This week I began tackling digital photographs. The inverse proposition is I let my paper photographs stay in boxes for now. Using artificial intelligence I developed a process that helps me save and reduce my tens of thousands of digital photographs vying for attention. It will make them more accessible for me and other family members.
The basics include backing up the original files and creating a duplicate working file from which to sort images into a more accessible location. The intent is to never draw from the saved files. After trying a couple of software solutions, I decided to install IrfanView to quickly view and sort files into a reduced number of new folders. The software is surprisingly versatile for freeware.
I began with three folders, ones to keep, maybe keep, or reject. After getting through an entire year by making this triage decision, I developed another set of folders where the images will be archived: creative shots, events, family, garden, politics, and work. There are some folders inside the six main ones for specific photo shoots, but not many. Getting here for the first year made the second year go more quickly.
After these two sorts, there are passes through them, first to delete the rejected ones (saved in the originals), decide on the maybes, and then make some passes through the keep file to find them a home. While doing that, each photo goes into the six primary folders. The process normally saves multiple images that were taken in a short burst. I make a pass through each file to pick the best one or two in those cases.
The boon to creativity is twofold. While quickly viewing thousands of photos I gained an insight I did not have previously. Each year tells a story and I get a view of it again more than a decade later. It evokes memory, the currency of a creative writer. The other boon is using the creative shots folder as a workbench for writing on the internet. The way they were selected — mostly stripped of context — enables me to reuse them with new meaning. These are just the beginning of the benefits of the archival process.
At first, the process was clear as mud, yet now the mud is settling. I can see and use the files better than previously, which was one of the points. That I developed the process myself, rather than learning it from an expert, makes me more willing to use it. With 17 more years of folders to sort, my buy-in is an important aspect of the project.
Developing an archival process was rewarding in countless ways. Importantly, when I am gone, another person will be able to understand what I did and where they can find what interests them. There is a lot of material for additional posts solely about process. Now that process is established I can focus more on the images and the memories they evoke. These will be good times.
It was four degrees Fahrenheit and snowy this morning so I’m posting some garden images from 2008 as a reminder of what spring and summer can be. These are part of my larger A Life of Photos project. I did the initial sort of my digital images from 2008 last week. Posts like this one are part of the work product of that project.
First spring flowers.Apple trees blossomed in 2008.Lilacs are a perennial favorite.Potatoes pop through the soil early.When all the apple trees bloom, summer and fall is apple abundance.Summer harvest in 2008.Bowl of home grown apples. Japanese beetles massing on an apple.Apple blossom buds.Farmstead from the state park trail in 2008.
While finishing the first draft of Book II of my memoir I set the photo project aside. In between now and when I turn the first spade of soil, I plan to organize the “Life of Photos” project so it can advance when there is time available. A couple of things.
I seek to bring order to my large collection of physical and digital photographs. The purpose is twofold. There are practical matters of archiving other than in a shoe box, album, or digital file folder. Digital is straight forward here: Make multiple copies: one to edit and work on, and one or two that are not touched and serve as backup in the cloud and on a physical drive. The other purpose is trickier. What is the culture and its underlying philosophy of value. When the editing process finishes, what work product will be left? At present, that is an open question, the answer to which lies in the work ahead. At a minimum, there will be some slide shows, easy to navigate digital archives, photo albums, and use of photographs on this blog.
The software Paint.NET will be the first attempt at editing software. It is available for free and if I want, there is a version with Microsoft support for a nominal fee. The types of edits are not complicated: cropping, renaming, and some minor restoration. Paint.NET should handle that.
We recently found photos in an album we made in 1986 were coming loose — all of them. We started a project using a different kind of adhesive, and found it was soaking into the paper too much. We stopped and evaluated. For this project, and for any other similar ones going forward, we expect to use archival corners to re-attach the photos into the same album from which they came loose. For new albums, we will add consideration of the kind of paper used. The cultural challenge is in addition to fixing old photo albums, answering the question what other kinds of collections belong in a physical album. Some potential answers: narratives about our lives together are important. Any final work product would support old and to be developed narratives. Photography can also be art, so some of the best may find their way into other media or into a frame which could be hung on the wall.
Our family use of photography increased significantly in the 1950s. When digital photography began in this century, especially after 2012, it was Katy bar the gate. Photography became less ritualized with posed photographs on special occasions, and more a complete, undisciplined explosion of digital images with less thought and process in how they were taken. The goal of my project is to bring intentionality back into the process of taking and storing old photographs.
