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Over the years since about 2004 I have accumulated over 17,000 digital photographic images. In the beginning I used Apple’s iPhoto to store, organize, and edit these photos. Within the past year I switched to Aperture which is Apple’s “pro-level” software for photographers. I wanted the wider array of adjustment tools available in Aperture and its better options for sorting, naming, rating, and searching a growing visual database. However, as I was starting this transition, life got very busy and I didn’t create a coherent plan for the software change. So photos got thrown in a big disorganized mishmash which mushroomed when I tried to cull duplicates out of the collection. I wound up with hundreds of small “buckets” (called projects in Aperture, events in iPhoto) containing anywhere from one to a few hundred photos each. There was no coherent organizing principle: some were labeled by date, most by subject, and about a third of the images had no keywords or tags assigned to them at all. There were still a lot of duplicates, but I started to worry that I was going to lose important images if I wasn’t more careful. In addition I couldn’t find the photos I wanted. So I began the process . . .
Let me digress a moment and describe my affection for photographs. I have been fascinated since teenager years by the power of remembered images. Photographs are like visual smells-they can trigger long-forgotten memories, reconnecting the past with the present instantly out of the cerebral crevices. I love the way photos can recreate emotions of joy, surprise, sadness, pain, and pleasure from our recollected past. In addition, what a powerful archive of our history. We seem to have diminished the art of storytelling in our modern culture. Families are fragmented and opportunities to share our common past have declined. People don’t converse anymore: we watch, we tweet, we blog, we text, we watch some more: we’ve either passively accepted someone else’s story or we compress ours to the least mote possible e.g. “R U OK?” So photography is a visual summary of our past moments and properly organized, can serve up an equally compelling narrative.
In a later post I will describe some of the process I am going through with my project, the joys and sorrows of software, the power and frustration of digital vs. film records, and my plan for the future.\
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