Organizing a Decade of Memories

December Resolution – Day 2

Remember the day you bought your first camera phone? Well, I just have a faint memory of it. I can’t remember if that phone had the ability to transfer photos to the computer. And because of that, I don’t have some of my most precious pictures.

My second phone came in December 2006. I clicked hundreds of pictures from that one and made videos as well. My Nokia N96 lasted for more than 3 years and I could back up everything on the laptop.

Since then I have changed 3 phones and have collected thousands of pictures. We don’t realize but we click numerous pictures of the same thing. At that moment it seems worthwhile, but do you want to keep it as a memory? Would you want to look through lakhs of pictures 10 years from now? Won’t some pictures be your favourite but you wouldn’t be able to find them since they will be lost in the pile of pictures you have? Same goes for videos.

So last week I took up the mammoth task of organizing my photos and videos. I made a folder with sub folders sorted by year. It was fun to see pictures that were 6 years old, the new ones were still fresh in my memory; sorting the gallery from 2008 was easier than sorting 2014!

I even saw all the videos and labelled them! If I need to find a video from my college days where me and my friends are dancing in the car – I can find it in a jiffy. I can find the video where I am singing on a date. It's a hard task to find a video when they all are marked by numbers and you need to open it and see what it is about.

I did find some hidden gems - some absolutely adorable videos of me and the Boy and my niece and nephews. I found a video from my first day in Bahrain (June 2009) where I was cribbing why there is no fan in the room! I found a video from Kuwait 2009 where we were talking about the city. I found my dancing videos. I found videos of the Boy and his friends totally sloshed and doing the weirdest things! Oh, it was fun. *note to self - make more videos*

This weekend, I encourage you to take out all your pictures and put them in a hard disk. Find ways to organise them. If you are like me, you would have a decade worth of precious memories hidden in different binaries of your laptop. It needs your attention. You would regret it later if you don’t organize it now.

Just do it, I say!