Half a decade of memories

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly chipping away at something I promised myself I’d do eventually – collecting, organising, and archiving old photos. For how much I preach backups and self-hosting, I’ve been rather careless with my own files, simply ditching everything whenever I switched devices or operating systems. After all, much of it was “cringe” in hindsight, so I rarely returned. I’ve always had this living-in-today mentality, though these days it’s slowly fading for good.

Why did I 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. That’s not good.

Once back home, I sat down and began the tedious process of sorting thousands of images from three phones, a camera, and a laptop into a single place on my desktop. There is also an iPad somewhere, but I’m afraid to look for it. It’s from when I was a redditor. All in all, I sifted through over ten thousand images from 2019-2024, including travel mementos, game screenshots, and (of course) memes.

Handling so many files takes time – especially when half require editing or even deleting (do I need a picture of a random field from 2020?). With the usual Discord microblogging unavailable¹, I spent a while alone with only my thoughts and half a decade worth of memories as company. The Minecraft soundtrack in the background didn’t help.

It was all the more interesting because I am at the very beginning of a new chapter in life – one could even say barely past the foreword. I’ve just turned 18 and entered university. 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 would’ve 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 doesn’t approve of. But the again, who hasn’t? I know I’ll come to regret some things I’m doing right now – it’s inevitable. This is partially why I’ve been more liberal with what I keep than usual – I don’t really see the value in various screenshots from Rainbow Six Siege, but sometime, somewhere, I thought it was important – so they were spared. Perhaps there will come a time when the same courtesy will be extended to what’s on my mind now (actually, I’d 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 – “only 5 years”, and yet this archive proves it’s an incomprehensibly long while. By then, I will have (hopefully) graduated, found a job – maybe even moved out! You never know with these things. Apparently, when I was 14 I wanted to be a community manager for video games – 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 wary of them due to lossiness – surely loosing data is bad. But you can’t 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 “better” looking one was the “worse” jpeg! I am now such a big believer in jpeg, there are a couple .jxls in the archive – some professional 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 phone’s photos take. For an unknown reason, I had the resolution set to 8000x6000, ballooning images of unremarkable quality to a dozen megabytes at best. I’ve manually converted some (as alluded to above), but intend to automate the process due to how many of these there are.

My obsession with drive space might seem silly – my current network storage usage is mere 20gb total in the age of terabytes on the cheap. However, I’d like to back things up properly from now on. Presently, all the files are stored on my PC, with daily backups to a second disk. But hardware redundancy is only marginally better than nothing. Ideally, I’d 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. It’s 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 I’ll get around to it over the weekend. Should be somewhere in the wardrobe, too bad the “wardrobe” is a whole room. After that, it’ll be curbing and optimizing for a while.

I’m still choosing how to handle automatic backups and future additions. Might just go with manual transfer over good old NFS or SFTP, but something fancy like Immich (once stable) is a possibility as well. I’ve been meaning to use my second, underutilised server as network storage, this could play into it.

Conclusion

Couldn’t 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 weren’t trying to use games for comparisons less, I’d put a Finding Paradise quote here. It’s remarkable how much I have changed over the years – and how much I haven’t. 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 the first semester.