Picking up from yesterday –
The most important lesson I’ve taken from this is that as soon as I get home from an even that involves a lot of photos, I must (must) get them onto my computer and in a folder for that event. Hopefully, I also have the time to throw out the ones I know I’ll never use, and to change the labels to words rather than “IMG_###” for the ones I will use.
It just has to be habit. Photos of something? Great. Organize them right this second so you never forget that fun something.
Side note: I will say that even though it sounds so easy – “oh, just throw out the ones I know I won’t use” – sometimes I have a bit of a hard time deleting photos. There’s something hard about decision time of which photos are worth keeping. Some are obviously trash. Some not so much…
But I think I get better at it as time goes on and I realize I don’t need every possible moment documented (and that I don’t want to spend my whole life organizing photos). As long as I have a handful of good ones (or even really one good one), we’re fine.
(But when it’s something special, such as meeting meeting Cory Booker… I have photos taken seconds apart that look practically exactly the same, but since there are tiny differences, I just can’t bear to let go yet…)
Part of the things that made sorting race photos specifically so hard was because you had to wait for professional photos to be available. By the time I could buy photos of one race, I was already running another.
Also, I was spending so much money on racing and traveling that much of the time, I couldn’t afford to actually buy any photos right then and there. So, finally about 7 months after I’d finished, I’d finally had the time and money to go back and buy what I wanted, track it all as it came to me, and organize it.
One of the things I find so hard about photos is that they come from so many places! I’d have text messages or emails from friends and family. I’d also have the pro photos from races being emailed to me, and some photos being sent in the mail. (Sometimes that was cheaper than a download option.)
Of course there were photos on my phone (oh so many). There were just so many places they were coming from, that even getting them into one place was a bit of a project in itself.
This is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.