Fourteen years in twelve terabytes

I stopped counting at seven hundred and forty one thousand files. Twelve terabytes, fourteen years of work, and the suspicion that at some point it had stopped being an archive without telling me.

It wasn't carelessness, it was accumulation. Every delivered project became a folder, every folder got a name that made sense that week, every new drive became a copy of the last one for safety. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to scramble fourteen years. You just keep working, and the disorder is the trail it leaves.

What forced me to face it was one specific image that took me almost an hour to find. An hour looking for a photo of mine, in my own archive, shot by me. An archive you cannot move through has stopped being an archive. It is a storage unit.

The rule I set myself was uncomfortable: nothing gets deleted until everything is in the right place. The temptation runs the other way. You see the same session repeated in three places and you want to clean. Except that while it is a mess you don't know which of the three has the final retouch. Deleting before organizing is a bet, and I have lost things that way.

What I didn't expect was what turned up along the way. My grandmother, in photos I had forgotten existed. Sessions that never made it into a portfolio because at the time I thought they weren't ready, and today they sit among the best things I have done. A 2013 job better than I remembered, and a 2016 one worse than I had been selling.

In the end the archive did not get smaller. It got crossable. And organizing fourteen years did not make me more productive, it made me more honest.

The archive is the memory of the craft. If it becomes a storage unit, so does the craft.