Our child said we should caption all the photographs so they could refer to the captions and understand the images when we are gone. There is more to it than that. Narrative context, personal reflection, and accessibility become equally important with captioning. Given the thousands of images, being thorough and doing it right could be challenging. In solving this, I expect embedding some of this information in the structure will be important if I can figure out how to do it. I don’t mean returning to photographs and entering metadata in every image. Instead, combinations of albums, folders and slide shows that tell our stories can be a structural framework. Short version: memory needs structure to survive the abundance of images. The project includes defining what that means.
While my personality is pretty cut and dried, a rational guy with a project like this, the work needs to develop what wings it can to fly into my and the viewers’ imaginations. Will it be emotional when I look at photos of my long deceased father? I wouldn’t admit it but probably.
This is a turning point in the project. Now begins programming work blocks into my already busy schedule, followed by doing the work. Once I get into the project I need to set several interim goals for the work products. When will the project be finished? I will need goals for that as well. The sooner I can call it “done,” the sooner I can devote time to other new projects.
I spent a good part of yesterday on the road to Des Moines and back. There was fog around Grinnell, yet visibility was good. By the time I returned, I was beat — a person only has energy to describe the Iowa landscape as a post so many times. So here are two photos from the state park trail earlier this week. The sun puts on a better show than I ever could.
A few photos from the first days of the year. The moon shots were one night when I couldn’t sleep so I went on a very early trail walk before sunrise.
Before sunrise.Before sunrise on the state park trail.Moon setting in early morning.On the state park trail.Moon setting in early morning.Sunrise on the state park trail.
Artificial intelligence rendering from my photo of a woodpile.
2025 has been a crappy year in some ways and a good year in others. On the crappy side, our president is undoing much of the good that has been in place since World War II. He and his collaborators in Iowa are changing society in a way that will have long-term negative effects. On the good side, I stepped back from society to get my own house in order so I can contribute effectively to driving Republicans out of power. The latter outweighs the former in importance.
I don’t know what happened to me during the coronavirus pandemic. I was diagnosed with diabetes mid-2019 and have been treating it by controlling diet. It is working. Things went well before and during the early part of the pandemic, but as I retired from paid work and stayed home more, maintaining my health became a challenge. In 2024, I tested positive for COVID-19 and literally felt like I was going to die. In 2025, I began to turn my health around. I started logging my meals, exercise, and weight on My Fitness Pal. My weight reduced by 12.2 percent and BMI went from 36.8 to 32.3 during the year. During a recent visit to the clinic my practitioner told me to keep doing what I am doing, so I will.
I wrote already about my writing. All I have to add on the last day of the year is I feel more confident than ever as a writer. 2026 should be a good year.
Mine is a world of ideas and reading is essential. I wrote about The Great Sort, which was the first major review of books I collected beginning when I was a grader. In the last year, I donated more than a thousand to Goodwill and the local public library used book sale. There is at least another thousand to go. The important thing about this year’s project is not the downsizing. It is development of a new way to acquire and read books.
Notably, a substantial percent of the 71 books I read this year were checked out from the public library. That was huge, and according to library data, I saved $821 by doing so. How do I get ideas for which books to read? I get newsletters from several large publishers yet a main part of it is by querying the library’s new arrivals on its website. There was more related to reading happening in 2025.
I have been on social media since about 2007. One of the uses is to find new ideas and books I should read. The contribution social media makes is I get real people’s ideas about what to read in the context of their social media account. It is a more solid recommendation than if I knew little about the referrer. Part of this is I take chances on authors with limited distribution of their work. It has been a positive experience.
The best thing about acquiring books to read this year began during the pandemic. The Haunted Bookshop is one of the few remaining used bookstores in the county. Its proprietor, Nialle Sylvan, has changed how I select books and helped improve the quality of writing I have been reading. During the pandemic, the shop’s business plummeted. I felt badly about the situation and asked her to pick $50 worth of books and I’d buy them. That worked out well enough that this year I gave her more information about what I was reading. The last batch of books she picked for me has been so engaging I had to put some of them down because I didn’t want the experience of reading an author to ever end. The writing was so good! That is rare. Long story short is if you can find a bookseller like Nialle Sylvan count yourself lucky.
I want to talk about menu planning in our household in 2025. We do it now, mostly a week in advance. This takes the stress out of daily questions about what’s for dinner. It created an environment where I could focus on developing new dishes, something for which I have ample creative energy. Who knew planning meals could be such a benefit?
