I had 61,000+ photos, which I had brought down to around 45,000 photos by deleting photos that weren't photos. If I separate the screenshots, which is around 6,000, I still have 39,000 photos and videos which are personal in nature.
But the irony is that when someone asks me for my photo, I have nothing to show. Obviously, not all of these are my own photos and videos—in fact, the majority are friends and family. But the fact remains: what are these thousands of photos for if I don't have anything to show for myself?
Earlier, photo albums had a very limited number of photos. Most people would need to hire a professional photographer or ask a friend with a camera to get their pictures taken.
When I was growing up, cameras weren't a rarity. It was common practice to have a point-and-shoot camera in a household. And phones started shipping with decent cameras too.
I liked clicking pictures as a kid. I liked using cameras. In fact, I bought a Kodak film camera—a very cheap manual camera where you'd put in a film reel and get it developed later. Later, one of my uncles got a point-and-shoot camera, so I got my hands on it. And even my mobile phone's VGA or 1.3-megapixel cameras were good enough for me to click decent pictures.
Unfortunately, due to a very regrettable mistake, I lost all my photos and videos that I had clicked and stored as a kid.
What I remember was being very intentional about what I wanted to capture. With a film camera, it's obvious that you have to be very certain of what you want to click. And there were times when you would choose not to click something in favor of something else. So maybe that taught me to be intentional when I clicked pictures with a digital camera or a mobile phone's camera—no random or extra clicks.
That's gone now for me. Not only do I click random things, but I also take tens of photos of just one scene or setting. My gallery is filled with multiple shots of the same photos. And I'm bad at deleting.
Like, if I had to choose one in the moment, I can choose one and delete the rest. But I let those photos sit for a few months, and then those photos become "memories" and I don't want to miss out on any, and it gets hard to delete them.
On top of that, I have 39,000+ photos that need to be reviewed and checked.
A couple of months ago, when I was dealing with my photo library, I thought I would be more intentional about what I click and keep maybe 1–2 photos max from an event or a time. But even at the time of writing this, my gallery is filled with multiple photos that look exactly the same.
The same reason that I hate re-reading my posts and editing them is probably also responsible for my disinterest in doing so with my photo library.
With rising storage costs and the hassle of backing up such a huge amount of photos, I need a way to cut them down. Even if storage isn't the problem, the problem is the noise. If you have too many photos, it's too easy to lose sense of what's important and what's not.
I backup everything to multiple cloud services, and I think it stems from the "PTSD" I had after losing all my photos during my school days. Now I back up everything. It's hard for me to part with a clicked photo if it has sat in my gallery for a while.
But something needs to be done. I can't live with so many photos. I can't delete most of these because of the "what if." The older the photo gets, the harder it is to delete it. So I have archived all my photos from 2013 until 2026 in zip files and stored them in multiple places. That way I won't have that fear of losing my "precious" photos.
After archiving and getting assured that I won't be losing any of my precious photos, I'm starting one year at a time and pruning what's unnecessary. I've already done this for the first few years. Surprisingly, the years 2013–2016 have way too few photos anyway. As the years go by, the number of photos and videos I have is increasing.
Let's see if I go through my entire library or just get overwhelmed and quit it.