100 Snapshots of Your Vacation is 95 Too Many

Vin and Me at Le D'orsay

If you are like me, you have a problem with photographs.  The problem is: there are too many of them. A lifetime of snapshots, kept meticulously in albums during the first few years and then haphazardly stuffed in shoe boxes and stored on dark closets -- along with old tax returns and other items that you don't use but cannot throw away.  Discovered every few years and put away again with a firm resolve to get the photos organized "one of these days".

We have a ton of  photographs.  Many are of our kids and family over the years.  Most of them are pretty bad photography, taken on inexpensive cameras from the old brownie hawk-eye, then Polaroids, then the 35 millimeter Canon sure-shot pics.

Around  2002  I got my first digital camera, after that point there is a sharp drop-off in the number of blurry, faded, hard-copy photos.  In the pre-digital world you always took 2 or 3 "takes" in case someone moved.  There was no way to know what the photo would  looked like until you got the film developed - weeks, maybe months later.  (The popularity of Polaroid was not drive by the quality of the picture, but the fact that you could see the results in a few minutes.)

But the digital camera allowed an amazing time-shift in amateur photography.  Now, for the first time, you could  see what the photo looked like, instantly!   There was no film to buy or to take to the photography place to get developed.  You just stored the photos on a CD or removable memory stick.  As the photo developing services were disappearing, the Internet via the  web (www) took up the slack, offering to develop selected pictures into prints for as little as 9 cents each.  These days, I use Snapfish to upload and edit and share my digital pictures.  I generally print only the best of these in hard copy, look at them and then put them in a drawer.  Someday I will organize them into an album.  I have half a dozen CD's of photos that were offloaded from my PC to make room for new photos.  The truth is I will probably never get around to organizing this mess.

The worst invention: Webcam

Most digital cameras have a movie setting that allow you to record a video that you can store, and you can get video editing software on your PC so you can upload the video to places like YouTube.


Most of us have taken photos intended as a keepsake to capture a moment in time of  a special occasion, a vacation, an unusual vista...something of personal significance.  What used to be a private collection of memories can now be published to the world.  Evolving photo sharing Technology now lets us "share" photos (and videos) via social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook and on our blogs.

Typical boring vacation photo

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. So I am appalled that so many people are so clueless that they think others have the time or inclination to look at 100 photos of your recent vacation.

People, it is just rude to send someone an email with 100megabytes of photos attached. (It takes a long time to down load and open).  And it is clueless to expect others to peruse 100+ boring pictures of you standing in front of some church or castle.  Please, just pick the 5 or 6 best photos of your trip - and omit the ones of you -- smugly grinning because you are on vacation and we are not.

Yes, I'm in Paris and you are in Podunk - go ahead and hate me.