Update: Monday 5:15 pm. Contest is closed. Congrats to our winners: Derek, Christa, G, Doran and P.J.
I have so many photos on my computer, sorting them has become an insurmountable task. The thought of going through and deleting the duds is one thing, but naming the best ones and putting them into folders is going to take me forever. How did I let myself get this way? 
I’m taking more photos than ever before, but I’m hardly printing out any. I don’t have a printer at home, and I go to photo kiosks or photo finishing places only two or three times a year. Next week on Spark, we’re going to look at some new nifty printing gadgets, and we’d like know if you’re buried under a pile of digital photos too.
Tell us exactly how many photos are on your computer right now and we’ll enter your name into our draw. Post your number in the comments section and we’ll give away 5 Spark bags next Monday at 5pm.
original photo by emdot
I have 4576 photos in my iPhoto library right now. Grows daily.
I have 2813 photos on my computer right now. At the beginning of November I removed all of my photos to a hard drive to make more room. Then I had over 10,000!
Apparently i have some 12,619 photos, but i have them in folders too, so take them out, and some more junk. That should be around 12,400 photos dating back to 2002.
~/Pictures $ find . -name ‘*.[Jj][Pp][Gg]‘ -print | wc -l
4637
But, I’m also scanning a friends photo album, so that she can have an electronic version of the album. Add another 360 photos to that count, if you want.
I have over 90,000 photos on my computer (and on a backup usb drive!). And these are the “keepers”. I probably delete about 35% of the photos I actually take. I’ve been taking digital photos for 9 years, so that’s not excessive. These days, I snap about 20,0000 photos per year. Am I hopelessly buried in photos? Nope….well, not until recently. I used to be really good at editing, triaging, and selecting my favourites and printing them on a monthly basis. I appear to have either become too busy or not as obsessed with regularly tidying up and organizing. Going back a year and dealing with thousands of photos is admittedly, a bit of a turn-off. In the last year though I have done a few batches of fave photos and big enlargements for the house/cottage. The absolutely amazing thrill of unlimited photos is still there for me. An incredible opportunity for experimentation, learning and photo fun.
I am a victim of the new/small/cheap point-and-shoot cameras of the 70s. Lots of extremely fuzzy photos of me and family. Thanks Kodak. I fear this kind of tragedy is going to repeat itself. I cringe to think of folks who will lose years of their life memories because they don’t print, don’t make backups and aren’t really sure where their huge collection of photos sits on their computer (my documents/photos/@#$@%#@$). One day they’ll just vanish. Kinda sad. Never have so many photos been taken by so many people but because they’re digital…..they could all disappear (finger snaps) just like that.
No record breaker here…
Only 3360 in 122 folders… all indexed using something called ACDSee Photomanager. A lot of fun…adding tags (who, where, what). And this was supposed to be recreation???
Just did a check and I have 1,179 pictures, quite possibly a few more. They’ve only been around since December 2005, when I got my digital camera.
I wonder, has the ability to instantly edit/delete your digital photos removed some of the mystique from photography? No longer do you have to wait until the film roll is finished before you know what the picture is like, and no longer do you have a limited number of shots available. Do we take less care in setup, knowing we can redo at will?
I have 1,918 photos on my computer.
@Dan Mansfield: While I’m sure some people have that sentiment, I wouldn’t ascribe it to everyone who has made the transition from traditional photography to digital media. Part of the purpose of photography is to capture moments. You can redo poses or landscapes, but candid moments are fleeting, and its your speed and skill with _any_ camera that’s the factor, not what sort of camera one has on hand.
The “point-and-click” mentality that makes digital cameras so useful belies the difficulty behind the composition of a particular shot. Just take a look at the vast array of tools available to professional photographers for use with digital cameras to get the perfect white balance or focus or whatnot (I’m not a professional photographer–I just point and click!).
For me, the “mystique” of photography is what lies behind the photo, the thought and attention to detail that goes into deliberately taking a photo. Are people more free with what they photograph, now that they have virtually unlimited space? Sure. But even a split-second decision to photograph something implies a conscious judgement on the part of the photographer, a statement: “I thought this was cool enough to preserve and share.”
14,994…looking forward to Apple’s new version of iPhoto to help me catalog them using face recognition. So far, they are only sorted by date (event).
I have somewhere around 85,000 photos on my computer. The majority of them came from a project that I did last year to take 100 photos a day for one year. So from January 1, 2008 to December 31 2008 I took at least 100 pictures everyday. The tag line, “What does a life look like in 100 photos a day?”
My flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoyojoe/collections), currently sits around 41,600 – trying to test the limits of unlimited storage.
Last year’s photos are all stored in daily and monthly folders and also put up on flickr, just in case.
8,289 in My Pictures folder.
I have 4125 photos on my Mac. I thought that was too much, until I looked at the other comments!
I’ve categorized them for easy access. I never seem to get around to print them off, though. Many of them are of National Geo – quality. (I think, anyway.) As an Artist, budding photographer and ‘world explorer’, I hope to enlarge them to poster size and market them for my future fundraising endeavors.
Thoughts of suddenly ‘losing’ all my photos are fleeting. After all, I have a Mac, right?
I have 2,326. From three digital cameras and four camera phones. I rarely do anything with file names. However, I use metadata a fair bit and use Windows Vista’s search feature to find most pictures I want or need at any given time.
3,042 digital and scanned photos. My “old” paper photos were being left out, so I scanned them to hang with the cool kids.
iPhoto reports 6995 photos, but I have more that I haven’t edited and added to the database.
Like you, Nora, I find the task of organizing all the pictures nearly impossible, but printing them using the book feature of the software is a great way to make some good-looking order out of the chaos.
