So Many Pictures

Last February, I got a new Macbook Air and passed my old Macbook Pro onto the kids. I had a few years worth of pictures in iPhoto on the old compter, which I assumed were all stored on the cloud.

Breathe…this is not a story about me losing thousands of pictures. Are you good now? Ok…let’s proceed.

When I set up my new computer, none of the pictures showed up and I wasn’t very motivated to sort it out at the time…or for months. This meant that every time I wanted an older picture I had to wrangle the computer away from Zeca, find the pic, upload it to my Google drive, and then download it onto my other computer. It was tedious, so, I pretended those photos didn’t exist for the most part.

Then, last week when I was supposed to be doing any one of the 27 things on my To Do list, I thought, "Ya know…I’m going to sort out that picture situation.” I got the old computer and looked at the iPhoto settings and sure enough - I hadn’t selected iCloud sharing which is why none of those photos were available on my other computer. An easy fix!

What did not occur to me at the time was that there were thousands of photos on that old computer - thousands of high quality photos and videos. Let me tell you…it takes a long time for thousands of photos to make their way around - and make their way around, they did. Eventually, I had 17,000+ photos on my new computer but we also had them on our phones which was a bit more problematic because we couldn’t take new pictures. Plus, our cloud had only enough room to store a file the size of a fortune cookie fortune which might have said something like, “You should have focused on your To Do list.”

I couldn’t deal with the cloud situation for a couple of days and when I finally had a moment, I decided that I would just export all the photos to my Mac. This would clear the cloud and our phones and I’d have the pictures where I wanted them all along anyway. Long story short - my Mac got low on storage. Luisa then suggested I put them on our external hard drive but I explained that it was already full of the pictures from the kids early years. For the first time in 15 years, I wished I just had all my pictures in photo albums.

Fortunately, cyber Monday arrived just in time to save me from myself. We got a gigantic new hard drive and I’ll be moving the pictures there…as soon as I should be doing something else. For now, I’m glad I have easy access to them again. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have run across this:

Portugal - 2011