I recently got a notice from Google saying that I’m approaching the limit of my free allotment of gigabyte storage. I would now need to start paying a paltry sum to house all my photos, videos, and sketches. Nice try. Google first got me fifteen years ago, when I signed up for a gmail account, and noticed on the first page that the number of bytes for storage I was being given was an ever increasing amount. I would just see the bytes climbing. I imagined I was growing rich along with this digital data company, only I was growing rich in memories rather than dollars. Or so I thought. As a writer, I imagined taking photos in order to write about them later. But what was it I was keeping? And how had I profited off of it so far?
If you are like me, you get caught up in photogenic moments and reach for that ubiquitous device, the smartphone, to capture in perfect quality the immediate happening for posterity. Only in looking back you realize you have ten images that capture the same thing as one photo. And that one image is your 37th birthday, the one where they darkened the lights so you could blow candles. You turned off the flash to capture the magic of flickering candles, but then all you have is candle smoke, blurred faces smiling, and hands clapping the making of a wish. You don’t actually know who is there until the next photo has the lights back on again, and there are half a dozen people you no longer talk to. You had only known them at that one job you worked at for a year before transferring out of the department, or moved across the country for a better job.
I have decided to take a look back at my life in Google photos and trash what I can. To be sure, there needs to be a method, not a goal. Goals are great, but as James Clear says in Atomic Habits: “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” In my case, I wanted to delete so much of what has turned out to be a remembrance of the wrong things. I wanted to become curator of moments that say something to future selves, not necessarily kept for my child’s child, but kept for readers within my lifetime. And truth be told, who will even see these once I die with my photos locked behind passwords and two-step verifications?
Steps to reclaiming old gigs.
1. Start with the biggest culprits: video recordings. I have recorded golf swings for immediate review. I have recorded the hypnotic waves crashing into the white wake of the ferry taking me from Osaka to Kyushu. I have taken videos of cool feats and tricks that fail to materialize. I have taken videos of entrances to parties, scanning the crowd thinking “this will make so many people jealous to see I’m at this party and they are not” and then never shown this to anyone. Instagram has moved to video stories that show life in motion, but not for posterity. For this reason, we are taking more videos and using up more gigs, but for something fleeting, envy-creating, but very little in the way of value beyond beautiful momentary distraction. For this reason, I delete videos that are either zero to 4 seconds long, or videos beyond 2 minutes that are just of life unfolding. I’m sure there is something beautifully hypnotic about revisiting these moments, but I’m also sure that if I haven’t sat down to do so in the last TEN YEARS, that I no longer need to overthink keeping it. Goodbye!
2. Everyday I’m doubling: Doubles, so easy to find. Sometimes they get added from two different sources, typically when backing up my photos from iPhone or iPad to google photos. These are easy to trash. Keep fifty percent, or even less if you have doubles of blurred friends under sakura trees.
3. Blur’s “Song 2”: Woo-hoo! I can’t make out what you are. Goodbye!
4. You now have 5 minutes. I have a g-shock watch with a stop-watch and countdown timer. I usually keep the countdown timer set to five minutes. I use this in classes when I give students a warm-up activity that I want to get done before my lesson. I also time breathing exercises when I need to focus my breathing and do away with stressful thoughts long enough for me to think clearly about how to tackle the problem. In this case, I try and trash as many photos as I can scroll through. I am not worried about deleting rare keepsake moments. By this point I have found most keepsake moments have twenty shots on either side of them that say the exact same thing. I really don’t need to keep the dozens of birthday photos trying to capture the moment of surprise when the subject’s expression changes from “what is this?” to “Oh my god, you guys! I can’t believe you knew I wanted this!”
That’s it. Four steps. I’ll be done sooner than I think if I tackle something in smaller, focused, five-minute culls than if I were to think about blocking a day to forgetting a past I already can’t remember.