2300 – but i have hundreds I haven’t moved over to this computer. It’s a herculean task that I can’t bear, yet I keep taking them.
Picasa
I have 14, 376 photos!
Holy CATS!
I have 1214. But I would have had many more if not for “Stamp” a lovely bit of freeware that batch renames files with a date and time stamp (as well as any other options you wish.
http://www.klingebiel.com/tempest/hd/stamp.php4
I don’t know how many duplicate photos this has discovered and allowed me to delete without worrying if this was the only copy of a file.
7093 pictures in 122 folders, most organized, but not named. I used to keep them nicely named, but I’ve gotten lazy. There’s a correlation between number of pictures and level of organization.
Heh. I did a search on my macbook, and it said “more than 10k” rather than giving me the number.
I forced it to count, and it looks like I’ve got 11,259 photos with me right now. That’s just since May 2008 — the rest are stored at home. Only 361 photos so far this year, though.
I am obviously more than a bit of an amateur photographer, but one of the reasons I have so many is that my boyfriend and I live on opposite sides of the continent right now, so our cameras are one of the ways we communicate our worlds to each other.
I recently archived 10 CD’s full of photos off my hard drive. My current total in iphoto is 1296. Because with a digital camera it is too easy to snap too many picturers of everything, I try to keep only the best. My level of photo organization is reduced to month and year the photos were taken. It makes for a lot of enjoyable browsing when you need a specific picture from the past.
Does my iPhone count?
287 photos in my camera roll presently. A lot were removed and placed on my hard drive at home or on Flickr.
I don’t have any photos on my hard-drive. They are all stored somewhere in cyberspace either in flickr or facebook or in friend’s cyber photo accounts.
I have 8439 on my mac. I started adding after we bought our first digital camera 2 weeks before our daughter was born in 2005. I have tried to delete the dud’s and repeats but it’s so hard to delete a picture of my kids
I’ve been taking digital photos with my own camera since 2005. I’ve also scanned many family photographs, learned photo restoration and created personalized cards and collages and a web page.
And of course, I do take a lot of photographs. My biggest problem with digital photography is that the camera doesn’t take the picture when I press the shutter. In order compensate for that, I am virtually always shooting in “continuous” mode. Which means a lot of after-the-fact winnowing.
There is a lot to photograph in my world. I come from a large family and have amazing offspring and a seriously cute dog. We have a lot of great wildlife to photograph as well. My current camera’s 8 gigabyte memory card will take more than 2,000 photographs of the best quality.
Naturally I have had serious trouble trying to organize my image files since Windows often decides I’m not allowed to copy, move or delete material. So a huge problem I have is duplication. (In some cases quadruplication.) Certainly some of my graphics files are duplication, and some are scanned graphics or documents.
Additionally I probably have a couple of hundred back-up CDs, but they are almost as hopelessly disorganized as my hard drives. I haven’t had much luck with DVD backup programs; now that they have come down in price portable hard drives are definitely the way to go for back-up. I am working really hard to get organized. I will definitely check out that “Stamp” program tog89 mentioned.
You want to talk “insurmountable task”? Currently on my computer I have 284,526 jpg files, and 21,451 psd files.
As of this writing, I currently have 1150 photos (according to F-Spot running under Ubuntu 8.10), with a few thousand photos yet to be scanned taken since 1977!
Yes, I was only ten years old when I was introduced to the hobby of photography at Camp Tecumseh near Delphi, IN.
My first photograph was a black and white taken in front of the cabin where I stayed . That is one of the 1150 images now on the desktop.
I found 69,726 photos on the computer. That includes my photos since 2002 and my wife’s since 2005.
I have 2457 photos on this machine 95% taken in the last 14 months as I travel the US.
… wow.. i never kept track.. but.. checked it out and found out that i have 6,659…
since 2004… but.. i:ve had 3 computers shifting the photos from one to the other .. and now to this one..
and they are all safely back up on HD…
love spark
I have 96 photos.
I have 7,603 photos stored in folders sorted by date and location/subject.
My mum bought a new computer and she gave me the old one. Later, I bought a new computer and installed her HD as a second or back-up HD in my computer. I have dozens of photo files going back many years of family and friends.
After two computer crashes due to malicious viruses, I still retain my photos on the 2nd HD.
It’s not hard to do, and I have several other HD sitting in a drawer not being used.
Worse! I have 200 of my brother’s photos on my laptop. Somehow,it became his holding zone. We got him an icybox!
I presently have 1047 photos on my computer. If I were to count the ones deleted it would be closer to 5000. The present images have all been prepared for reproduction and printing.
I have 21,609 pictures taken over a 5 year period.
I had a digital point-and-shoot to Rome for school where I had taken 7,000 from that trip alone. Now with my new DSLR, I’m sure to that number will exponentially grow rapidly.
Picasa3, by Google, is the only way I can keep track of all this information. Highly recommended, although I wish it had a stronger publishing component like iPhoto, where you can design your own photo book.
There are 8962 images in iPhoto on this computer, but that’s only photos from 2007, 2008, and this year — the rest are archived on another machine. My Flickr account has 11,555 photos in it (including the one that Spark used for my appearance on the show last year — http://www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2008/04/full_interview_derek_k_miller_1.html).
.jpg= 23,371
.jpeg=204
.png=1704
.bmp=102
total=25,381 but that doesn’t include thousands already moved onto storage devices.
Why do I have all these things on my computer?
Hey! I won! Thanks — apparently I get a Spark bag, which I will treasure like a delicate flower pressed between the pages of my diary.
Okay, I’ll probably actually just chuck some stuff in it. But thanks anyway.