Do You Take Too Many Photos? I Know I Do.

Having countless digital photos feels overwhelming — it was never like this for my parents…

Table with five different old film cameras on it
Photo by Antonio Scant on Unsplash

Overview

  • My parents’ approach to photography
  • My out-of-control digital photo collection
  • A strategy to get things under control

Growing Up With Film Cameras

When I was a child, my parents only took around 50–100 photos each year. My dad had a 35mm film camera, and was the main photographer.

Many of the images were from our summer holidays. We were only ever away for one week, and it was rare for more than two films to be used, each of which held 24 or 36 photos.

Quite often, my parents would ‘use up’ any remaining film when we returned, by snapping pictures of random things around our home.

Some photos were taken at other times of year too, such as birthdays. But unless it was an extra special occasion like an 18th party, there weren’t very many.

Considering how few pictures were taken back then, it’s not surprising that my parents only had a small number of albums.

During the 1970s, many of the photos were developed as slides, and we ended up with quite a few boxes of them. Even including all those slides, the numbers were still fairly modest.

The Digital Era

When I became an adult, I carried on my parents’ tradition of taking only a small number of photos for quite a few years. But things started to change after the year 2000, when I got my first digital camera.

Initially, memory cards were fairly small, so I couldn’t take many more photos than I had with a film camera. But it wasn’t long before larger cards became available at a reasonable price. And having almost no limit meant that I may have got a little carried away…
Why take just one photo of something, when you can take thirty?
Things stepped up even more in 2005, after the birth of my first child. I probably took as many photos that year as my parents had done during my entire childhood.
Why So Many?

I find it hard to take group photos in which everyone is smiling, or to capture a child’s cute or funny moment. So I take multiple photos in the hope that one of them will be good. The problem is that I can’t bring myself to delete the ones that get rejected.

I sometimes wish I had more photos from my childhood — there isn’t even a single image of certain memorable items or events. So I’m probably over-compensating now, by taking tens or hundreds of photos each time.

Compulsive Photography

When I’m getting rid of items, I find it helps to take photos of them. Often it’s the memories that I’m frightened of losing, rather than the objects themselves.
Photos help me declutter. But they create digital clutter instead.
While it might sound like a good idea, the trouble is that I get carried away. I take multiple photos from every angle, sometimes even recording video clips.

It feels like a compulsion — I have to take them.

I experienced something similar on holiday many years ago with my late wife, when we found ourselves without a working camera. I couldn’t rest until we’d gone back the following day, retraced our steps, and taken the ‘missing’ photos. And she never complained — what an amazing woman she was!

On another occasion, when my late mum’s house was being cleared, my anxiety levels were very high. I simply had to take hundreds of photos of everything — it was the last time I would ever see the place.

(Perhaps I have OCD. But I don’t want to get side-tracked by talking about that right now.)
My Photo Library

As you might expect, I’ve ended up with many tens of thousands of photos.

Holidays and events result in far more images than necessary, and a lot of them tend to be very similar.

My photos of ‘old junk’ — items I no longer have — are almost never looked at.

I’m starting to realise it would be hard for anyone looking through my photos to figure out which items really meant something to me.

And ironically, I don’t have any photos of certain ‘very special’ items — the things I can’t part with. So in some cases, the objects I’m most attached to are not represented at all in my photo library!

A Possible Strategy

Something has to change — I can’t keep adding photos at this rate.

This is what I should do:
  • Don’t take as many photos from now on.
  • Delete blurred or nearly-identical photos soon after taking them.
  • Choose favourites from past events, and consider deleting (or at least archiving) all the others.

Final Thoughts

My parents didn’t waste time trying to digitise their life, or sifting through thousands of images on a computer. They just took a reasonable number of photos, and looked at them from time to time.

I now have an overwhelming number of pictures — I can’t imagine how long it would take to look at them all. Hopefully, I can take some action, and bring things under control.

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