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actually doing things with your photos?!
May. 3rd, 2023 09:12 amI have long had an intention of printing out photo books of the many years of digital photos I have squirreled away. It's nice to have physical copies of these things that one can occasionally flip through and reminisce! The photo albums of yore were good actually!
But I have always been intimidated because it's just SO many photos since I got my first digital point-and-shoot in 2009, and it seemed like an enormous amount of work. And every year I put it off it's just gotten worse.
Last night I decided to finally start tackling the problem. And.....it turns out I have transferable skills from my old job, and it's actually super chill for me to do?
I used to work for a travel company, and one of the things I got really really good at was quickly sorting through a vast array of mediocre photos taken by our travellers for what was worth using, and shoving them into templates in one of those online retailers for cheaply printing out photo books as mementos for our clients. It means I have a lot of practice at thinking through how to arrange photos on a page, I have remarkably little sentimentality about not being able to use every photo, and I have made my peace with going for "good enough" rather than feeling like it needs to be perfect.
All that practice with photos that mean literally nothing to me means that I have the mental structures in place to make it easy to do with my own photos from my own life!
So that's cool. I have a book of photos from 2009-2010 ordered already, and have made inroads into sorting the rest of my photos too.
I will say though. The years between when I started using a smartphone as my main camera and when I got a smartphone that could actually take photos worth looking at are PAINFUL.
But I have always been intimidated because it's just SO many photos since I got my first digital point-and-shoot in 2009, and it seemed like an enormous amount of work. And every year I put it off it's just gotten worse.
Last night I decided to finally start tackling the problem. And.....it turns out I have transferable skills from my old job, and it's actually super chill for me to do?
I used to work for a travel company, and one of the things I got really really good at was quickly sorting through a vast array of mediocre photos taken by our travellers for what was worth using, and shoving them into templates in one of those online retailers for cheaply printing out photo books as mementos for our clients. It means I have a lot of practice at thinking through how to arrange photos on a page, I have remarkably little sentimentality about not being able to use every photo, and I have made my peace with going for "good enough" rather than feeling like it needs to be perfect.
All that practice with photos that mean literally nothing to me means that I have the mental structures in place to make it easy to do with my own photos from my own life!
So that's cool. I have a book of photos from 2009-2010 ordered already, and have made inroads into sorting the rest of my photos too.
I will say though. The years between when I started using a smartphone as my main camera and when I got a smartphone that could actually take photos worth looking at are PAINFUL.
