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Comment by splittingTimes | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the data retention policy of OP is the real problem. Sound like a data hoarder/virtual messy to me.

When ever I take pictures on a trip or vacation, i go through them at the end of each day, delete most of them and keep maybe 2 or 3 max, beautify them and the rest goes into the bin. No matter how long the trip, i try to only keep at max the 15 best Pictures. All filler no killer. That way I am comfortable to show others pictures of a trip without boring them and I also like to look at them from time to time as I know those are the best moments.

At the end of each year we create a calendar with photo collages of 4 to 6 pictures per month. The calendar goes to relatives and we create a photo book from the print outs. That is what gets archived.

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> Maybe the data retention policy of OP is the real problem.

This... this is a truly universal first-world problem. The average person did not need data retention policies until the past decade or so, and now it feels like I need a retention policy for literally every physical or digital object that enters the premises just to maintain my sanity.

You never threw out bad photos when you out them in a photo album? Seems like I’ve always faced the same data retention problem with photos, but it’s a lot easier to ignore it now and just keep them all.

With a roll of film people often tried to just take 1 or 2 photos of something. Now it's easy to take like 30 photos of some interesting thing happening. Then later how do you decide to delete 29 of them? What if a few of them captured some interesting thing you didn't expect, or if different things are accidentally in focus. It's maddening.

I am not a data hoarder, but I do know that the entropic cost comes with deleting not creating data. So if I take 15 shutter clicks to get the picture where the dog is actually looking at the camera, the most I’ll do is favourite the good one, but it’s too much work to do anything about the others.

Photographers have their photo collection as their life's work and source of professional value. It's viewed very differently from a personal photo collection and serves a very different purpose. They may need to access these photos in the future for many different reasons, for new clients or projects, etc

God: So how interesting do you think your life was?

Adam: ~15TiB.

There's a ton of easy low-hanging fruit along these lines that could be improved. Good example: I have a python script that routinely scans my ~/downloads directory and quarantines anything more than 24 hours old. It then scans the quarantine directory and deletes anything more than a week old. If the data is important, I'll have 2 chances to save it someplace meaningful.

I use the downloads folder to store the interesting pieces. It is fascinating to jump back in time and see what you have came across.

Same. For example my downloads folder has near every major release version of Starsector, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio.

This may not be directly related to your workflow, but in macOS there's a preference to delete items that have been in Trash after 30 days. If you're more proactive about putting stuff in the Trash (and less proactive about emptying it), that (plus backups) gives a similar behavior. My wife doesn't ever empty her Trash and previously I had written a script that did it.

This is the way!

I recently got into film photography and the 36 pictures I get from the lab after a weekend or two make me so much more happier than 6 frames per second that my Fuji does.

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