I am an addict. I confess.
I cannot go three days in a row without succumbing to my wickedness.
I am hooked on photography. I MUST take photographs! That’s it, I have said it!
Wherever I go I usually carry a camera; it enables me to indulge my vice with reckless abandon.
The number of pictures taken (once restricted by films) is now only limited by the storage capacity of the camera’s flash memory card.
With the price of SD cards plummeting, just about anybody can now afford 8GB and even 16GB cards, even in point and shoot cameras.
But gluttony has a price.
Recently I noticed that my photo program (iPhoto) was getting sluggish.
It occurred to me that this problem could be related to the amount of pictures stored on my hard disk.
Last time I checked, I discovered that I was storing over 13,500 photographs on my hard drive.
My computer sports a Christie-like stomach. A girth of one terabyte (1000 gigabytes) to be precise.
In order to be more responsive my machine had to lose weight.
But diets are not easy. To be successful you have to forsake something that you love and as the song says “breaking up is hard to do.”
Discarding photographs is always a hard decision. They are your babies and it is always difficult to part with them.
You keep some pictures for their exceptional quality, but you also keep many (not so good pictures) for sentimental reasons.
In iPhoto, pictures are grouped by “events”, the day that the pictures were taken.
I went through each event with a Javert-like determination to cull my herd.
After a week of hard work I have discarded close to 1500 shots. I think that my machine is now lighter on its feet but I have to watch myself.
A relapse is always possible. I could fall off the wagon anytime and start shooting recklessly again.
I just have to be careful and above all, avoid binging.
If you are cute or unusually fetching, don’t tempt me. For my mental health and for my computer’s sake avoid my field of vision.
Thank you for your understanding.
Alain