In the entry box I asked, “When did I make my first message on ChatGPT?” The machine, which prefers pronouns you/it, didn’t know. More precisely, it replied, “I don’t have access to the exact timestamp of your very first message, but I do have a reliable estimate.” It was in late May this year, according to the machine’s best estimates. Sounds earlier than I thought, but what do I know. That’s why I asked.
I am figuring out how to use artificial intelligence effectively. The reason I use the words “artificial intelligence” is what I am learning on ChatGPT is applicable everywhere ai is used in my world. This includes Google, my bank account, this blog, and a host of other applications. They are not all the same artificial intelligence, but the kernel of getting information I need is a similar process in any of them. It is a helper, although I don’t usually mention I use it in the Twitch chat I frequent because millennials and Gen-Z folk are skeptical of ChatGPT specifically and ai in general. As content creators, there may be concerns about ai taking over the space and putting them out of business. The energy use is a concern as well.
People ask, “What about the energy artificial intelligence uses?” Hannah Ritchie, who I think is brilliant, posted the following around the time I started using ChatGPT:
My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.
If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.
But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too. (Email from Hannah Ritchie on May 6, 2025).
For the time being, I will restrain myself by not mentioning ChatGPT on Twitch. That is, unless the chat is about ai, which it was yesterday. In those cases, I drop Ritchie’s name with a quote. Bread on the water.
Things I use ai for are related to living in the real world. How should I organize my workshop tools? How should I manage a photoshoot of a political rally? How can I improve my exercise regimen? Please explain this piece of legislation so I can understand it. Here is my schedule for starting garden seedlings, how can it be improved? How do I solve the problem of binders in a casserole that lacks eggs and cheese? Why does cornstarch get such a bad rap? The machine is quick, its access to information is broad. It uses the same language to answer that I used in my queries. I am convinced the machine has read the work of Dale Carnegie.
I asked about data privacy and the machine gave me good tips about how to use not only their service, but would apply to my internet traffic generally. Things like speak in generalities, be mindful of what you put out there, and how to use controls built into the app to minimize how much of me is out there. So far so good with this tool. I plan to continue.
The good in 2025 definitely outweighed the bad. Republicans are not going to go away, so I need to be ready for the 2026 Midterms. This cycle, I will likely use my new ai helper to be a more effective canvasser.
I decided to call 2025 finished with 71 books read. I set my goal at a book per week and exceeded it. Yay!
Goodreads is great for me because it provides satisfaction when I finish each book and rate it. Likewise, I refer to the historical information often. The above chart came via email last week and tells a story about which I hadn’t thought. June through August is the busiest time in the garden. Likewise September through November are taken up with kitchen work processing the harvest. Seems natural I would read fewer books during those six months. The seasonality just never occurred to me.
I post each book I finish on Goodreads and at the Read Recently page of this blog if interested. I also keep a spreadsheet.
Book reading appears to be a lost art in American society. I understand people are busy taking in information from the large number of sources that exploded after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The web was popularized through the adaptation of web browsers in the mid-1990s. We bought our first home computer and logged in via dial-up on April 21, 1996. After that, it was Katie bar the gate with many more words than could be read by a single human. I think even artificial intelligence machines have trouble getting through all of it. All that said, I sort of understand it, yet believe individuals reading books is an important kind of experience that rewards us in tangible ways.
Online apps are not for everyone, yet if you are on Goodreads, I’d love to see what you are reading. Find me here and join my community!
Calling this project done for now. I went through all remaining boxes in the two stacks and prepped two more boxes for the library used book sale. There are five empty boxes and a good amount of new stuff placed in old boxes. This was the first major sort of my books since they arrived in 1993 and I built the shelves. I’m satisfied I have a better idea of what is available, which was the point.
Notes:
I found the rest of my books related to slavery and African-American studies. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois is important to the literary discussion of the United States. If a 21st Century canon was relevant or possible, he would be in it. I don’t expect to reread the book, yet it earned a place on the shelf. I studied Stanley Elkins’ book Slavery in graduate school. I would be curious to reread it, and also read the criticisms of it. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington moves from box to shelf as well. On my to-do list is rearranging my African-American studies books.
I had more than a hundred business books. It was a really complete set as my work at the transportation and logistics company ended in 2009. The only ones I am keeping are Dale Carnegie’s books, which include one owned by my father, and an autographed copy of Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. I picked Deming up for a buck at a used bookstore in Sweetwater, Texas during the rattlesnake roundup.
