Right, so I was trying to follow the Parry vs Sakkari thing the other day. You know how sometimes you just check scores, maybe watch a few points. It got me thinking about something I tried doing recently, felt kind of similar in how it just didn’t go the way I thought it would.
I decided it was finally time to tackle my digital photo mess. Been meaning to do it for ages. Had photos scattered across old hard drives, USB sticks, even some old cloud backups I forgot about. My plan seemed simple enough: get everything in one place, sort it out.
Getting Started
First step was just copying everything. I got this big external hard drive and spent a good afternoon just dragging and dropping folders. Felt pretty good, like okay, progress!
Then came the sorting. I thought, I’ll just make folders by year. Easy. 2010, 2011, 2012, you get the idea. But when I opened the first big folder I’d dumped everything into… wow. It was a total jumble. Dates all over the place, weird filenames, tons of stuff that looked the same.
Finding the Duplicates (or trying to)
I realized duplicates were going to be a huge problem. So, I looked online, found some program people recommended for finding duplicate files. Downloaded it, installed it. Seemed okay.
I pointed the program at my massive photo folder on the external drive and set it running. Man, it took ages. My computer was working really hard, could hear the fan spinning up. I left it running overnight.
The Reality Check
Next morning, the program finished. It found thousands and thousands of potential duplicates. Like, an insane number. But here was the problem:
- A lot weren’t exact duplicates. Maybe one was slightly edited, or a different size. Stuff I might want to keep both versions of.
- It found loads of tiny little image files, like icons or thumbnails, mixed in with actual photos. Useless stuff.
- The program didn’t just delete them. Oh no. It wanted me to manually review every single pair it flagged. Click ‘Keep Left’, ‘Keep Right’, ‘Delete Both’. Thousands of times.
I tried. I really did. Sat there for a couple of hours clicking through photos. It was mind-numbing. Felt like I wasn’t making any dent at all. It was just way more complicated and frustrating than I’d pictured. You think you have a plan, and then reality hits you, kind of like watching a match where the favourite suddenly starts struggling against someone they should beat easily.
So, after another session of that pointless clicking, I just stopped using the software. My grand plan for perfect yearly folders kind of crumbled.
My new approach? Much simpler. I just made folders for big life events I could remember – ‘Trip to the Coast 2015’, ‘Sarah’s Wedding 2018’, ‘Christmas 2020’. Then I just manually dragged the obvious photos into those folders. Ignored the duplicates, ignored the perfect chronological order.
It’s not the neat, organised library I dreamed of. There’s still probably loads of duplicates eating up space. But hey, at least I can find the photos from major events now. Sometimes you just gotta adjust your expectations and do what’s practical, right? The perfect plan doesn’t always survive contact with reality.
