Alright, let’s talk about this ‘2023 tigers’ thing. Sounds pretty wild. For me, 2023 wasn’t literally about facing down striped predators, thankfully. But it definitely felt like wrestling some kind of beast when I took on organizing my photo archives.
See, I’ve been snapping pictures for years. Digital photos, phone pics, scans of old prints… just mountains of files dumped onto hard drives. A complete mess. Finding anything was like digging through a landfill. So, start of 2023, I thought, right, this is the year I tame this digital jungle.
Getting Started
First step was just figuring out what I had. Plugged in about five different external drives. Some were old, barely spinning up. Heart-in-mouth moments, you know? Just copying everything onto one massive new drive took days. Seriously, just the copying felt like a huge task.
Then came the real fun: sorting. Folders named ‘New Folder’, ‘Photos_Backup_2’, ‘Misc Pics’… useless. Thousands of files with names like ‘IMG_*’. It was chaos.
The Process – More Like a Fight
I decided on a structure. Year, then Month, then maybe event folders inside the month. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Trying to figure out when some photos were actually taken… man. Sometimes the file data was right, sometimes totally wrong. Scanned photos had no date info at all. Had to eyeball dates based on who was in the picture, what clothes they wore, how old people looked. Felt like a detective.
I tried some software first. Those fancy photo organizers? Downloaded a few trials. They promised automatic sorting, face recognition, the works. Mostly they just crashed or made even more of a mess, creating weird duplicate databases. Wasted a good week or two on that path.
Back to Basics
So, I went manual. Tedious? You bet. Put on some music, grabbed a coffee, and just started dragging and dropping. Create folder ‘2010’. Create folder ‘2010-01’. Look through a pile of photos, guess the date, dump them in. Then move to the next pile.
- First pass: Just get stuff into rough year folders.
- Second pass: Try and get the month right.
- Third pass: Rename files based on date and maybe a brief description. Like ‘2010-01-15_Snow_*’.
It was slow going. Some evenings I’d just stare at the screen, feeling overwhelmed. Like those tigers were winning. But then I’d find an old photo I’d forgotten about, bring back a good memory, and it spurred me on a bit.
Where I Ended Up
End of 2023 rolled around. Did I finish? Not completely. There’s still a big ‘Unsorted’ folder that scares me a little. Probably got another few thousand pics hiding in there. But the main bulk? Yeah, it’s organized. I can actually find photos from specific years or trips now without wanting to tear my hair out.
It wasn’t a glorious victory, more like a hard-fought truce with the digital chaos. Those ‘2023 tigers’ were just thousands of JPEGs and chaotic folders for me. Taming them took patience, more manual work than I expected, and accepting that ‘good enough’ is sometimes better than perfect. Still, feels good to have wrestled that particular beast into some kind of shape.