I intentionally left political books alone. I have all the presidential memoirs I know about, beginning with Truman. The next reading here is if Barack Obama ever finishes the second volume of his presidential memoir. I’m not a fan of Trump and to my knowledge, he hasn’t written a memoir from his first term. Like with Nixon, I’ll likely wait until he is dead before considering purchasing any memoir. I bought a copy of Mike Pence’s 2022 vice presidential memoir So Help Me God for a buck at the library used book sale. It is occupying the spot where Obama’s book will go when published. Pence seems to have tried to tell a normal story of that period. Will know more if I get around to reading it. Life is short. So many books with limited time.
As I approach a new year of writing, I feel refreshed by The Great Sort. I feel better aware of my stuff and know where to find things again. Highly recommend it if you have a wall of boxes hanging about your home.
For years, my books about North American indigenous culture were tucked away in a box. I decided I was wrong about them and with newly opened space because of The Great Sort, I put them on a shelf. These are in addition to the works by and about Black Hawk which I always kept out, and those of Hyemeyohsts Storm which I kept out, yet now boxed away. I wrote about Chuck Storm as we called him here. The next step is to incorporate this literature into a reading plan.
Of these books, the author that might best fit into a canon of American Literature (if such a thing existed or was possible) is N. Scott Momaday, whose House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. There are others here that remain quite good. I read what I read of these beginning in 1970 while at university. I don’t know where this is going, yet they are out and available in a prominent space. I won’t miss seeing them daily and expect to read some of them.
I mentioned the Time magazine purge. I came across a dozen copies of Harpers Magazine dated 1938 and 1942. I bought them at either an auction or a yard sale for a buck. They used to be property of the Mount Carroll, Illinois public library, yet now find themselves in The Big Sort. There are familiar authors inside: John Dos Passos, E.B. White, Peter Drucker, Margaret Bourke-White, Glenway Wescott, Eudora Welty, T.S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, and probably others I should recognize. At the stop on my desk, enroute to the recycling bin, I notice how many pages of book advertisements there are. The December 1938 issue has 44 pages by most of the major publishers. That says something about the role Harpers played in popular culture. If that didn’t give it away, the advertisement for New York department store Hammacher Schlemmer did.
There are four mover’s boxes of vinyl records which I will attempt to sell locally. I asked our child about them and there was only a single record of interest: Beethoven’s Fidelio. The ones I will keep are a small, undetermined number. I will keep the Red Gallagher album because he autographed it for me and grew up a block away from our home. I spent a good part of my life listening to these hundreds of records. While I still have a turntable, I need a new amplifier and don’t want to spend the money. Probably should sell the turntable as well.
I’m writing on Christmas Day and noticed how many empty boxes there are. The purge of books and magazines is having the desired effect. There are more boxes than things on the sorting tables. At this point, I will find something to fill most of the boxes, although I am weeding out different styles of boxes because I need them for book shipments to the public library. While I just began The Big Sort, it feels like it has been going on for a much longer time. In a way, it has.
When handling hundreds of books long packed away, a few will stand out. Not only do I want to keep those in this photo, I want to read or re-read them next year. It’s part of the process of the Great Sort.
While living in Mainz, Germany, I had a stamp made with my military address and Social Security number on it. Back then, we viewed the Social Security number as unique to us and if we got separated from any possession, the rightful owner could be found. It was embossed into our dog tags. We put it on clothing, imprinted it inside field boots, in books, on everything that would take ink. That was short-term thinking from a perspective of how many people today would like to get hold of that number and use it for theft and other evil purposes. Wasn’t the best idea.
A substantial part of the Great Sort has been spent searching for these stamped locators and either blacking them out or cutting them off.
It has been hard to persist more than a few hours without getting impatient and stuffing books back into another box and into the new stacks I am building. At that point I must resist the urge, turn off the lights, and find something else to do. I want this to be a final sort. I’m labeling and dating the outside of the boxes so I know what’s in them and when I last touched the books. I doubt I will return to many of the boxes.
In the display area of my writing space I have about 3,000 books. I pulled out and boxed all the books of music. The vinyl long playing records will get boxed, reunited with the others I have, and then finally disposed of. This creates more space for active books and some of it will fill with the three-ring binders I am making as I write my autobiography. It should be a more useful (to a writer) library.
I want the Great Sort to be finished by Spring. I think that is doable even as I enter seedling planting time next month, especially if I stick with it a couple hours per day. The purpose of the work is to improve how I store research materials and become a better writer. I’m hopeful at this point. all of that will be the Great Sort’s outcome.
Mailing label from the first apartment where I wrote after university.
Journey Home 
You must be logged in to post a comment.