Saw the name Tamara Zidanšek pop up somewhere the other day, I think it was during some tennis highlights I was watching. Made me think, you know? Watching those players, the focus they need, it’s something else.
Anyway, it got me remembering this massive task I finally tackled recently. It wasn’t tennis, nothing that glamorous. It was my digital photo collection. A complete disaster zone, spread across old hard drives, my laptop, even some dusty DVDs I found.
Getting Started
First off, I had to actually admit there was a problem. For years, I just kept dumping photos anywhere. Downloads folder, desktop, random folders named ‘new pics’ or ‘stuff’. It was bad. Finding a specific photo? Forget about it. Took me forever.
So, I decided enough was enough. I gathered all the drives and discs in one place. That was step one, just getting everything physically together. Felt like preparing for a big expedition.
The Sorting Process
Then came the real work. I plugged in the first old drive. Man, the chaos. Thousands of files. Some were duplicates, some were blurry, some I didn’t even remember taking.
My initial plan was simple: sort by year, then month. Seemed logical. But reality hit hard.
- A lot of files had wrong dates. Old camera settings maybe? Who knows.
- Some folders were already kind of sorted by event, like ‘Beach Trip 2010’ or ‘John’s Birthday’. But inconsistently.
- I kept getting sidetracked looking at old pictures. An hour would pass, and I’d only sorted like 20 photos.
I didn’t use any fancy software. Just Windows File Explorer. Copying, pasting, creating new folders, renaming. Super manual. My wrist actually started to hurt after a while from all the clicking.
Sticking With It
There were moments I nearly gave up. Staring at a folder with 500 unsorted images from 2012 felt impossible. Just sheer volume. But I thought back to that idea of focus, like those tennis players. Just one point at a time, right? So I decided, okay, just one folder at a time. Or even just 50 photos at a time.
I started making small piles, digitally speaking. A folder for each year. Inside that, folders for main events or months if I could figure them out. If I couldn’t tell the date, I made a ‘ToSortLater’ folder within the year I guessed it belonged to.
It took days. Not solid days, but hours spread over maybe two weeks. Plugging in drives, sorting a chunk, taking a break, doing it again.
The Result (So Far)
It’s not perfect. There are still duplicates I need to weed out, and that ‘ToSortLater’ folder is still pretty chunky. But it’s way, way better than before. I can actually find things now. I put the main sorted collection onto a new, reliable hard drive. The old drives? Wiped clean, ready to be retired or reused.
It felt good, honestly. Like winning a long match. Just a simple, boring task like organizing files, but finishing it brought this huge sense of relief. Sometimes it’s those mundane battles that feel the biggest when you finally conquer them.
