A Digital Mess of a Man
Let me just start off by saying that my apartment normally looks okay. Could be tidier, could be way worse. My digital belongings, however, are a mess. I don't think they've ever been properly organized. It doesn't help that I'm a digital hoarder. My files include everything from a script I made for mIRC back in the early 2000s to chat logs, games, music, essays, old project files, videos, and pictures. So many pictures! My older stuff is at least organized by year, but my active hard drives are filled with folders named #Organize that are promptly being moved from machines to external drives. I'm deathly afraid that I'll accidentally delete something. Ironically, within this chaos of no backups, I'm far more likely to lose precious files.
I've become good at ignoring the problem, but now I'm on a mission to rid myself of all things Adobe. I'm teaching myself DaVinci Resolve to replace Premiere; the next step is to replace Lightroom with Capture One. Being the digitally lazy person I am, I've been relying on Adobe's cloud service for almost all my photos taken over the last seven years. I shoot exclusively in RAW, color grade in Lightroom, and export to JPEG to either send to friends or upload somewhere. Those JPEGs have a bad tendency to get lost in the chaos.
The thing about Lightroom is that it sucks, especially the online version. It will from time to time "forget" my color grade if I haven't opened the image in a long time. Meaning that if I can't find the JPEG, I have to re-color grade the photos I want to use. So annoying!
A part of me is saying, "Fuck it! Spending time on old files is just living in the past". But I like my past! I kinda like organizing too. It's just the insane amount of stuff I've accumulated over the years that puts me off. But now it's out there that I'm a digital mess, and I don't like that one bit. Shame, the best motivation after a near-death experience.
Coming in a few months: No Longer a Digital Mess of a Man.