still have a few stashes of floppies to locate and go through, but this is the vast majority of the pictures that I’ve taken in the past 7 years. I’ve made a concerted effort not to throw anything away; there were only a very few things I didn’t keep, and they tended to be old action figure shots I had taken for the Toybox section of the site, and other stuff along those lines. You don’t get that kind of self-editing when you have a roll of film developed, and I was going for the same idea here – even oddly-framed, off-centered pictures of horses are on there. Not to fill out space, but because one simply never knows. There’s a story behind every shot.
It amazes me how much some of the pictures bring back to me. There’s one floppy with some shots of our mostly-empty apartment, circa October ’99, with a strange hue of orange from the setting sun shining through the windows, and I remember that day – couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was exactly, and I’d have to right-click on the photo and look for the date – distinctly, walking around my new place in a daze, wondering what the hell kind of crazy thing I’d just done, moving back to Arkansas without a job. Amazing how that stuff comes flying back, isn’t it? And it’s mainly the orange light, and the somewhat disjointed series of shots (my temporary computer setup, a slightly out-of-focus Iago cleaning himself next to a laundry basket of dirty clothes, Othello snoozing on the couch). I’ve actually thought about posting some of these photos in the blog and retro-dating them to when they were originally taken, with only a line or two of text explaining the when and where; I might still do that, and probably create a new “old photos” category so you can find ’em if you want (or avoid ’em if you want).
Before I go there, though, I think I need to go to bed.

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  1. 1
    ubikuberalles

    I’ve had my Agfa digital camera since July of 1999. Here are the stats on that camera:
    6,221 files
    82 folders
    2.52 GB
    I guess I take bigger pictures than you (in file size, that is).
    That doesn’t include the pictures from my other digital cameras (PDA camera, binocular camera and my mini-spy cameras) but there are only a few hundred of those pictures.

  2. 2
    robohara

    7,713 Files
    251 Folders
    1.47 GB
    The majority of those were taken with my Olympus D-460 camera, 1.3 megapixel (1280×960 I believe).
    In 1995 I scanned in most of the film prints I had which wasn’t more than a hundred or two. Unfortunately most of them are 500×375 in resolution. If I can find the pictures again, I’d love to scan them all in with a modern scanner. In 1996 I got my Kodak DC-40 and in 1997 I upgraded to the DC-50. Both of them used a funky resolution — 760×580 or something odd like that. When I moved back to Oklahoma in ’98 I bought the Olympus that I’ve been using up until this past Father’s Day, when I received my Samsung 5.1 megapixel camera.
    My folders are fairly specific. I’m pretty bad at renaming photos so I tend to use folders to find things. I also use Google’s free software Picasa to organize and sort my folders and add keywords for searching (it also has a nice “export to web page” feature that works great for quick and dirty photo albums). My Olympus D-460 lost the date/time stamp every time I changed out batteries and as a result every picture I’ve taken over the past 8 years is dated 1/1/2000. For that reason all of my folders contain all the relevant information (Car Show, Yukon Park – 07-04-2006)

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