Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Too many photos?

I'm "that" person. The one who posts SO MANY PHOTOS on Facebook. I laugh when I see someone's "album" of a family event or birthday party and it contains less than ten photos. TEN? I can easily post 200 photos from one day of vacation. Is it overkill? Perhaps, to some. To me, photos are memories. And who can have too many of those? I love photos more than anything. Even as a child, I would mentally prepare a list of what I would grab in case of a fire, and photos were first on my list. You just can't replace them! Sure, you can back them up on an external hard drive, or store them in the "cloud", or print copies and put them in a safe, and thank GOD for that, because it used not be so easy. I still have my treasured prints from my childhood, which I need to scan into my computer and copy onto a DVD and store in my fireproof safe, because if everything goes up in flames, there is NO WAY I could ever replace those.

Before 2005, I had a Nikon camera that used actual FILM. Remember film? I loved that camera and it took such great photos. I was hesitant to "go digital" but received two digital cameras as wedding gifts when Jeff and I got married. Soon, I was hooked - how awesome to take hundreds of photos and only keep the ones you like! Sure, most of our "memories" are locked up in my laptop, but Facebook gives me a way to show them to my friends and family, who often "steal" copies for themselves. I love that I can share my photos this way, and it's a great venue for sharing photos of events like parties, reunions, graduations, etc. with a large group of people.

My kids once told me I had over 200 albums on Facebook, and expressed disbelief. I now have 517 albums. So what? I make a new album for every event. I HATE IT when people don't make new albums and so the comments below are from two years previous. Bleh! Just make a new album already - it's so easy. I could go back and delete some of them - many I've published for the sole purpose of sharing them with people who've attended parties at our house. I don't need to keep them all. But I love that they're all in one place. I almost never look back at them. I sometimes look through old albums on my computer, but there are so many, it seems daunting at times. Usually when I back up my hard drive, I will look through some old albums and sort/organize a bit. I just love looking at photos!

And it's not just my own photos. I love looking at other people's photos - of their vacations, their celebrations, their wedding portraits hanging on the wall. Every picture tells a story and I am interested. I never get bored looking at pictures.

As for my Facebook albums? Yes, I publish a lot of photos. No, I don't care. I know those who want to will look through them and those who don't will skip it. That's the beauty of it!

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