Twenty Years in the Digital Photography World

Twenty years ago, I entered the digital photography age with the purchase of this Nikon point-and-shoot digital camera.  And it was thanks to a recent post by my brother on his new website, a-picture-and-a-thousand-words, that I even realized this.  So, like him I decided to document this milestone.

Before I wrote this post, I searched and searched for that camera in our house but could not find it. This actually surprised me as I rarely throw anything away.  During my search, I did run across three other Nikon point-and-shoot cameras I had owned over the years along with my first two Nokia cell phones but not that first digital camera.

The first photo I have with that camera is this one, file name DSCN0002.jpg, taken on August 22, 2003, at 8:23 PM.  It is of our oldest son after a long drive from Memphis, TN to Austin, TX where he was entering graduate school.  We had been moving his furniture into his first apartment from the U-Haul trailer that we had pulled behind our Jeep Liberty.  It is not a flattering photo, as we were all hot and sweaty so I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing it.  But it is my oldest digital photo.

So, you are probably asking yourself what happened to DSCN0001.jpg?  Well, I have this vague memory of standing in our kitchen and opening the camera box, inserting the memory card, installing the batteries, and then snapping a shot of…our oven.  I had never immediately seen the image I had just photographed before, so I wanted to try it out.  Obviously, not being a subject of which I would always savor the photo (pun intended), I deleted it.

Three days later, I was back in Memphis and captured this image of our daughter beside her fully loaded car ready to head off to Oberlin College for her senior year, file DSCN0005.jpeg.

After those first saved photos in August 2003, I took and kept a total of 125 photos of various events and activities for the rest of the year.  Having previously lived exclusively in the film and print photography world where you typically only took photos you wanted to retain, with a digital camera, you could take as many shots of any subject you wanted and just keep the best ones.  And in the old photography world where you first paid for film, and then developing, and then printing, after the initial cost of the memory card, taking photos in the digital world was essentially free!  Free, unless that is, you chose to print out your digital photos.  I did this initially but then figured out a much better way to view my photos.

Rather than just viewing my digital photos on the back of the camera in the small window or printing them out on 4” X 6” paper, I wanted to store them on a computer where I could see much larger versions of them.

Which led to my first problem to solve.  Knowing I would be taking many more digital photos than film photos, how should I organize this larger number of photos?  Being a very organized ISTJ (Myers-Briggs personality type, click HERE for more details), one who firmly believes in “a place for everything and everything in its place”, I had meticulously placed almost all of our photos in photo albums, labeled by year and season.

For digital photos, I knew I had to come up with a plan.  I don’t know how many different possible solutions I explored but the one I settled on seemed simple and easy to use.  And has remained so to this day 20 years later.

In the digital world, photos are just files, typically jpeg files.  In the computer world where these photos would reside, files are organized into folders.  My simple solution was to create a folder with a name that began with the year, such as “2003” and then include an identifier after the year such as “Christmas” or “Amsterdam.”  That way, all the folders for a given year would sort together in alphabetical order based on that identifier and the photos in that folder would sort in chronological order from lowest to highest numbered file name.

Ingenious huh?

This was how I managed and viewed all of my digital photos on the two different Dell computers I owned for half of that first decade of digital camera usage.

But then my world really changed again in 2009 when I got my first Apple computer and then in 2011 with my first Apple iPhone.  Now it was almost seamless to take photos with my iPhone and then import them into the iPhoto software on my computer.  There I could create the folders by year and activity before copying the photos into the correct folder.  Then syncing my iPhone to my computer, all those events and albums were updated on my iPhone.  Even the previous folders I had on my Dell computers became Events or Albums within the Apple computer world.

Over the 20 years since I joined the digital photography world, I have created almost 250 individual folders and within those folders are housed over 20,000 photos.  I am so glad that I started that organizational scheme all those years ago as it makes it easy for me to go back when asked, for example, “what year did we go to Switzerland?”  I simply scroll through the years until I find the one which also says “Switzerland.”

And this I can do anytime anywhere as in the Apple world; I carry every one of my digital photos organized this way on my iPhone.  In fact, I take pleasure in having a conversation with someone about something that happened in the past, say a trip we took, and I can whip out my phone and pull up a photo from that event.

Prior to the digital photography age, men and women could carry only a small number of photos in their wallets.  Now we can carry every photo we have ever taken in our phones.  What a wonderful age we live in now!