Digital Decluttering: Photo Collection Consolidation is Back on Track (Premium)

The kids---who are both adults now---were home for Thanksgiving and so I finally asked them about the digital photo collection as part of a conversation about the work my wife and I have done over the years to downsize and that I have done, especially this past year, to organize our digital archives.

As a bit of background, we have a relative who is a hoarder, and each time she's moved in recent years, the family has discovered an astonishing amount of stuff piled up in every nook and cranny of her home. And while you can't ever plan this perfectly, our goal is to not add the responsibility of dealing with all that clutter when we pass away. And that's as true of the physical stuff as it is the digital stuff.

Anyway, I told the kids that I had two big sets of archives, a documents archive that includes everything I've ever written over about 30 years and a photos archive that includes all my---and, more importantly, our---photos from an entire lifetime, dating back almost 60 years. I explained that they would likely be uninterested in my documents archive for the most part, though there are some personal things in there, and that there may be colleagues out in the world who wouldn't mind going through it. But the photos archive will be a bit trickier because there are thousands and thousands of photos (and home videos) of them in there. And that it was likely that they would want to save at least some of it.

There was no need for an immediate decision, I added, since I was literally working to see whether it was even worth taking the time to consolidate this archive, which consists of three separate collections (each with lots of overlap but also each with some unique photos) into a single photos archive. If you've been following along with this past year's digital decluttering efforts, you are likely familiar with some of this work: I very successfully organized and replicated my documents archive but had mixed results with the photos for a variety of reasons, including its vast size and the lack of good meta-data in many cases. The kids were only peripherally aware of this work because I had shared some newly re-digitized home videos with them when I did that work a few months ago. But I never mentioned the photos.

Our son Mark initially joked that I should make the photos archive consolidation my "retirement job," and he then suggested that perhaps making a "best of" or "favorites" collection and sharing that would be enough. But after thinking about it for a bit, he said that this archive needed to be saved, and that he, at least, would like to have it when we were gone. Kelly, our daughter, was nodding her head to all this. She, too, was interested in the "favorites" collection and agreed that the entire thing should be saved if possible.

I was a bit surprised by that, but I told them that their mother and I had at one point curated a photo collection, literally called Favorites, 15 or 20 years ago, and most likely with an ...