Taking So Much Longer Than I Figured - Sorting Pictures

 For the past three days, I have been sitting at the computer for about 10 hours a day sorting pictures.

I shared in my post a few days back that I have a ton of pictures and why. But, there are two bigger issues that I never figured on when doing this type of work.

The first is I am a giver. I give time, I give gifts, I give pictures of other peoples children when the parent's are working and can't be on the field trip or watching the program.

I went on every field trip any of my kids ever went on. I even tried to bribe Princess Five when she was in high school telling her I would pay her $50 so I wouldn't have to go as it cost me more than that to get my background check renewed. She said her sisters all went to the mall with me on the band trips so she wanted me to go as well.

She soon regretted that choice when sitting with your mom isn't so cool so I told her to go sit with her friends and I sat alone both ways on the bus. We did enjoy sushi at the mall, and I got some great pictures. You have to realize that two parents go on the bus and all my friends children are in the band, dance recital, etc so I would take close up pictures of each kid for the parents and before facebook, it wasn't as easy to send digital media so I think you may be understanding where I am frustrated with this. My dvd / cd burner never worked on the Panasonic computer I won so making them a cd was super frustrating and didn't happen.

I have spent three days going through each file and uploading hundreds of pictures of other families and kids that happened to be in the play, band, dance class, drill, piano recital and I have learned something about my family. We are all picture hoarders!

I uploaded to pages for my siblings, to my extended family, I have pages for all the dances my kids attended as I took most of the pictures for the event. I have pictures of people I don't know! I have deleted so many pictures that my children weren't even in. I took the pictures because I know how those kids feel when there is no parent there for them. I can't tell you how many times children have come up to me at events and asked if I would take their picture for them as their parent didn't attend or didn't bring a camera.

I know I have also over compensated with my girls as their father isn't involved so I had to be at everything as I never wanted them to feel they weren't being supported. I was always front and center with two cameras, one for video and one for pictures.

The other issue I have, is that being a busy mom, sometimes I would download part of the sd card to create some space and then use it and then forget I downloaded parts and redownload them so I found the same files in several places and the older the files, the more copies there were due to the issues I had with the computer viruses and having old computers, I would copy any files onto the back up and then there are the back up on each computer with the same files carried forward for years and so I had to sort sometimes through three or four copies of the same pictures.

This project is taking forever and I am not even close to being done as I haven't started on the family history scans, my kids scans, or the 15 sd cards that need to be downloaded and organized.

With all that said, I have found the most adorable pictures of the kids and am excited to have them in a format that is functional and usable and hope that after a few more lengthy days, I will have a wonderful library of pictures that will be a blessing to our family.

I hope that I have been a blessing to those I have uploaded pictures for in the past few days. It is funny but I could tell before uploading which friends would be annoyed and pick apart the photos and the ones hat would be extremely grateful for even just one or two pictures of their children.

I think I have more pictures of some of my children's friends than their own parents do. There are two close friends to one of my girls whose mothers never went to any of their activities and my daughter was in almost every activity with their child from preK to graduation. I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures of their children but I understand that pictures are not everyone's thing. But, whenever I took the camera out, that child would be front and center for the pictures and more than once I had to kindly tell the child that I wanted pictures of everyone and if they kept stepping in front of other children, I wouldn't be taking any more pictures. Over time they learned to share the spotlight as they knew I would take pictures of them as I always did.

Looking at these first digital pictures of my children, I am sad that I didn't invest in a good digital camera back then. The camera that took these was borrowed and I really love the quality of the pictures as the digital we used before I won my Lumix wasn't the best. I learned that a quality camera really makes a difference in the pictures and lighting.

I am still searching for a new camera and am debating between a high end phone with a good camera or another high end camera. I need to decide soon as mine is really on its last leg.

Hopefully I will have more to share soon, but this is taking up way more time than I anticipated. I have gotten some grateful responses to my uploading from most so it makes it worth it. I can share that I am so glad my children are grown and I won't be taking any more pictures of other peoples children. lol

Have a BLESSED Day!