Media Flood

I have been our family’s data person for several years now. After my wife and I married and finally amalgamated all our external drives, laptops, mobile devices and thrown all our photos into semi-organized folders, we then started having kids and with each child a plethora of images, from us, from grandparents, siblings, etc. started to demand storage.

Before we knew it, we were pushing close to 1TB of just photos (most of them lower resolution too!). And the longer we waited to sort them, the harder it got. At the same time, we became more aware of how important family photos are when our kids’ reactions to them highlighted how they value having family photos on the walls and albums they can leaf through. Looking back to my own childhood photos as well, we started to see that the more photos and videos there are, the less likely we are to wade through them. So the quest to prune our family photo repository began.

But how can you choose a hundred photos a year (our goal) from about a thousand or more? Which cute face do you delete? How much time do you spend watching all the videos to determine which ones make the cut?

These are questions that overwhelm an increasing number of families and I can’t say I have a solution, not really, or at least, not yet. We are currently trying to get to about a hundred photos a year, which then get designed into a yearly or bi-yearly album for physical page turning.

But in the midst of all this, we have our wall art and our albums from various photo sessions we’ve had over the years and this is what we keep coming back to.

So while I am hoping to at some point give you all some pointers on how to wrangle the media flood, I for sure know I can recommend having occasional family sessions and purchasing products to display in your home. They're actually the only photos we are guaranteed to look at down the road and the ones we'll treasure most

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