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, in the case of podcasts, listeners or viewers). In other words, it’s not a one-way street in which some “expert” opines from on high. I don’t have all the answers, and I never pretend otherwise. And I have some wonderful examples of people providing me with answer or solution I might never have found otherwise. This might be the best one yet.

On the advice of a reader, I ended up purchasing a high-speed photo scanner, replacing for the most part the adequate flatbed scanner I had been using. You can read all about how that went down in Digital Decluttering: High-Speed Photo Scanning (Premium), but it was obvious right away that this device was far more efficient than my old approach. Better still, I could suddenly see a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I would actually complete this task after all, and do so relatively quickly, a time frame I saw, now, as months, not decades.

That assessment was so far off the mark.

In the two week span since I started using this device, I have used the high-speed photo scanner to digitize over 4,000 photos that were contained in 19 separate albums spanning a period of time that ranges roughly from 1988 to 1994. To be clear, that is every single photo album I had remaining. All of them. I don’t just see a light at the end of the tunnel. I am standing beyond the tunnel, bathed in that light.

Those photos have all been properly tagged with at least the correct date meta-data and have uploaded to Google Photos and to my NAS. I’ll be pushing them to OneDrive soon as well.

The photo albums themselves, and the many photos that they contained, have all been tossed out. The past three trash pickups at my house have been interesting because we have had a ton of additional garbage and recycling each time. Much of that is the photos and the broken-down boxes that used to contain. Had contained them, in dozens of cases, since 1999, when we moved from Phoenix to Boston after our son, who is about to turn 20, was born.

Yes, this is a big deal.

And yes, there is more work to be done. Another tunnel to traverse, if you will. I still have many, many loose photos, meaning photos that are in the envelopes they came in when they were processed. These photos are less well organized than those in the albums, are in many cases not at all organized. And getting them scanned will take some time. Getting them properly tagged will be harder.

But it’s going to happen. It will almost certainly happen before summer, if not spring. This year. Not at some distant point in the future. And that is almost a miracle. A wonderful, wonderful about-face for a task that I previously thought—no, knew—I would never complete.

There will always be more decluttering to do. I’ve spent a lot of time in the basement over the past month, going through other boxes, throwing things out, donating them, whatever. Chipping away at the ever-growing pile of stuff that always threatens to drown us in cardboard, plastic, and metal. This is work that needs to happen again and again, over time, and it does. But now it can happen without all those heavy boxes of photos hanging over us, both metaphorically and literally. And that, folks, is what real accomplishment feels like. I assume you know how rare and unfamiliar that is. And how appreciated.

Thanks again for the feedback. This has been life-altering, and in a good way.