spring cleaning

In the very near future I shall commit an act of Organization. Those often scare me, and in this case it's a big one: sorting all my images from a plethora of folders into a set sorted by year/date. Several programs can do this dirty work now, and I have a poly-terabyte backup drive to send this to. Once that looks sane I can do a boat-load of deletions, reformat my Imaging hard drive, and pull the de-chaos-ed data back there. Perhaps I can reset my cameras to monthly folders as well to make this process more fluid in the future.

I don't know it the automation of it makes this more or less spooky. So many of these images are truly junk (e.g. comparing shots taken with two or three lenses which I haven't owned in years) or just bad (taken after dark from a moving vehicle).

I've now gone a decade or more by simply making up a folder name as I go. Picasa made such decisions too easy for me - and now I'm firmly entrapped by my laziness. For example: I have a Pentax folder in the images area, with several subfolders for lenses and cameras I have used. I also have Pentax gear that is not under the Pentax folder. And other shots with Pentax cameras on the 'Pictures' folder of the c: drive! And why do I need to know it's a Pentax image by stuffing it into a specific folder, if the image data already has that label embedded within it? Plenty of thinking needs to go along with the new storage technique.


And yes, I can add labels within these sorting programs later; even Windows can do that. I can even add stars! I've always found that to be a bit odd, as why exactly would I keep 1-star images at all?

Better late than never.. maybe!