5 personally fulfilling reasons to organize your photo library.
Imagine your family photo album was filled with old newspaper clippings, receipts, and class notes. You had to sift through clutter every time you wanted to remember that beautiful moment.
That’s how most phone photo galleries are organized. Filled with screenshots, duplicates, and other useless things.
At some point in the last 5 years I decided to go a different way. Because of that, I’ve been left with a peculiar artifact: a set of organized, original, honest photographs.
These are five reasons you should do the same.
- You have a graph of your growth in your pocket.
In these photos you can see the changing of seasons. Your physical growth. Your career trajectory. Your rapidly changing relationships. You can see it all play out in sequence. Then you can zoom out and see it at a bunch of different levels.
It’s like looking at a graph of your life. Beautifully organized along a timeline, with rich visual data that you can access with a click.
It’s quite unlike anything else.
2. You start to see the inflection points.
The other day I was lulled into a haze of exploring a different version of my life: the life I lived between 2018–2019. Old best friends and partners littered landscapes that were just barely familiar to me. It was like a daydream.
Then I woke up — because of this photo:
This is the first time My Media ever had a meeting. It was almost two years ago. I looked at it for a while. I smiled. Then I moved on.
After this photo, though, things were different. The pictures had a slightly different character. The landscapes were different — increasingly more familiar to me. Some people started to look different, some disappeared, and others showed up for the first time.
That day, March 25th, 2019, was an inflection point. A day that my life was set on a different trajectory. The ensuing months were months of intense change. To be totally honest, that may have been the day my adolescence ended.
I can pinpoint it to the day, which I think is pretty cool.
3. You get a really good sense of who you (have) love(d).
My favourite Beatles lyric is from “In My Life” when John Lennon sings:
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I’ve loved them all
With a photo library like this you start to see recurring smiles. People you have loved so much. The ones who are still around, and the ones you wish were still by your side. You start to pick up on who compelled you to get your camera out and capture a memory.
As an archive of the people you love, smiling and happy, this is a beautiful thing in itself.
4. It’s much needed catharsis.
You start to realize, after a while, that you’re structuring your entire past into a neatly organized and meticulously curated story. Not for anybody else, but for you.
Then you start to wonder why.
Isn’t it a little self-indulgent? Self-aggrandizing? Sad?
For me, it makes total sense. I’m someone who likes to have very specific and narrow outlets for my emotions. My sadness only finds expression when I’m making music. That means I have to have my guitar easily accessible at all times. Otherwise, I don’t process it.
This photo gallery is like my guitar for nostalgia. Longing for the past is a natural, and potent feeling. It’s easy to get down thinking that things used to be so much better (especially these days). Having a photo-gallery like this makes indulging that feeling easy. It gives you this accessible outlet for nostalgia — so that the feeling doesn’t linger too long, or make you doubt the present and the future.
5. It’s really good to remember what love is like.
One of the funny things about the photo gallery is that there’s a conspicuously missing month: March 2020.
In 5 years of taking photos there is no missing month except for the empty space between February 18th, 2020 and April 10th, 2020.
I think we all know why.
We’ve been in lock-down for almost a year now and it’s hard to remember what the alternative is like.
Goddammit I want to hug the people I love so bad. I want to sit in their house and laugh. I want to smile with them. I want to have a deep pride in how much they’re growing. I want that old love. That pre-March 2020 love.
There’s a future where we can have that kind of love back. Until then, though, take some time to remember how awesome love is.
You’ll be happy you did.
