On February 27, 2000 I purchased my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 950. This camera had a large for the time 2.1 mp sensor and cost around $2,000. I think the small memory card was around $600. While the quality wasn’t amazing the camera did allow for being able to deliver images quickly and served me well for a couple years until reasonably priced DSLR’s came out.
What this meant for cataloging is that for the first time all of my images were accurately time and date stamped…. and sortable.
The past few weeks I’ve been consolidating the bulk of my still images onto three 8 terrabyte hard drives. While this seems like a lot of drive space one has to remember that even the Nikon D800 raw files that I have been shooting for years are approximately 75mp and my new Nikon Z7II images are around 85mp. It does add up, approximately 14.5 TB at this point.
I catalog my images with Photo Mechanic Plus and presently have about 20 catalogs containing between 2,260 photos and 83,213 photos. The total number of images cataloged at this point is approximately 400,000 but will likely grow to about 500,000 by the time I’m finished. That works out to approximately 1,370 photos shot every day for 365 days. Pretty crazy but hopefully there will be a few good ones hidden away!
Additionally I have perhaps 100,000 film images shot between about 1970 and 2000. Some of these have exact dates… maybe 10,000, images of live music, sporting events and maybe even weddings. Most are manually cataloged with the month and year only in a progressive manner. Back then a roll of film might have been shot over a period of a few weeks. Close but not exact. The images with exact dates, they are fair game.
Years ago I did a “Photo of the Day” on my blog and attempted to shoot and publish at least 1 new photo every day. Of course the motivation then was to get out almost every day and do photography. Easier said than done if you have a busy life but it did get me out shooting more often.
I’ve decided to try a different twist on the “Photo of the Day” concept this time. Take a journey back through history, one day at a time.
My plan is to search the database for each particular day and grab an image from whatever turns up. Hopefully it will be a good image but…. there might be the odd day. Now I’m sure some days will have perhaps 3,000 images when I search my catalogs while other days might have 10 or even perhaps 0! If I get 0 results? I had better get out and shoot!
Here’s the database query I just used on May 16 as an example. This result presently displays 1,618 photos shot between May 16, 2000 and May 16, 2020. When I go to “tagged” images (those that have been used or processed) I’m down to 37. It’s an interesting mix of a professional rodeo, a family on their boat and the inside of a Smiths speedometer! What a choice!
Stay tuned, the fun begins.
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