Need to Delete

My disk space has been crammed for the last few days and I have to make some choices. No longer can I just download new applications and have thousands of pictures on my hard drive. The biggest problem is the photographs.

In the age of digital photography, most people have such massive numbers of photos stashed away somewhere and they keep piling up, while nothing is done to them. I think this must be a particularly big problem in families with children where the motivation to keep the photos is great (who could be heartless enough to delete those twenty shots of little Paulie walking on the beach with an ice cream cone, each one equally adorable?), loads of photos are taken, and there is very little time to do anything about them.

I don’t even take all that many photos, yet when I ran the Duplicate Detective software on my Pictures file, it found 14,500 files and roughly 2GB of duplicates. Unbelievable. About the same number of duplicates was found in my music files. I got rid of those and now I’ve got some extra space. But the problem remains: What to do with those ever-increasing pictures?

I could make a photo-book with them, and I have made a couple in my life. I know, it’s easy and everything. But I still can’t decide if it’s a good idea to keep most of the original files. When I look through them, I feel such nostalgia. I just find it so hard to press delete on any of those adorable baby faces.

I know I could get some extra storage space and put them there. I’ve even got some. But that’s just moving the problem to another place. I should make the decision to delete at least 50% of the files, but it would probably take me days to go through them. In five years time it’s going probably going to take me months. The situation gets graver by the day.

Have you found a solution to end this photo deluge? If you, dear reader, have any suggestions or ideas, please tell me in the comments. I need to delete.