Discussion: Impressive!

That's every photographer's dream and you're the only person I know who has achieved it. Wow!!! Congratulations on a huge milestone.

It was a massive undertaking. Getting everything scanned took me several years. After going digital, I brought those photos up to date every few months, so this century was always in pretty good shape.

I took about 5 years to go through 30 years of 35mm photos. It was a good rainy day activity.

Well, just knowing that *anyone* has done this will hopefully inspire me to make some more progress.

The alternative was going through stuff stored in the basement, attic and closets.

By the way, photo count is just over 22k.
Videos (which have always been close to up to date) just under 500. They take a lot of space, so I don't keep everything.

Wow!! How many GB?

Lots of them. I didn’t specifically note the total space, but my recall from my last backup is that my media (my photos, video and audio) was about 170GB.

turns out just photos is 200GB.
another 66GB of video

You've done some wise editing then. I have 560 GB of digital photos with only minimal scanning completed. I need to set aside some time each day to delete photos that aren't worth keeping.

What is your naming convention? I had this chat with Ming but I don't think I ever asked you.

The naming convention might have drifted over time.

I named rolls with the date it was developed and a source indicator (film, slide, which digital camera) and some descriptor after that: Paris, home, Christmas type stuff. I treat a download from a digital camera as a roll - it just might have a lot more photos.

Photo I name with the photo number (so I can find its source), that would correspond to the number on the edge of the negative, or useful digits on a digital image. Them EJLP for who is in it (there were name length constraints when I started), name of other people and a descriptor.

I did not keep raw copies of everything. I started using digital cameras very early, so many photos aren’t really high resolution. From 1999 to 2005 I accepted lower quality digital for many routine photos and used film for things I felt really needed more detail. I recall raw images being ballpark 4x the space of a jpg.

I did sort out duplicates. Things like 20 shots of a full moon, would be reduced to 1 or 3 that were best. Unless a blurry shot was artistically interesting, or the only shot of a person at that time, I would purge it. My roll naming gives me a path to search for more if I ever feel the need.

I would never do more than 4 rolls in a day. That was to try and avoid making bad decisions by getting fatigued.

All great advice. Thanks! :)