Nightglow Window

My Friend Flickr

The digital age is a blessing and a curse. Everything is at your fingertips, easily sortable, imminently accessible. But if your hard drive craps out or a raging wildfire engulfs your home, you could lose everything.

When the recent wildfires rolled through San Diego, there was lots of talk about what you'd take if you only had five minutes to pack. I realized that my photos would be near the top of my list. And even though I have them backed up on an external hard drive, thinking about them began to make me nervous -- there's an awful lot to lose there.

So began my task: backup all my photos someplace where they won't get lost or destroyed. Soon the Flickr Uploader was toiling away in the background. Tonight, I'm pretty much done. Oh, there are a few more trips I want to get up, a few more files I want to make safe, but it's down to the dregs.

So what are we talking about? 200 photos? 500? 1,000? 2,000? You know me, if something is worth doing right then it's worth doing with overkill. The tally as it stands now is 15,347. That's fifteen thousand three hundred and forty-seven.
(Update: tally is now 16,752)

I went back and forth about whether to make them public or keep them private. Oh sure, this blog contains hundreds of images from the last 20 months. But it's the barest tip of a vast, sometimes interesting (oftentimes embarrassingly mundane) iceberg.

In the end, I decided to share them share most of them. Since there are far too many photos to seriously edit, I uploaded them all. You have the poorly lit, poorly exposed, poorly framed photos. You have unflattering photos, photos of hotel rooms and rental cars and meals.

I think there's also hundreds of pretty interesting shots as well, with maybe a few you'd call amazing. I've seen a lot in the last two years, and this task really brought that home. So check it out if you'd like. It's all there, now for the world to see at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightglowindow/sets/

p.s. view sets as "slideshow" or you really will go insane.