tacos

The person who causes me more unnecessary work and aggravates me to no end, is that jerk, Past Me. Let me tell you how much he has complicated one of my current projects.

I got an Aura frame for Christmas. It's one of the best gifts I've ever received. It's an electronic picture frame to which my kids can add photos from an app on their phones. I get regular updates on what they are up to. Wonder Woman will sometimes just sit in our living room and watch the photos flow through, commenting on each one as we relive favorite memories. Don't judge me, but there are more than one computer screen also visible in our living room. I got the idea to have them scroll through our entire photo collection using either a screen save or one of several apps. I would rather not curate a collection for it to use, so I just set it to shuffle our library.

Wonder Woman is always doing favors for future Wonder Woman. One of the things she does id quickly delete any non-keepsake photos or memes that end up in her photo library. There is no version of Lou that can be bothered to do this regularly. As anyone in IT can tell you, there are certain types of photos that populate our photo collections. The usable life span for these images is about five minutes, just long enough to get back to a computer and enter information from the photo into some sort of tracking system or management console. These images include:

  • Photos of various serial numbers we need when making warranty support phone calls
  • Lots of pictures of IP addresses as reported by computers, printers, switches, and the like
  • Bar code stickers with asset information for the organization we work for

As a 21st century citizen active on the Internet, I also find it pleasurable to find and share memes that are funny and though provoking. I've done this thousands of times. I know this because I have thousands of undeleted meme in my photo collection. The mad girlfriend meme is represented no less than 22 times in different versions. As humorous as this is, it's not something I want to show up while I am trying to enjoy photos from old trips or my family.

I'm also one of those people who take pictures of my food. It doesn't have to be remarkable or beautiful food either. It's just a way to tag my location when I go out to eat. I have so many damn pictures of fried eggs sitting on top of SOS on toast. I could make an entire album out of just taco pictures. Haha, funny, except Wonder Woman doesn't think so when they scroll past her.

The other categories of strange photos, of which I have way too may, include random shots I took at particular venues to geotag a location for later use. There are also many images from the grocery store that I took, so Wonder Woman could give me the assurance that I was purchasing the correct product. A life-long bad habit of mine is writing down phone numbers but not recording who the number belongs to. I compound this by taking a picture of the naked number and leaving it in my collection. I have dozens of sticky note photos to demonstrate this.

AI is getting better at identifying objects in photos, but it is not good enough to quickly find ALL of anything, especially in large collections like mine. No matte how many times I scan my photos for pictures of bar codes or grocery carts, there are always remnants still lurking about. If I were a smarter man, Present ME would start doing future Me the favor of regularly culling this stuff from my phone. The problem is that Present Me is too busy cleaning up after past me to have the energy or motivation to worry about Future Me, mostly because without any evidence, I tend to think that gentleman will have unlimited time and resources. He is wonderful!

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