Too many photos

I’m drowning in photos!

Today I spent 2 plus hours just looking for a particular photo that I want as background material for a blip. I think it was before christmas Dec. 1998. I have a whole cabinet of file boxes of photos from around 1991-2001. Chronological. A big chunk of 1998 is missing. In my studio there are more boxes, I went thru everything. it’s not there. It’s very distressing.
Then there are the boxes and boxes of carousels of slides from before that in our (damp) storeroom ---back to 1963 (before that, b/w prints) for us and a bunch of our parents’ slides to go through as well. From 2001 it’s all digital. I might have been able to find it there.
There are albums too. But they really take up space so I stopped making trip albums. (And now we can make a small digital book of a trip!)

Our resolution is to go thru the slides at least and just save a few. But what to do with those? scan 5 at a time? take them out for someone else to scan? How to label them? (any one with some experience and a plan is encouraged to share it!)

Which brings me to the not new question. Why do we have all these photos? Memories? history? art? addiction? Of course today I had an opportunity to toss some - instead I picked out an irresistible few to give away or save out (hence this blip of the pile on my table..”watercolored”. to make it a tad abstract....) - and I put the rest of the boxes back on their shelves!

and I have an inkling of how hard this project is going to be........