I May Need a 12-Step Program

Hi, my name is Kathy, and I am a photoholic. I take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. But, even worse, I am a photo hoarder.

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Bleeding Heart

That flower image is one of hundreds of gigabytes of images that I don’t need to keep. I mean, it’s pretty, but why do I need to keep it? Like, for years? I don’t. I really need to concentrate on keeping only those images that mean something to me.

Unlike many people, I don’t store the images on my camera and/or phone forever, I actually upload them to my hard drive in a pretty timely fashion. That’s where they tend to sit. For like a year or more.

Recently, over the past six months or so, I have noticed my computer getting slower and slower. I’m not really inclined to buy a new one at the moment, so I just grit my teeth, do what I have to do on the pokey-ass thing, and then get off of it.

That slowness is probably one of the reasons you haven’t seen much of me lately.

The weather this holiday weekend has been rather wet. So I spent the day on Sunday deleting and moving image files. I think it has helped. Yay!

All is well here. I haven’t been riding as much as I’d like, but other stuff — good stuff — has been keeping me busy.

Remember my quest for LOVE? I haven’t given up. Even though I am chasing a moving target — more LOVEworks keep getting added — I really enjoy getting out and see the sculptures.

Guess how many I have captured so far? Forty-six! That’s a lot, right? This is a big state!

Unfortunately, the Virginia tourism folks don’t keep the master list up-to-date, so I don’t know how many there currently are. Whatever… who really cares about statistics? I like looking for LOVE. LOL.

Here are my latest captures…

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LOVEwork in Crozet, Virginia

 

Early Mountain UNK
LOVEwork in Madison, Virginia

I’m not sure if the Madison LOVE is official or not. It’s not listed on the web site, so I have no idea who it belongs to. I suspect, however, that it might be on the Early Mountain Vineyard property. I captured that image from Wolftown-Hood Road (VA-230).

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LOVEwork at Airlie (near Warrenton, Virginia)

 

The last image is just a few minutes from my house. I guess Airlie is technically in Warrenton, but it’s not in the downtown area where I live. It’s less than four miles away, though, which is cool.

And it’s actually a pretty place. I should go there more often.

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Parked at Airlie for the LOVE capture.

I’ll try to catch y’all up on what’s been happening ’round here. The exciting stuff, anyway. Like visits with grand kids, a trip to my friend’s rose showcase, a few rides we’ve done, etc. Oh, and a few craft projects. Another reason I’ve been away from the pokey computer.

Yes, that stuff is exciting to me. I’m getting old.

TTFN, peeps!

11 Replies to “I May Need a 12-Step Program”

  1. I hoard pictures too, and I really need to delete stuff. My phone is completely full, my computer hard drive is full and now I am stuck. I am actually at the point of having to buy a new computer because mine is 10 years old. I seem to have an obsession with hats lately and have bought 4 in the last 2 weeks, so you aren’t the only one who needs a support group. 🙂

    1. Good to know I am not alone. I do t have a similar hat problem, though. Lucky for me, we have network backup. The trick is actually remembering to move the images I want to keep. I deleted at least 100 GB off of my hard drive. That’s a lot of pictures!

  2. External drive storage is relatively cheap especially if you go for a scalable solution like a Drobo. Not really fast but upgradable. I started out with 2 1 TB drives, added 2 more 2 TB drives, replaced the original 1 TB drives with 2 TB drives. Recently, I replaced the 4 2 TB drives with 4 4 TB drives. This is over about 7 years. Perfect for storing old photos. I use a Mac and originally kept photos in Aperture libraries. During a year, the library was kept on the local drive and backed up to the Drobo. At the end of the year, the library was moved to the Drobo and copied onto a another drive and a new library was created for the upcoming year. I use CrashPlan to back up my photo libraries to the “cloud” from the Drobo as they are pretty static at the end of the year. The bad thing is that Aperture is no longer supported and I refuse to use Lightroom due to the subscription model. I need to export my libraries to something else but not sure what to use at the moment. The benefit is that there is not more than a years worth of photos so everything is kept. BTW, this device lives in my office and not at home since there is a lot of Internet bandwidth available. BTW, I only have about 250 GB of photos. The Drobo is used to back up all sorts of things. If it is already a tertiary backup, I have CrashPlan skip that directory.

    1. Whoah, Richard, that’s quite a lot of detailed, technical info. All I know about our solution is that Hubby has it under control. 🙂

  3. Hello, Kathy. You’re among friends here. 🙂

    I get really anxious if I don’t sort, post-process, and rename files shortly after a trip. When left unfinished, it weighs on my mind. Meanwhile, the exterior of my house needs repainting, the flower gardens desperately need weeding, the kitchen needs remodeling, and my mind is at ease. (Wonky priorities?)

    As for LOVE, I prefer it industrial… Hmm, let me rephrase that. I love that industrial looking LOVE sculpture in Airlie. It’s the kind of love that a guy could really embrace.

    And, Richard! Holy cow, man, are you in your element when it comes to tech lingo and storage solutions. Right on! I’m definitely looking to you if I ever need insight into such matters.

    1. Yep, we all have our priorities. Whether or not they are wonky is relative. We all have different tastes in LOVE, too. A good friend of mine doesn’t like the Airlie sign. When I first saw it, I was expecting an ugly monstrosity, but I like it, too. Although I don’t like the idea of encouraging people to add combination locks as a sign of their love and affection.

  4. Nothing wrong with hoarding photos until they slow things down. We have over 20k of them in iPhoto on our big computer and back them up onto the iPad. Maybe that is why my iPad is so slow, lol

    I think we keep them in case we want to look at them again one day,… you know in case all the flowers disappear and we need to refresh our memories.

  5. I too have a photo problem! We keep ours on an external hard drive, I think it’s 3 or 4 terabytes, so space is not a problem. They have always synced to the cloud with Google photos, but now they (Google) have some sort of issue so I am behind at the moment. But apparently not bothered enough to do it manually lol!

  6. Ah, the age of digital photography. I store my photos on an external drive. Funny thing I don’t go back to look at them. I print the one or two favorites and the other thousands I save; what for??? Future generations. Will they care?

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