My whife has similar issues with her photos. She has hundreds of thousands. She takes thirty photos of everything “so she can get the right shot,” but can never find the time to sort through them. She keeps running out of space on her phone’s msd card, and just getting a new one and putting the old one away. She six terrabites of mostly photos on my desktop (I gave hear a hard drive in it so she could use it for Photoshop) and none of it is organized.

    I can only give you the same advice I give her: you need to curate, and that means you need a system. A good system/protocol/routine should allow you to keep your data sorted and organized, and I strongly suspect that once you know exactly what you have and where it is, you’ll feel a lot better.

    If your concern is storage, if you are not consciously data hoarding (in other words, you’re not going out and looking for entire runs of magazines, TV shows etc.); a good curation system will ensure that while yes, your data collection may continue to grow consistently, I doubt very much that it will grow at a rate that makes it unfeasible to manage.

    If I might make a suggestion to begin with: /r/datacurator

Powerline in general is a bad idea

    It makes me happy to look at my collection. Even if I’m not opening the files, just seeing a folder full of thumbnails of every issue of Nintendo Power magazine, or that dream collection of old console game ROM, brings out that eight year old whose family could afford to get me two NES games a year - one on Christmas, one on my Birthday, and that was a HUGE deal for me. It gives me this little spike of dopamine just see it and remind myself it’s there. It’s mine. It’s a collection. I get a thrill from collecting it.

    A lot of people, they sit in front of a screen, they scroll Facebook, they seem gossipy bullshit about vapid celebrities, the same generic, memey “riding the wave of trends so you’ll like me” reels made by people who will be end up the subject of some drama YouTuber’s expose in a few years, and of course the ever-important “here’s your super toxic thing of the day, make sure to get as furious as possible at this, while we go ruin people’s lives for participting it, and then for agreeing with it, and then for disagreeing with it, but not loudly enough” shit that twists them into knots and re-affirms on a daily basis that the world is a horrible place and everything is bad and they should be fucking miserable.

    I sit in front of a screen and catalog and sort all the wonderful things that make me feel excited. So maybe no one else will ever see it. Maybe I’m not impressing anyone else. Who cares? We need to stop basing our valuations of things on whether or not it gets us attention or appreciation from others. This stuff makes me happy. That’s enough.