I’ve seen some awesome pictures lately. Rich, textured, color saturated, detailed pictures that make me say, I want to produce pictures like that. I learned that I would need to begin shooting RAW (digital) files, and I would need to get serious about photo editing.
I looked at software and chose Photoshop Elements 13. It has both organizer and editor, will process RAW files, find duplicate (and similar) files; it employs facial recognition, and does batch conversions; exactly the features I was looking for.
I waded into it at first, then finally imported all my pictures. Even after deleting hundreds of duplicates (how did I accumulate HUNDREDS of dupes?), the program says I have 96,346 pictures. Is that possible?
I got my first camera when I was 13 years old. I just turned 63; that would be 50 years of shooting about five pictures a day. But, I didn’t take all of these pictures, I’ve been fortunate to have inherited quite a few old, family “shoe box” pictures.
I started transferring my VHS and Hi-8 videos to digital a long time ago, and I’m nearly finished. I scanned all my 35 millimeter slides to digital a few years ago. I back up all my pictures on an external drive. I’ve tried to organize them, but have had only limited success.
I’m sure I would be scanning, digitizing, sorting, and tagging all this media even if I didn’t have Multiple Myeloma. I don’t know if the five terabyte shoe box/drive of old pictures my grand-kids may find and open one day will be completely organized (does anyone live long enough to get completely organized?), but it will hopefully provide insight and answers to questions they might have about the old days.