Too many photos

I am overwhelmed with all the pictures that I have taken. My phone declared itself 'full' last week and asked politely if I would like to store my photos on the memory card. That sounded easy, so I said yes and carrried on snapping. This means that I have 220 photos stored on my camera. Many are poor, blurry shots; or trivial pictures taken to illustrate something on this blog: a jug, say, or my kitchen timer. It's the same in my e-mail address book which is full, not only of the addresses of people I don't know (a result of receiving circular e-mails?), but also multiple copies of every address, an artefact of the change of computer a few months ago.

I am aware that I need to give both electronic items a clean-out but I find the idea a little scary. At the back of my mind a voice whispers, "Suppose you lose something vital and never, ever, get it back?" The perfect photo, the only memory-jogger of a beautiful day, the address of a friend that I will irrevocably lose contact with if I fail to e-mail. And yet our ancestors, even ourselves only fifteen years ago, fared very well without so much electronic information. We took a few snaps on film, printed them off weeks, or even months, later, binned the dross and kept a handful. We wrote letters to or telephoned our friends and kept an address book.

What I want to do is go through all these photos, upload all the special ones to photobox and get prints, and then arrange them in the pages of an artistic scrapbook, or at least an album. I don't want my children to say, "Where are all the pictures of our childhood?" and to have to confess that they are stored as zeroes and ones on a hard-drive in a landfill somewhere. The thing is that the task is now so huge that I don't know where to start and when I find a period of free time, I don't feel like trying to climb this mountain.

Processing my thoughts is germinating an action plan, always a good thing!

1) I will sort out the 220 photos on my phone, deleting the rubbish and filing the good.

2) I will consult my albums to find out how old the children are in the last pictures I carefully mounted.

3) I will upload all the really good pictures that are worth keeping. I mean really worth keeping. While I want a pictoral record for myself and the children of our lives together, do any of us want to trawl through endless photos? No, just a few to illustrate and remind. I hope that our memories are full!

4) I will put some money aside next month to get them all printed, maybe in the little books that photobox do, especially as they are sometimes 3 for 2.
5) I will refer back to my action plan when I am feeling overwhelmed.

6) I will do a little at a time.

Sorted!
And here are the pictures from our Bank Holiday day out to the Tower of London. There's even one of me!