What’s So Great About Photos?

Halli Hallo! Here we go again, another round of Everything’s Famtastic to enthral and delight you. Last week’s post about dealing with grief was kinda heavy and not my usual thing. But then again, the passing away of so many friends and family in such a short time is also not “my usual thing”. But nobody is ever alone in their grief. I just hope that my post reached the right person at precisely the time when they needed some reassurance, comfort and strength after losing someone special.

One of my “usual things” however, is photographs. I take a LOT of photos. Just ask my Hubby. Or my kids. Or pretty much anyone who has known me for a while 😉. I take photos with my mobile phone. I take photos with my big fancy-pants SLR camera.

I not only take a lot of photos, oh no. I collect photos from my Hubby’s mobile too. And when we get together for special occasions with friends or family, I like to check out what photos anyone else took too. Which means that I have a fairly large collection of photographs.

Ahem. *clears throat* I don’t think that I have been quite clear enough. I have a REALLY LARGE collection of photos. I haven’t done a hard-core sorting and cleaning out of photos from my laptop in years. Since approximately 2014 to be precise *buries face in hands in shame*.

Ok confession time. I take a LOT of photos. I have more than 40,000 photos stored on my laptop dated from 2014 to present. I am a photography addict.

There is just so much to do with all those photos… *wails*

Oh, So Many Photos!

Nowadays, anyone with a mobile phone in their pocket or handbag seems to pull it out at every occasion and snap a pile of photos. And then post them all over whatever their fave social media account is. (Refer to “#Selfie” by The Chainsmokers 😉) But I, sounding like an old biddy naysayer, have been snapping photos on my various cameras for many years. So there!

*Back in the day*, whenever there was a party, I would be there photographing my friends and sharing prints- yes, PRINTS *gasp!*- with them. (Anyone remember what printed photographs actually look like anymore?!?) Chances are, if friends or family members were looking to chase up photographs of a special occasion, I would be one of the first to be asked whether I had some.

I really do love photography. I am by no means anywhere close to professional status. But I do alright. Straight horizons. No blinding the subjects with the flash. Pay attention to focal point. Try for interesting composition. Stuff like that 😉.

And when one takes so many photographs, one must store them somewhere. For me the process is: load them onto the laptop, back up to an external hard drive, and also burn the photos onto discs.

But I do like to make it more difficult for myself my inserting a whole lot of work between the “load onto laptop” and the “burn onto discs” steps.

How I Deal With So Many Photos

I reckon if you asked, say, 10 people what they do with their digital photos these days, most would probably include something like “Dunno. They’re all on my computer somewhere.” Mine are too. And I know exactly where the 40,000 of them are 😉. Doesn’t make it easier to grasp the workload ahead of me though!

If you ever attempt to research ways of organising, storing, labelling or editing photos, there are a thousand different suggestions for the “best” way. I am quite sure that mine is NOT the best way. But I know my system and I am sticking with it. You know, “If it ain’t, broke don’t fix it”?!? I can tell you what I do with my photos and you can compare that to your own method. And quite possibly lean back and smugly smile at how much more efficient your own system is 😉.

As a rule, I download the photos from mobile phones, SLR, WhatsApp or wherever into folders on my laptop. Easy, done, right?!? *dusts hands off* Er, no. I like to do a bit of editing on some photos. And I also want them labelled with a date and a brief title. And just for more *fun* I also tag them so I can search by name if I am looking for someone specific. After all that, I burn them onto discs for storage. Then, and only then, will I delete them from my laptop.

Although it is still a lot of work, I don’t actually do all this one by one in some folder on my computer. Can you imagine? OMG, I’d be 110 years old before I got through it all!! No way. I love using Adobe Lightroom which can take care of all the tagging and editing and way more, on multiple images at a time. Thank goodness.

I don’t own the full Adobe Photoshop. It was too expensive for me. And I am not really planning to replace people’s heads with lizard heads or “photoshopping” bikini bodies anytime soon. Or ever, actually. But #lightroom is a fantastic, user-friendly program that is really fun and easy to use. It is definitely worth checking out if you are into playing a bit with your photos once they are on your computer. P.S. No, this is not a sponsored post for Adobe. But hello Adobe people, if you want to pay me to talk more about your products, please feel free to get in touch 😉 LOL.

