Exponential Growth

Yesterday I copied all the photos we had taken over Christmas and New Year off the camera and onto the computer. Given the way I store the photos this meant that I created a new folder for 2011 and started to think about finishing the archiving of the 2010 photos onto DVD.

We bought our first digital camera back in June 2005 and since then have taken an awful lot of photos. For the first few years it was easy to archive the photos by simply burning them onto a single DVD, but given the growth in the number of photos we take archiving to DVD is becoming a time consuming process. So I decided to see just how many photos we have actually been taking over the years.

As we only bought the camera in June of 2005 I've had to extrapolate a little to get a number for the first year on the graph (we took 769 photos in 7 months which suggests 1318 photos in a year), but it is quite clear that we have taken a lot of photos and the growth in the number taken each year shows no sign of slowing down. The red trend line is the most worrying thing -- it's an exponential growth curve!

I suppose the growth can't continue on at this rate forever (there becomes a point where the time needed for the camera to actual take and record each photo becomes a limiting factor) but it won't be too long before the archiving becomes exceptionally time consuming -- it already requires 5 DVDs to archive the 2010 photos.

Of course as well as the archiving, sorting these photos is now becoming more difficult. Whilst I keep trips together in sensibly named folders there can still be hundreds of photos to sort through to find the one I remember taking. Ah well, I suppose I shouldn't be complaining at least I don't have to pay for film development -- just printing all the photos I took last year would cost me around £500 without the cost of the film and processing on top!