digitally minimizing

[mcbrat]

over the past couple of weeks i have been deleting photos from my phone and cloud storage! its part of a whole digital minimializm upheaval in my life with a heavy emphasis on privacy and actual human connection. in the process ive realized that alot of my data footprint is in PICTURES. thousands upon thousands of pictures, most of which are frankly duplicated upwards of 10 times each (if its a selfie session easily 30-50 photos, out of which i like one or two)

so awhile ago i started with the strategy of favoriting photos that i really liked out of these photosets, and therefore my whole photo storage!

this has made it easier to go through and remember and delete things that truthfully i have never looked back on or thought about again. in the moment these things felt very meaningful to capture in pictures (so meaningful i needed 127 photos and 11 videos of a single concert), but looking back i have almost no attachment to them! and im a sentimental person.

so i have been using screen time where i would have scrolled previously to go through my library on my mobile phone and continue MASSSSS deleting. today i got rid of another 2.5k easily!

it feels good also to empty these essentially over memorialized memories because some of them were painfully associated, or i looked at them and some pain of rememberance came up with it, or disgust, or just plain old detatchment. even the ones that were great great memories but i know i would appreciate more if i could say print 25 photos of the whole trip out and make a memory book- it felt like a weeding process.

i repeat, i am a sentimental person and keeping photos, taking photos, curating photos, making collages and mood boards and vision boards is really really important and integral to me fundementally. which is why this feels even like an artistic extension of myself.

and i get to look at all my photos in the process of this decluttering!!
yayyy!!

Comments

[spiffikins]

This is something that I really need to do!

[mcbrat]

it is easier when i think of it like having a scroll on my device, like today i did it on public transport and in a waiting room eheheThis is something that I really need to do!

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Well done!

[the_broken_tower]

I like the idea of creating a memory book from a subset of printed pictures. There are tons on the external storage drives over here, and they were a pain and a half to even transfer from the old phone. The solution has been to (eventually) sort through them and downsize, but they're still going to be sitting on a storage disk doing nothing much - even after being reduced.

A memory book seems more functional. There's certainly good reason to write about the memories that went into some trips as the book is being made. It'd be doing something.

- MVL (he/him)

[harpers_child]

I've got like three partially completed albums in my craft closet. I'm hoping to get my wedding album done next year. We've been married for a decade now. Mostly I have to go through and write names on the backs of photos and put in a few captions. (The actual pictures got printed out and put in the book as soon as I had access to them.)

If you do want to photobook / scrapbook / album, I have recs for various ones, but also understand that's a separate activity from going through pictures.

[adafrog]

Wow, go you!