Declutter Your Photo Life

1 review for Declutter Your Photo Life

1. 

   Gloria June 24, 2022

   First off, what phototog wouldn’t fall in love a book that begins with the author saying: with his very first camera when he was a boy, he would shoot a roll of film in a week; with his next camera he shot a roll of film in one day; the third camera, 100 images on a holiday; and, when he became a young father, 50,000 shots in the first year! Yep, that’s why we need to read this and learn how to declutter our photo lives.

   In an early chapter the author outlines, simply and efficiently, his five–step workflow for organizing your photos. I appreciate his setting out this system early on to refer back to when actually doing the work. As an aside: Pratt uses a word I’ve never seen, “deduplicated”. It refers especially to computer data and means to eliminate duplicate information. He even suggests brands of deduplication software. I’ll be interested in how that comes up later. As I read further, I discovered an entire chapter dedicated to deduplication. Now that I have read it, it makes sense. We have duplicates from redundant back ups, unformatted memory cards, social media, screenshots, etc. Lots of duplicates to deal with and he gives us the how-to in that regard. I appreciate it because I had never really thought about ridding my photo library of duplicates.

   I enjoyed the list of places where we can discover old photos: in wallets, in family bibles, on the refrigerator! The writer entertains us as well as educate us. He also suggests that we tap members of our family for photos they may have to add to our digital library. He also wisely advises that we remove old photos from adhesive albums because they will continue to disintegrate. I have found that to be true with the photos I am scanning from old family albums. Instead, after scanning, he says to place them in new, non-adhesive albums.

   And probably my favorite tip of the author’s is that we do not need to scan everything. If a photo was just a bad photo or something we don’t care about and never will, there’s no need to preserve it. Something hard to accept, but it makes perfect sense. I find that it is sometimes difficult or impossible to date old photos unless there’s a nearby witness to help you out :-). The author points out that we should do a little detective work. For example, if there was a car in the photo, you can often date the image by its license plate! I never thought of that. You can also count the candles on a birthday cake to see how old the birthday person was. In other words, don’t give up.

   Finally, the author gives us several useful plug-ins and apps we can use in our work to declutter our old photos. I appreciate that because often I have no idea what works and what doesn’t. This book is not only incredibly useful for anyone working on photo archives for their family, it’s also a joy to read. I will be revisiting it for sure!