I imagine that with iPhoto Manager you may want to start again in order to buy back some speed; that is, make your current library archival and start a new one to be the default. In fact, I don’t think there’s any limit to the number of separate libraries you can manage, so you could do Pies, Sullivan, Field Hockey, etc. as appropriate. Even a special library for all of Anna’s inside-of-pocket videos.

Finally, I’m surprised and more than a little sad that you guys don’t have a Flickr account. It’s one more lovely way of narrowing the ocean, and the free account is surprisingly robust. You should give it a try.

Heed this advice if nothing else.

The DSLR thing can indeed add to the problem, especially if you’re tempted to go with the RAW + JPEG shooting option; that’ll fill a hard drive mighty fast.

Erik: thanks for providing the impetus for this discussion.

Jane: nice coinage, and it neatly captures my ambivalence about stuff. I’m going to use it. Note that I said 14,000 photos taken, not saved; the cameras keep track of how many frames you shoot, but have no idea how many pictures you actually go stuffing into your digital shoebox.

SquamLoon: I feel your pain. Since moving to iPhoto 18 months ago things have gotten better, but there is still a rat’s nest of an “archive” full of precious things and utter crap. Working on multiple machines offers a neat backup solution but also introduces new complications (as does using multiple management/storage systems). I think the idea of iPhoto automatically saving originals is meant to be a step-saver and a way of protecting you from making irrecoverable mistakes with your precious pictures, but I agree that it can be a pain in the ass; iPhoto Diet claims to deal with this issue.

And yes, we did learn that word together in 1983, and from the insufferable Sting of all people, if I am not mistaken, though I think it was Karl Jung who coined it.

And yes, ceasing entirely to take pictures is probably what King Solomon would counsel.

You’re darned right about the synchronicity (and I do believe we learned that word synchronously, I might add, in the year 1983)â��I happen to be tearing my hair out over the photo overload as I write.

What advice would I give?

DON’T TAKE PICTURES.

So.

We are both packrats and monks simultaneously then. Packmonks.

(Thanks for fixing the special character.)

Speaking of all my many photos, I might never reach 10k if I start deleting the crap like I have been contemplating doing.

In an attempt to build my mystique, I refuse to specify to whom I was referring.

I wonder if it was my own subconscious that produced the synchronicity of which you speak, since I saw that photo before asking and I’m not sure what made me think to ask about it. Either way, it’s cool being quoted in someone’s blog entry.

To answer your question, the arrival of your email and my wife’s posting of the 3000th picture just happened to coincide in a nice bit of synchronicity, so at the moment I began writing the post, I knew that your emailed question would provide an important element for it.

The mysteriousness of our private Flickr photos deals more with not wanting to ruin a Christmas surprise than with our being actually mysterious. It’s very rare indeed that we designate pictures as anything other than fully public.

Jane: funny, I read his email as addressing you as the packrat and me as the streamlined possessions-are-nothing zen monk. I may back up a lot, but I don’t actually keep much.

I have no idea what I am going to do but I suspect it will be something along the following lines:

-Keep a copy of everything at Flickr.
-Only actually save a small percentage of that on my hard drive (sorted via iphoto, which I just finally started using).
-Immediately and often back up said photos to the backup drive I was gifted with by Señor Packrat.*
-Learn to keep the bulk of photos, particularly the family/history/etsy ones, on the backup drive and off the macbook.

But oh holy hell yes DO delete the dogs.** I try to catch them on the camera before I download them to the computer. Even then, I have to force myself to actually delete them.

*This being sgazzetti, himself.
**But not the good photos of dogs.

How many paragraphs into this did you get before copying it from an email and pasting it into Wordpress?

My dream would be to accurately title and tag all my photos in iPhoto BEFORE uploading them to Flickr. I tend to do most of my Flickr tagging in the FlickrExport window, and then my tags don’t stick locally to aid in local searching. It’d also be nice to enslave a clone of myself and make him go back and tag all my old photos, but that technology just isn’t up to speed yet.

The “delete liberally and often” advice you give is excellent. If it ain’t good enough to upload to Flickr, delete it from the local library.

I’ll have to check out the Library Manager. Thanks for that. I agree that DVDs suck for backups.

I wish I was mysterious enough to have private photos hosted on Flickr. :-(