An initial reflection on the 10,000 photos that I can access any time

How many photos can you access easily? I’m talking here about photos that are personal to you in some way, or sent for you to see, not photos taken by complete strangers with no connection to you.

My estimate, for all the photos that are personal to me, or have come my way, is at least 10,000. It’s hard to be exact. I’m not going to try and count them, but if we’re dealing with a one followed by zeroes, 10,000 is the best guess. It’s way more than 1,000 and less than 100,000.

I have thousands of prints stored in various ways: photo albums, shoeboxes, larger cardboard boxes, plastic storage crates. For at least a thousand of these photos I have multiple printed copies, for reasons I will explain another time. [This later piece explains why.]

When it comes to digital images, I have thousands of them replicated in a variety of locations: phones, hard drives, USB drives, cloud storage.

These days I acquire digital images from people I know well, people I hardly know, and people I have never met. All of these images end up in my default cloud storage location. (Imagine typing that sentence 30 years ago.) The reason for this ever-growing collection of photos is straightforward. I am in various WhatsApp groups. People send images and other content via WhatsApp. WhatsApp content is stored on my phone and automatically backed up to Amazon Photos.

Here’s an example. Over the last year I have played football up to three times a week. Information for one of these weekly games is sent to a WhatsApp group that I am part of. (For the other games, information comes via email or text.) There are over 40 people in the group. Many of them send photos, memes and short video clips as well as text. These end up in my gallery, and then in my default Amazon photo album. When my son scrolls through images on my phone or laptop he will ask who these people are. Often I have no idea. There are people sending messages to the group that I have never met. We have never played football on the same evening.

Based on past experience I could continue with this theme for a further 700 words, ending up with another thousand-word piece. I’ll leave it here for now, and break it down into smaller chunks.

All being well, I’ll return to this subject using the heading “10,000 Photos”.

Follow-up pieces:

10,000 Photos: thousands of duplicates

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