A Few Thousand Photos Later

Most of what I do all day produces something that either works or doesn't. Code compiles or it doesn't, tests pass or they don't, the data pipeline runs or it spends twenty minutes complaining about something I forgot to clean.

Photography doesn't really work like that.

I started carrying a camera properly during my HND years in Kathmandu. It was cheap, secondhand, and mostly used for street food stalls, random places around the city, friends, and whatever half-finished side project I was working on at the time.

The habit stayed.

Then came the move to the UK, an MSc, part-time work, and the usual collection of things that somehow make a week disappear. I still kept taking photos whenever I had the camera with me. I just never really got good at dealing with the photos afterwards.

The storage problem

I have a few thousand photos now. Some are good. Some are terrible. A lot of them are probably somewhere in between.

There are RAW files, JPEGs, videos, edited versions, exports, screenshots, and folders with names that made perfect sense when I created them.

My storage is starting to complain.

This is slightly embarrassing because I can happily spend an afternoon designing a data pipeline to organise some random dataset, but give me a few thousand personal photos and my entire system becomes IMG_4827.JPG, followed by IMG_4828.JPG, and then another 400 files I haven't opened since 2023.

At some point I'm going to have to do something about it. Probably before the storage fills up completely.

Why I keep taking them

I don't really take photos for Instagram or a portfolio. Most of the time, I just like having a camera with me.

There is something different about walking around with the intention of looking for a photo. You start noticing things that you would normally walk past. Buildings, signs, light, food, people, small details that don't seem particularly important until you stop and look at them properly.

Writing code trains a very specific kind of attention. Something is either correct or it isn't. A test passes or fails. A function returns what you expected or it doesn't.

Photography doesn't give you that certainty.

There is no green checkmark for a good photo.

Sometimes I take twenty photos and keep one. Sometimes I take one and forget about it. Sometimes the photo I almost didn't take ends up being the one I like most.

I think that's probably why I've kept doing it.

Maybe I should actually do something with them

The storage problem has made me think about something else.

I have all these photos and videos sitting around, so maybe I should eventually do something with them.

I've never really thought of myself as a content creator. The phrase itself makes me slightly uncomfortable.

But I already have the camera. I already have the footage. And apparently I have enough of it to start having storage problems.

Maybe I'll start sharing some of it at some point. Photo dumps, short videos, little edits, things from trips, random places around London, Kathmandu when I'm back, or whatever I happen to be photographing.

I might even make some completely unnecessary trailer-style videos for ordinary things. I've always liked the idea of taking something completely normal and giving it the production value of a film that absolutely did not need a trailer.

Nothing planned yet.

It's just one of those ideas sitting somewhere between "this could be fun" and "I probably shouldn't give myself another project."

The unfinished part

I still don't have a proper system for managing the archive.

I could build one. That is probably the dangerous part.

I could spend a weekend writing a little application to catalogue everything, add metadata, generate thumbnails, search by date and location, and turn a simple photography problem into another software project.

Which would be very predictable.

For now, I think I'll just start going through the photos.

Maybe I'll find some worth keeping. Maybe I'll delete a few thousand. Maybe I'll eventually share some of them.

Or maybe I'll just run out of storage first.

We'll see.