Picking pictures

I'd worry that by admitting now that I have not switched computers yet you will all think I am disorganized, but I am pretty sure no one reading this has any illusions left about that.

Some of it is time issues, but the real concern is data loss. It may be worse because of the traumatic way in which I lost my previous data.

When I have changed computers before, yes the old one usually was quite old and not working well, but only once did it involve a real crash, and that time pulling out the drive and using an IDE to USB connection to transfer files worked fine.

Through great continuity, I had family history work going back to 1996, journals going back to 2000, and photos going back to 2007 when I first got a digital camera. Add in all my novels and screenplays, my blog logs, and my spreadsheets (I put so much data in spreadsheets!) -- it was just really hard. I still hope someday that I will be able to afford to have a professional try.

When my friend gave me her mother's old computer, I was reluctant to create new files. I no longer log my blog posts. I did end up with some files for a class, and I did give in and create a couple more spreadsheets. I now have an illogical amount of anxiety over transferring those, but the main issue is pictures.

There are many selfies of course, the majority of which were posted, except for that slew from Halloween to December 15th when I could not get any photos transferred. Selfies are ephemeral; I don't need to keep those.

You might also guess (correctly) that I have a lot of blurry concert photos that it should have been easy to delete when I was picking the clearer ones to post with the review. However, I did not. I am doing some of that now.

I am somewhat proud that if you do the right search combination on certain musicians, photos from this will come up: http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2014/02/concert-review-reggie-and-full-effect.html

I think those are really good pictures of Zach and Cory. I have better pictures of James from different shows. I did not get a picture of Billy that night, and he died last year. There are some emotions that come with doing this. There are some fears about loss that aren't really about any photo, but they still come with the photos.

There are photos of places that went up on the travel blog. Sometimes there are other photos that did not get posted but they are not bad; do I want them enough? Even scarier, there are some photos for travel blog posts that I have not written yet. What if I load them and something goes wrong? I just came across a photo I took of some artwork at the Fox Tower Theater. I had forgotten I took it, but seeing that reminded me; do I need to remember?

The biggest questions are with pet pictures. If anyone is wondering why I recently created a Pets album on Facebook and am adding to it, it's actually for for selecting a cover photo for a fundraiser, but it goes along with this as well. Synergy!

We take a lot of pet photos, because our pets are adorable and beautiful and quite photogenic. They also do the same poses in the same spots pretty frequently, I am now noticing. I probably do not need every photo of Mavis on the couch corner, but how many do I need? So trivial, really, but it doesn't feel that way. Maybe it's because I've been burned.

Sometimes I suffer from inertia when there is uncertainty, even when it is fairly minor, but I will press on.

In the meantime, here are some bonus selfies that stayed trapped in the camera for a long time. If you want the pet pictures, those are going on Facebook.

 (This was a "kiss the cook" one. I was making fajitas.)