Summer is the time for projects. My wife and I spend summers on Vancouver Island, and I have more time to do projects when the days are longer. For example, I lug an assortment of books to plow through and try to balance nonfiction books, mainly theological, with best sellers.
This summer, my large project is organizing my photos. Last year, my father gave me a box of old photo prints, primarily childhood pictures of me. He wrote on the back the date and occasion which greatly helps me as I historically organize the photos. I shipped the bags to an Arizona-based company that digitizes photo prints. In less than a month, the photos were returned along with a flash drive containing the electronic photos.
I uploaded the photos into my photo external drive, placed them into folders, and re-organized all my digitized photos into a consistent structure for easy retrieval. During the spring, I hired a professional photographer to come to my house to instruct me on developing a photo library. My vision was to create a system that would easily sort the photos in my photo library without me laboriously searching through all the folders.
The difficult part of the project is going photo by photo and labeling each with keywords: date (month/year), location (city/state/country), event (Christmas/Birthday/Running/etc.), and person(s). There are ways to speed up this process and it takes someone (me) who knows the people and events to tie each picture to keywords.
The other problem is the volume of pictures. I have both my own and my father’s photos. My father’s old photos were originally slides, the oldest being made with thin glass, starting in 1955 with the birth of his first child, my older brother. He digitized his slides over a decade ago and gave his children a DVD containing over 2,200 photos. My photos number in the thousands and begin in the 1970’s. I have traveled extensively and lived in Europe for almost ten years. Just looking at the sheer number of photos makes me weary.
How does one tackle such a big undertaking? I first focused on getting the basics done correctly, the macro-organizational decisions, then divided the project into smaller units. My first small unit was concentrating on the box of photos that I digitized, over 700 photos. I developed keywords and input the information on the back of each photo into my electronic library. I did one plastic bag a day and it took a week to finish. This created a consistent keyword system. I next tackled all the family pictures which are mainly of people. I am now finishing my father’s 2,200 slides by doing about 400 photos a day. My skills are improving as I am learning how to add keywords to groups of photos.
I made a few mistakes along the way. My biggest error was somehow deleting all the keywords under the Snodgrass Family folder. I did not properly back up my library file which resulted in adding names again on hundreds of photos. I now back up each day!
My photo project brought back so many memories. I viewed pictures of my parents in their twenties taking care of their young children. At the time of the photos, my mother was younger than my daughter’s current age. I carefully examined pictures of my father and grandfather when they were my current age and compared their facial features to my own. They looked old, and unfortunately, so do I. Seeing my own children as babies brought back so many emotions. I looked so young to be parenting a child.
The photos also brought back the sadness of family and friends who have died. The joy of our earthly life together was balanced by the grief still felt. One of my most poignant feelings, looking at some of the pictures, was of mistakes I made during life’s journey. Pictures can invoke memories that we would like to forget, and given the chance, make different decisions. Although I still make mistakes and sin, I have learned from my youthful mistakes. I try to be a better person today while carrying the scars of the past.
Scripture teaches the faithful that we worship a God who offers grace to all who profess their sins. We can’t eliminate past sins, but we can move forward reconciled by grace and live as God commands. The faithful get another chance and hopefully, history does not repeat itself.
When I read Apostle Paul’s letters, I see his struggles in believing that God granted him grace after he persecuted the early Christians. It took an encounter with the risen Jesus to reverse his sinful behaviors. After his conversion, Paul traveled through the ancient Greek world teaching Gentiles about Christianity. He preached about God’s grace to a pagan world. We can examine our past by viewing old photos, but God commands us to live in the present within the light of Christ which illuminates the eternal future.
