Self-Archival Project (In-Progress)
I have so many years of photos in Google photos from my phone automatically backing up there, but I don’t love Google Photos for long-term storage. You can make albums, but you can’t make stuff you put in albums disappear from your feed, which makes organization difficult. Albums operate more like tags, rather than locations. I’d rather engage with the photos as files for organizing and de-duping. So, I started the process of exporting my Google photos into files on my computer that I can organize and engage with.
This process has uncovered some exciting creative potential though! Like I am piecing together the narrative of my life as I sort through the following:
Photos and Videos
Photos of me in all my awkward gender and expression phases
Photos of Friends and Quaill Club housemates
Photos from Events
Photos of the house and garden and how it’s evolved over the years
Photos of art and projects and the process around them
Boomerangs??? Those little 2 second clips that’d repeat??? So many of these. I am trying to figure out what to do with them. Maybe a compilation video?
Screenshots
Some tea in the form of screenshots of text messages. Mostly deleting these.
Sweet and kind words from people I want to remember
Quotes and digital moments I’d like to save
Downloaded Images
Mostly memes and poems. I am organizing those, saving some of the stuff I think are worth sharing into channels on my are.na account.
Junk
Duplicates of photos since apparently I can’t just hit the photo button once, but rather 2-500 times per photo op.
The Goal:
To break up this giant pile of photos, screenshots, downloaded memes, and more into an archive of my growth, my house, my friends, and the house. I am not sure why I want to do this yet, but it feels important.
The Process
Use Google Takeout to export Google Photos into one file. Doing this maintains the metadata, like date and location, that downloading straight from Google Photos unfortunately strips away.
Use a File Organizing program that breaks everything up according to certain parameters. In my case, I picked grouping them by month created, so the folders are labeled 2017-06, 2017-07, etc.
Go from folder to folder, remove duplicates, and sort images between folders such as “Quaill Club,” “Memes,” "Poems and Quotes,” etc.
Issues To Solve
Should I keep photos in the folders that are based on date for chronology purposes, and instead utilize tags to categorize them? Do tags communicate between Mac and Windows?
Photo Organization Moving Forward
I no longer let my phone back-up automatically. Instead, I do this:
Use the app Swipe and Delete to review my photos from the previous month, easily deleting any that I don’t want to keep.
Then I manually back up the photos to Google Photos. I might eventually just back them up directly into dated folders, but I don’t mind