So Many Photos, So Little time

I've finished going through all the CDs and drives I could find, looking for any picture that might be useful in our Albion Fire Department photo book project. (It's a book project about the Albion Fire Department … focusing on photos. Pretty self-explanatory, but I'll look for a catchier title.)

Every photo I found that had even an outside shot of being useful, I transferred to a file and then to a thumb drive. I was pretty loose in my definition of "useful", since Emily can do amazing things with mediocre pictures, of which I've taken many. Then I totaled them all up.

My file now has 7,792 items, taking up 34.4 gigabytes of space.

This does not include a whole box full of photos loaned to us by Phil and Cindy Jacob, many of which Emily is in the process of scanning into her computer. It doesn't include the boxes of prints I have, myself. It also doesn't include any pictures we may yet have loaned to us by anyone else; it's just the ones I had immediately available in electronic form.

So … I've got some sorting to do.

Hopefully we'll get many more good photos donated toward the project, so I don't have to mess with my mediocre ones at all. But I have to admit, I had a lot of fun going through all those files. I've pretty much mastered a complete lack of organization, so I had to go through all my boxes of CDs … music, pictures, backups, documents, everything. I kept saying, "Hey--I remember that!"

I also transferred, to a different file, hundreds of my old humor columns, dating back to between 2000-2004. Basically fourteen to eighteen year old columns, which means many of my readers have never seen them, and the rest have probably forgotten. A project for later this year: Adapt and assemble them into a new book, which I've tentatively titled "Still Slightly Off the Mark".

An easy project in theory, but I'll probably rewrite them, since I'm theoretically better for having a decade and a half more writing experience. What do you think? Do we all need a laugh?

I think so, too.

Old photos--or in this case, video scans--do my heart good.