Photographic Memories

As I wrote before, Mr Google hijacked an entire evening by forcing me to sift through photos.

It was however an interesting exercise. I flipped through multiple folders, smiling at some memories, laughing out loud at others and cringing at some.

The years before we all had mobile cameras were so much better. I had one-tenth the numbers of photos to go through. And I am not even talking of roll cameras here-where each photo would be carefully composed before clicking, and people would decide what to click depending on how many clicks they had left on the roll.

We were much more trigger happy with the digital camera-but even those were thoughtfully clicked. 

I remember positioning my camera with the 10 second timer to click myself while travelling on my own. At the bottom of the hill, an old lady stopped to chat “Oh You are that girl who was clicking photos of herself!” 

I thought of that complete stranger from another country as I flipped through a few hundred selfies (no, not exaggerating) that the girls had dumped in the folders when they changed their phones. Selfies when they were dressed to go out, at their shabbiest, rolling eyes, sticking out tongues, making faces, sticking on snap-chat ears…phew. Those were supposed to be fun!

Of course I didn’t have the heart to delete them all, it just took a few hours to select and delete a whole lot of them. All road-trip shots of the sun and the sky, clouds, coconut trees, roadside tea stalls and temples just had to go. Deleting beaches and sunsets was tougher, but those of monuments was easy-we could always google them.

What I retained were the ones with people-the kids and their school days, stage shows, dance classes, birthday parties, fun outings and even the random ones clicked sitting in the lazy afternoon sun. I guess those are the moments that matter when we really need to choose.

Those and the travel photos. Google will make my do a further clean-up soon. I need to curate and save those memories before that!