R is for Reminiscing

I've been staring at this picture frame for a few days now.  I got it as a graduation present a few years back and hung it on the wall with every intention of printing out the photos to place in it.  Well...you know what they say about the best intentions.  The frame is still hanging there with its fake graduates smiling at down at everyone, looking far to cheerful to be even remotely normal.

I decided to finally sit down, dig up those old photos, go get them printed, and do that frame some justice.  The thing I love about printed pictures is that I immediately file them away, in chronological order, to await that long list of scrap books that I'll never finish.  They're easy to locate because I know if I don't find them in box 1, I'll find them in box 2...and if not, they aren't printed.

Digital pictures on the other hand, though I love them to death, don't get the care and attention my print ones do.  They sit, half forgotten, on that memory stick until one day it's full.  Then they get downloaded to the computer and shuffled into newly created folders with vague names like "dad" and "summer '10".  There is sadly no rhyme or reason to their final destination other than what made perfect sense at the time. 

After nearly an entire day of going folder by folder, I had yet to run across my graduation pics.  Sad, but I was undaunted!  I could do this!  I decided perhaps I had shuffled them into some odd folder, so I got the bright idea to use the search function on my computer.  I did a search for all .jpg files, since all my pictures are .jpg.   Do you have any idea how many .jpg files a computer has?  I had over 32,000.  I'm not sure if that was all of them or my poor computer gave up.  And in case you're wondering how I could fit that many on my computer, I have an external hard drive I had hooked up to search as well.

I decided there had to be a better way...so I did a search for DSC in the file names, since that's what my camera labels every picture with.  This turned up 16,006 files.  Slightly more manageable.  After a half hour of looking through those, I still had not found them.  I'm a bit bummed to be honest. 

But with the sad there's a small bit of happy.  I spent a day looking though 7 years of family photos.  I saw 7 years of different haircuts and colors, fashion do 's and don't 's, and 7 years of my 8-years-old  nephew growing up.