Monday, September 7, 2015

Deleting Stuff...Not So Easy To Do Sometimes


Modern technology is simply amazing, but few talk about the ugly side, the side that's especially bad for a hoarder. I admit that I have a problem, and it has to do with taking digital pictures.

It's not something I'm proud of, but I've learned to live with it.

Then again, maybe I'm just living a lie.

I take a lot of pictures. Of course, not as many as a professional photographer might take. But I'm not making money with my pictures--it's just for fun and to chronicle my life. The ugly side comes when my half a terabyte of laptop memory is all used up and I've got to start deleting.

In the above picture, I took a computer screen shot of what I saw when I selected a large amount of pictures to delete. I picked a date almost two years ago and decided to delete all photos and videos before that date. We were just about to embark on a fantastic vacation to California to see family. I highlighted all the photos I had taken before October 20, 2013 and it turned out to be 10,962 pictures and videos.

I couldn't believe it!

I did not permanently delete them. I've backed them up on several hard drives so I'm not worried about losing them forever. I liked having all those pictures on my computer so I could just pull them up any time and check them out, or use them in blog posts. The problem was, I hardly ever did that and my laptop computer was full. Time to clean house.

I thought it would be easy to drag all 10,962 photos and videos to the trash icon then delete them. It didn't turn out that way. After a couple of hours of trying, I shut down my computer then deleted a more manageable number, like 3,000. That eventually worked out.

So, have I learned my lesson? I doubt it. The future will only bring advancements in both digital photoraphy and data storage options. All this will only enable me to hoard more photos. Everything will be fine, until I'll need to do this all again.

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