Cleaning the Memory Bank

Clear the digital waste, or store meaningful moments?

I take lots of photos. Too many. But I love the medium of photography, whether it’s an instantaneous or a carefully framed shot, if it captures a moment or an interesting image, I’m hooked.

But there is no doubt that my phone and laptop are full of many photos and videos that aren’t worth keeping. Mediocre pictures that don’t make the grade and only mean something to me and no one else.

And yet.

Even a not very good image from past travels, a photo from a place I have visited, or road travelled, makes me smile. Add in all the thousands of photos and films of friends and family, and it makes it very hard to choose which images to delete and which to keep. I want to preserve all those memories.

Of course there are Apps and programmes that can help. These can identify duplicate photos very quickly, they can highlight images that aren’t in focus and are too blurry. But when it comes to sorting through them after this initial step, it’s only me that has the memory bank to do so.

A member of my family suggested that I just type in one date only, (not the year) in the search button in my photo library and it would then bring up all photos from that date from over the years. “If you do this every day”, she said, “you will be able to clear thousands of photos”.

So I tried it and it works, sort of.

Only sort of, because seeing where I was one, five, even 10 years ago leads to too much reminiscing and not enough reorganising.

Today it’s the last day of August 2025 so I am now looking back at that same day over the years.

In 2014, there are several, not brilliant photos taken from a plane. I was obviously flying out of Geneva as you can see the Jet D’eau in the distance, but I am not sure where was I landing, London maybe?

In 2015 there are many photos of the famous Cow and Calf rocks in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, and lots of photos of the “Coutances Way” sign. This may seems weird, but there was method in my madness. Ilkley is twinned with Coutances in Normandy in France. I wanted to use an image of the sign in a little film that I was making about polyglots for Visions du Réel, a Swiss documentary film festival.

And also on the same day and year, there is a photo of a pretty house in Runswick Bay, a coastal village in North Yorkshire. There was obviously a bit of driving done that day.

On the 31st August 2017, I just have a short video of a dripping, overflowing dishwasher, I guess I filmed it to show a plumber. You don’t need to see it.

On August 31st 2018 - nothing.

On August 31st 2019, there’s a video of a paddle board race near Nyon on Lake Geneva, Now this is fun. Check out the competitors paddling up to get a glass of wine

The photo below from the 31st August 2020, shows a Montreux Jazz Festival poster being hung up on the wall in our house in Kendal. We had just moved to Cumbria. Moving during Covid times wasn’t the easiest move to make. But the poster reminds me of many great concerts.

And there’s also a photo of a well worn, well used recipe for Carrot and Orange soup.

On 31st August 2021 there’s a photo of mushrooms growing by the road near us in Kendal. They are there again this year.

Now that I have started this exercise I can see there are hundreds, nay, thousands of pictures that might be of interest for future Substack posts. I was never a press photographer as such, but was once part of an official press pack and along with writing, I took a fair few photos at rock festivals and events.

I can already see that there are some interesting photos coming up which were taken a few years in New Mexico, on the 1st September.

They all come with memories.

I think I’ll keep the lot.