23,000 Pictures in 7 years?!?

The Revelation

Last week, among my new explorations of the computer world, I re-discovered cloud storage, i.e. online storage for files and information.  I knew it existed but it had never really occurred to me that it had any direct personal usage that could benefit me.  I had used it now and then for work only to share and work together at a distance over Google Docs and Dropbox.

Then, reading about it again last week, I thought, "Hey, I know a great use for this.  My wife has a hard disk where she saves her pictures.  Why don't I back this up for her in online/cloud storage in case anything ever happens to the external hard drive?"

Free Storage: Is 5 GB Enough?

So I did some research.  Google Drive offers 5 GB of free space.  So does Ubuntu One and a few others.  Well, I thought, I'm sure opening a couple of accounts in her name will easily cover all of them with space to spare.

So I started making tallies of the folders on the disk (which holds 1 TB or 1000 GB of memory), but is far, far from full.  I got up to 12 GB and started getting worried.

When I got to the end, it was 60 GB of memory in photos!

Help, I Need More Cloud Memory!

Needless to say, I had to find a different way to do this; I wasn't going to open 12 accounts just to get all her pictures up.  Fortunately, I found ADrive which offers 50 GB with it's free package.  This way, 2 accounts will do the trick.

The guilty photographer

How Many Pictures???

Besides looking for more cloud storage, I was curious about this huge number. So I did a quick calculation of photo files; 23,000 pictures!!

There must've been some mistake.  But no.  I looked a few folders, and it looked like the numbers were accurate.  In complete disbelief, I decided to do some further calculations:

• The pictures were taken over 7 years (Aug 2006 to present)
• That means she has taken an average of 3286 pictures per year.
• That's an average of 9 pictures per day!

That number doesn't include the many that she has lost or discarded.  I'd say it's easily at least double that, more like 20 per day.  Knowing my wife, that actually doesn't sound like a whole lot.

I've now told her she has a limit of 5 pictures a day, and of those she can only keep the best ones.

So far, she's paid no attention to my limit whatsoever, and I'm pretty sure I've counted well over 20 shots each day.

The Task Goes On ... and On

I think this was about 5 days ago.  Last I checked the uploads were about 15% done.  We have my recently revived mini constantly uploading. (It does a much better job of it than her fancy, new graphic-friendly HP, which kept freezing up the upload after about an hour.)

I think I have about 3 weeks of this work ahead of me.