“So if Lightroom is so awesome at taking care of all those photos efficiently”, you ask, “why do you still have 40,000 photos on my computer?” Aha! I saw that coming 😉. Um, life, childcare, other projects and hobbies, overwhelm, procrastination, side-stepping, family demands, work demands, big dreams… Would you like to hear more reasons? And all the photo-related projects that pop up along the way, that make me pause in my tackling-those-photos-process.

All Those Little Photo Projects

So exactly what photo projects do I mean? Well… *large inhale*… calendarsalbumsCDsbooksscrapbooksframedphotographsmosaicsshareonlineforthekidsforthegrandparentsforourhomeforfriendsforschooletcetcetc *phew!*

Got that?!? Ok, again…

Every year I order printed calendars with photos of the kids for us, the grandparents and all of the godparents. This way everyone can see some of the special things that we have been up to in the previous year. (A few months back I wrote about creating photo calendars- see here! )

I make photo albums (either with actual prints, or these days more likely as a printed book) for each of our 3 children, populated with the best of the best photos of each child. Yes, our bookshelf is groaning under the weight of these albums (just ask a certain member of this household, who will gladly roll their eyes at that very bookshelf). But our kids actually love pulling those albums off the shelf and eyeing off and giggling at their earlier selves. And one day our children will be all big and grown up and move out of home and take those albums with them 😉.

I burn tons of photo CDs. Not only as a backup copy for me. I also copy some photos for friends if I know that I snapped some good ones of my kids and theirs, or me and MY friends (See! It’s not ALL about the kids!!) I select some hundreds of photos to share with the grandparents. Definitely worth remembering if you are an expat like me. We don’t have ANY family living in or near our town. My mother-in-law lives in another city and my own parents in another hemisphere. Although we do our best to make sure our children have as much contact as possible with all grandparents, giving them plenty of photos to look at allows them to vicariously share our lives. All of that means I have folders left, right and centre on my computer labelled with the likes of “For the Grandparents” and “For Family P.” to which I then export the relevant photos.

I order hardcover printed books with special family and highlights photos from our big family holidays. Like when we visited Australia and spent 2 weeks driving down the east coast in a campervan seeing fields and waterfalls and egg-laying turtles and wild dolphins and coral and beaches and…. Such GREAT memories!

After special holidays, like our recent trip to Croatia, the kids love making up their own small album or scrapbook of holiday photos and treasures. The look of pride on the kids’s faces after they have their own self-designed album is precious. One upon a time I also tried my hand at scrapbooking. But again time was a problem. And in Germany somehow, scrapbooking wasn’t such a raving popular success like it was in the States. Shame.

What’s a household full of children without a smattering of framed photographs on display? Again, it takes a lot of sorting (and sometimes arguing with the subject in question 😉) to find the ultimate photos to frame.

If you ever needed an idea for a gift that encompasses hundreds and hundreds of photos, a mosaic is the way to go. There are multiple programs available on the internet, many of them free, that allow you to upload your photos and- voila!- it turns your photos into a mosaic of them all. (I have used AndreaMosaic a number of times and they have always turned out great!)

Lastly, how could I forget about sharing your faves on social media?!? I tend to not share so many photos around on social media, but once again, for an expat, it’s a great way for all those loved ones across the seas to see what on earth we get up to 😉.

What’s So Good About Photos Anyway?

That brings me back to why I am posting this today or working so hard to edit and delete already 29GB of photos from my laptop …

It actually started the other week. When an old friend of mine passed away. Each in our group of friends was asked whether we wanted to share any photos we had. So, I went looking for photos. And (thanks to my excellent system of storing my photos in calendar order) I was able to find some (amongst the 40,000+ quite quickly. Looking through those photos really made me smile.

And then I got caught up looking through other photos from years gone by. All the way back to 2014 when (now) Master 5 was still lolling about on the floor as a cute but helpless baby, Miss 8 was still having afternoon naps and Miss 10 was learning to ride a bike.

All of which made me smile more. And remember. Everything comes flooding back. People, places, sights, shared laughter, friendship, love, accidents, clothes, homes, pets, experiences… Favourite pieces of clothing. Damaged teeth. Painted faces. Tear-stained faces. Sunrises. Sunflowers. School bags. Every single birthday. All of it.

I smiled. I chuckled. I got teary. I laughed out loud. I shared the photos with my kids, my Hubby, my family. My heart swelled with pride and love and and joy and happiness and gratitude.

And all of that in turn reminds me why I love my photos so much 😊.

Am I nuts? Or does anybody else have vast troves of photos on their computer too? How do you manage them? Do you actually DO anything with your photos other than just collect more and more? Tell us about it here below!