Nine Thousand Photos

Getting back to work on my fire photo book project, the first thing I did was get all the photos together. I went through all my hard drives and thumb drives and backup drives, and even drove the car just to make sure I had all the drives covered.

After making the first pass through all the electronic photos already in my possession, I came up with 9,154 files in 184 folders, for a total of 17.7 gigabytes of pictures.

 "Great Scott!"

 

Yeah, that's a lot of gigabytes ... especially since I figured the finished book would have about 500 photos in it.

And I haven't even finished begging other people for their photos related to the Albion Fire Department. Heck, I haven't even tracked down all the people who said they had stuff for me two years ago, before I got off on several tangents and put the project on a back burner.

But it's just the first run through. A lot of those pictures will get passed over when I start on the final outline, for various reasons: not quite clear enough, too much like similar photos, not as good when converted to black and white, and so on. Plus, a large part of them are from the last few decades, and I'm really hoping someone steps forward with older ones--the AFD has been around since 1888, and I've only been taking pictures of it since 1980.

Organizing projects like this can be incredibly difficult and time consuming. I didn't really understand that while going into Images of America: Albion and Noble County. Now I do, but here I am, anyway.

But hey--it's a good social distancing project, right?

You want to talk about old pictures? This one predates the fire department: It's Albion's second courthouse, which was replaced by the third one in 1888. And no, I didn't take the picture--it was found at the Noble County Old Jail Museum.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"