Digital Decluttering Check-In: Photos (Premium)

As you may recall, I discussed my desire to (re)jumpstart my paper photo scanning efforts in late January. This is a task I return to again and again---I wrote about this same topic in April 2016 and then again in February 2017, too---but never complete. The problem? I have too many photos, in dozens of albums and, worse, loose in several large boxes---and it’s just too monumental. So, I scan some number of photos for some period of time, lose interest or get distracted by other projects or just life in general, and then return to the task again some (many) months later. On and on it goes, and I have always felt that I’d never really finish scanning.

The desire to scan these paper photos isn’t just about preserving memories, though that is obviously a big deal. It’s also a small part of a broader goal of achieving a more minimalist existence, with the basic goal of being more mobile, in the sense that we could move to a new home, state, or even country more easily in the future. Be able to downsize. Like most people, we get bogged down in stuff, and the sheer weight of that stuff plays a big role in indecisiveness and an inability to move forward.

On a related side note, our annual home swap is like a mini-move we undergo each year, a time during which we aggressively clean and/or organize because another family will be living in our home, usually for about three weeks. So, each year, we do a sort of spazzy deep clean for the house, and I feel like this has helped in ways that most families probably don’t experience. It’s easy to let things just pile up.

Also, our move to Pennsylvania in 2017 was as much about us proving to ourselves that we could do such a thing as it was about actually doing that thing. That is, we moved for whatever reasons we moved, but we also were able to further clean and declutter in the course of making that move in ways that exceeded what we do normally for a home swap. And in performing this move, my wife and I were able to accomplish something---albeit with more stuff than we’d like, and to a bigger home in a less expensive area of the country---that we always vaguely promised each other we would do in the future. It was a good opportunity to test our theory, so to speak.

That said, we did move to Pennsylvania with what I still think of as a metric ton of stuff, much of which took the form of photos and photo albums in boxes. Many, many boxes. Too many boxes.

So here we are.

As is often the case with this type of thing, when I published my article about photo decluttering---which is really not “digital decluttering” per se, but let’s not get bogged down in the details---I received a lot of feedback from readers. Some of it was in the form of “you’re doing it wrong,” which I have to say is always appreciated. As I noted in Confluence (Premium) this past week, I’ve always seen what I do as a two-sided relationship in which there is a back and forth with readers (or, i...

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