Even More Photo Clutter

I resisted buying a digital camera for a long time. Put off by articles citing the poorer image quality of digital cameras, I figured my old Minolta SLR would do just fine. Eventually, though, the digital camera reviews became more positive, and I finally decided to take the plunge.

By shopping carefully, I got a great deal—less than $50—on a new FujiFilm Finepix 3MP camera. After mastering the basics, I found myself using it increasingly frequently because of its size and weight—I could just stick it in a small case and put it in my jacket pocket. No more lugging around the much-heavier Minolta with its scratchy leather strap.

When I first began taking digital photos, I printed copies of them all, just as I had with my film camera. The quality of the shots still didn't seem as good as those developed from film, but in most cases, the convenience of the FujiFilm more than made up for any diminished sharpness.

Eventually, though, I noticed I was becoming less deliberate in my shots—if I didn't like a picture, I could just delete it! This led to many, many more photos, which soon began cluttering up my limited hard drive. Instead of culling through them after each shooting session as I should have, I just let them pile up.

To make matters worse, I soon stopped making prints altogether, reasoning that I had to go through them all carefully first and still had a whole backlog of prints in envelopes to put into albums. Before long, I had thousands of digital photos on my computer—and no real incentive to tackle what was fast becoming a massive amount of photo clutter.

Photo Clutter

I've decided to write this blog because I have way, way too many photos. Even before I bought my first digital camera (a 3-megapixel FujiFilm Finepix) six years ago, I was hopelessly behind. All (well, almost all) the prints were organized by date in their original photo-processing envelopes, and I'd been very good about labeling and dating them: I'd put a small sheet of paper onto which I'd jotted down the date and subject of each photo inside each envelope.

A small percentage of my nondigital photos—taken with a Kodak Instamatic and then, later, a Minolta SLR—had actually made it into albums. Nothing fancy, but they did the job and gave me hope that someday I'd finish the task.

In late 2002, a neighbor introduced me to Creative Memories. When I told my husband about this wonderful photo-organizing system, he begged me not to take the plunge. "You'll never get the photos done," he pleaded. "They'll be cluttering up the dining room table for years!"

Undaunted, I ordered my first album, page protectors, mat, blades, tape runner, colored paper, and pens. The system was so nice—and so expensive—that my usual perfectionist ways went into overdrive. Completing just one side of a single page usually took me an hour—and this was for just 4–6 photos, with no journaling and no embellishments other than a colored "frame" around one photo per page!

My album-making speed slowed to a crawl, the photos continued piling up, and then came the digital camera. . . .