I didn’t realize it until I went to organize them, but over the past 5 years I’ve taken north of 15,000 photos, over 19G, with one of two digital cameras. The first was a Canon A70 and the second a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I’m a big fan of both of them, but gave the A70 to my mom a couple years ago. There have been many times when I’ve wanted another small/casual camera so I’m no in the market to replace it, but haven’t settled on anything yet. 15k is a lot, but I’m actually missing a few hundred based on some scripts I wrote to help find and eliminate duplicates. I now have a system for originals in place so that won’t be necessary in the future.

With that many pictures it was bordering on impossible to find what i was looking for. I’m not a Mac guy so iPhoto wasn’t an option, but there is a Linux equivalent, f-spot. I’d tried it in the past but found it to be extremely flaky/crashy when I tried to get it to deal with that many pics, but not anymore. It seems to cope with them rather well, I haven’t had a single crash in the couple of weeks of hour here and there working with them. I don’t have an exact figure, but I’ve probably spent altogether 20 or so hours tagging the photos in f-spot and that effort has paid off. It’s not perfect or a detailed as I would like, but I now have everyone and roughly everywhere/everything tagged in photos so I can jump straight (or at least close) to what I’m looking for. f-spot also has a nice time line bar that comes in handy when you know when something happened. Basically I’ve gone from having pictures of lots of things, but not way to find them, to being able to relatively quickly jump right to whatever I was looking for.

So the 20 hours is pretty ridiculous, but with any other process I’d seen it would of been 10x or 100x that (short of probably iPhoto which f-spot is likely modeled after.) 20 hours I could live with, but 200 or more I just wouldn’t of bothered, like I haven’t over the past several years. The good news is now that I have the bulk of my photos in and tagged adding new sets in will be a quick and painless process so maintaining the tags going forward will be painless.

One unexpected result of going over all of my photos was being reminded of all the places, times, and people they’re of. That was probably the best part. Surprisingly there aren’t any pictures that I don’t remember taking (or remember someone else taking.) Even so there were a lot of places, people, and events that hadn’t entered my conscious mind in quite a while. It was nice to get a pictorial reminder.