Pictures, pictures and more pictures. When I was a kid my mother used to take tons of pictures of my brothers and me. This weekend my mother dragged out the many photo albums in her collection. Surprisingly it didn’t take very long to flip through them, which of course included us making fun of one another.

Back in the days of film and printed pictures people had a bit more discretion when taking snapshots. We had to be careful what we took pictures of back then. Film was fairly expensive and we had to pay a fee per print to have them turned into actual photographs. When the pictures were finally returned, many of them were culled out because they were simply bad.

Digital pictures and movies are a different story. Rather than scrutinize a shot at the risk of wasting money, many of us snap dozens of pictures hoping for the perfect shot. Hundreds of pictures of the same subject matter later, we end up with a picture or movie that is exemplary. The problem is we never delete all the other imperfect shots.

I’m hypothesizing the more pictures and videos we take now, the less time we’ll have to look at them when we get older. If I take 4,000 hours of videos over the course of my lifetime, by the time I finally have time to watch all that video it will take me about 170 days with no breaks. I’m not looking forward to that.

While I was running the idea for this week’s article by a friend, he told me he had calculated the movies stored on his computer would take three years to watch in their entirety. He admitted that he was addicted to taking videos of whatever he could and that most of the footage was garbage. He had so many hours of video he knew had to be deleted, but couldn’t commit the time.

When I heard his admission I started talking to others about their image and video collections. One of my relatives told me she has roughly 80GB of pictures alone. That’s roughly 80,000 pictures. Who has the time in their life to ever look through that many pictures, never mind sorting and deleting the bad ones?

Convenient cameras attached to smartphones combined with giant storage drives are the real culprit. Having a camera attached to our hips 24/7 makes taking pictures relatively easy. Infinite hard drive and cloud storage compounds our ability to hoard useless pictures and videos. I’ll admit to having hundreds of selfies on my phone that I’ll never look at again.

I’m sitting back down to the computer after feeling guilty about the last sentence so I took a look at my own stash of useless pictures. My 64GB phone is almost full of pictures and videos I’ll never look at again and my storage drive has almost 200,000 pictures. I’m guilty of syncing my phone to my computer and relocating garbage I’ll never look at again to my storage drive.

We view pictures and videos as memories we can relish later. Unfortunately not too many of us actually take the time to relive memories through our shots. In years past it was easy to flip through a collection of cherished pictures sorted in brag or scrap books. With the advent of digital pictures we’re forced to gather around a computer screen and sort through a hodgepodge of junk until we find an image we like.

(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner.  You can read past articles at www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)