The Digital Photo Mountain
Over the last 12 years I have amassed something in the region of 45000 digital photos (and that number grows by several hundred every time we leave the house with the kids for a “day out”). The only attempt at “organisation” has been dumping the photos into dated folders each time we empty the camera, phone, or whatever device it happened to be.
In order to finally do something about the growing mountain of photos (I've tried numerous filesystem backup tools), I have returned to Flickr – the photo service I used years ago. Over the last several weeks, all of the photos have been uploading to a paid account, with the intention of weeding them out over the next several months – making some photos available to the public, some available to friends, some to family, and deleting a huge number of them.
All I have to do now is find a couple of years to sort through them... either that, or enlist the help of the Mechanical Turk over at Amazon to get an army of poorly paid people around the world to tag our photos appropriately. Or not.
It all takes effort, and that's something I would rather spend elsewhere.
At least the photos are uploaded to Flickr though – which is one better than being copied onto an external hard drive that could be stolen, or burned to ashes in a house fire.