Attention Geeks: SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY!

Typically, I take a lot of photos during my various rail journeys. And, after some 25 years of train travel, I have literally thousands of them. The trouble is, they’re scattered all over the place within my computer. In all this time, I have never developed a system for storing my photos in an orderly manner.

For example, I’ve taken the Coast Starlight probably a dozen times and have probably taken a number of photos of the famous horseshoe curve near San Luis Obispo on every one of those trips. But if someone were to walk into my little office and ask to see one of those photos, it would probably take me ten minutes to find one. (Actually, it took me 12 minutes; I timed it.)

I know, I know … there are any number of programs to do that. I have iPhoto in my Mac and that would be one, I’m sure. But there are thousands of photos and I’d have to look at each one individually, figure out when and where it came from, decide if I want to keep it … Sorry, just too daunting.

Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve created a file for each trip and a file for each day, then downloaded photos into that file at the end of each day. That seems to work reasonably well.

The fundamental problem is that my brain still does not find much of anything about these apps and programs to be intuitive. In fact, it seems to me that everything is far more complicated than it needs to be. Just because the computer can do something, doesn’t mean it should be an option.

The geeks keep on tinkering with this stuff and it doesn’t get any better, it just gets more complicated. 

End of rant.