Half a decade of memories
Over the past few weeks, Iāve been slowly chipping away at something I promised myself Iād do eventually - collecting, organising and archiving old photos. For how much I preach backups and self-hosting, Iāve been rather careless with my own files, simply ditching everything whenever I switched devices or operating systems. After all, much of it was ācringeā in hindsight, so I rarely returned. Iāve always had this living-in-today mentality, though these days itās slowly fading for good.
So why did I finally begin this endeavour? The final straw came this summer in Kaliningrad, as I was taking photos on a shaky boat and it occurred to me that I was one slip away from 2 years worth of pictures sinking into the sea. Thatās not good.
Once back home, I sat down and began the tedious process of sorting thousands of images from 3 phones, a camera and a laptop into a single place on my desktop. There is also an iPad somewhere, but Iām afraid to look for it. Itās from when I was a redditor. All in all, I sifted through over 10 thousand images from 2019-2024, including travel mementos, game screenshots, and (of course) memes.
Handling so many files takes time - especially when many require editing or even deleting (do I need a picture of a random field from 2020?). With the usual Discord microblogging unavailable, Iāve spent a while alone with only my thoughts and half a decade worth of memories as company. The Minecraft soundtrack in the background didnāt help.
It was all the more interesting because I am at the very beginning of a new chapter in life - some would even say barely past the foreword. Iāve just turned 18 and entered university. For all intents and purposes, this is a clean slate, and I can decide what follows. Which makes looking at what came before seem all the more special.
I often heard that as you grow, you learn to accept your past mistakes. Though even a year or two ago I wouldāve hated to stumble upon all the Hermitcraft memes 13 year old me found hilarious, I already feel differently. Sure, younger me spent a lot of time the way current one doesnāt approve of. But the again, who hasnāt? I know Iāll come to regret some things Iām doing right now - itās inevitable. This is partially why Iāve been more liberal with what I keep than usual - I donāt really see the value in various screenshots from Rainbow Six Siege, but sometime, somewhere, I thought it was important - so they were spared. Perhaps thereāll be a time the same will be done to whatās on my mind now (actually, Iād rather not keep anything math-related). And besides, here I am - clearly, it all worked out in the end.
This also makes me excited for next 5 years. It sounds like hardly any time - āonly 5 yearsā, and yet this archive proves itās an incomprehensibly long while. By then, I will have (hopefully) graduated, found a job- hell, maybe even moved out. You never know with these things. Apparently, when I was 14 I wanted to be a community manager - yet right now am studying theoretical computer science.
Technical details
Now, all the slightly melancholic restrospection aside, here are some technical notes.
I am extremely conscious of file sizes, and there were some
surprises in that regard. The main one - man, jpegs are
awesome! I was historically wary of them due to
lossiness - surely, loosing data is bad. But you canāt
help but be impressed at an image being cut down from 10mb to
500kb at no visible cost to quality. The funniest instance was
me downscaling and jpeg-ifying a game screenshot, then
comparing the before/after, only to realise the ābetterā one
was āworseā! I am now such big believer in jpeg, there are a
couple .jxl
s in the archive - some āprofessionalā
photos from my graduation were so horrifyingly large, I had to
call in the big guns.
Another storage-related annoyance was (and still is) how darn much my old-old phoneās photos take. For some unknown reason, I had the resolution set to 8000x6000, ballooning images of unremarkable quality to a dozen megs at best. Iāve manually converted some of them (as alluded to above), but intend to automate the process due to how many there are.
My obsession with drive space might seem silly - itās mere 20gb total in the age of terabytes on the cheap. However, Iād like to back things up properly from now on. Presently, all the files are stored on my PC, with daily backups to a 2nd disk. But hardware redundancy is only marginally better than nothing. Ideally, Iād like to store everything in one central location with as many offsite copies as possible - in particular, I am considering carrying around a USB stick or a portable SSD. Itās a good idea in general, and always having photos on me is a nice bonus. Having to transfer smaller and fewer files will hopefully help with that. And⦠yes, I also just like small files - have you seen this website?!
My current priority is filling the 2022-sized hole with images from my old iPhone - somehow, I managed to lose both the phone and all the lightning cables I still had. There are loads of files there, so Iāll get around to it over the weekend. Should be somewhere in the wardrobe, too bad the āwardrobeā is a whole room. After that, itāll be curbing and optimizing for a while.
Iām still choosing how to handle automatic backups and future additions. Might just go with good olā NFS or SFTP, but something fancy like Immich (once stable) is a possibility as well. Iāve been meaning to use my second underutilised server as a NAS (or purchase a dedicated oneā¦), so this could play into it.
Conclusion
Couldnāt bear ending on technical notes. I suppose I just wanted to share how fun it was to take a look back in time. If I werenāt trying to use games as comparisons less, Iād put a Finding Paradise quote here. Itās remarkable how much I changed over the years - and how much I havenāt. Maybe I should revise my attitude, and stop the endless running once in a while to take a look back.
In the meantime, the next goalpost - end of first semester.