Content is an integral element of my life because many of my interests revolve around digital creations. Rather than being a traditional artist, I express my creativity through photography, video editing, social media, and graphic design. I started taking photos when I was young because my mom’s favorite hobby was photography. She loved taking portraits and eventually that interest rubbed off on me. Video editing started similarly, as I used the app video star when I was younger and had a ton of fun creating music videos and adding effects. My interest in graphic design started later in life as I started thinking about potential careers. I liked video editing but graphic design felt more applicable. Finally, social media has always been an entertaining element of my life, but as I’ve used it more in my career it’s meaning has transformed.
Most of my content is digital. A few select photographs and art pieces transition to physical copies. However, it can be difficult to find the best homes for physical work. I tend to hang onto digital pieces longer. I use hard drives and USBs to store my work. Before getting my new laptop which has 1TB of storage, my old laptop only had about 132GB which was not always enough for my projects. I tend to organize by the content form (photographs, graphic design, academic work, etc.) and then organize it in groups. For instance, my academic work is sectioned off by class and then project.
I like keeping content that I am proud of or intend to look back on. I’m more likely to keep the final product than the work-in-progress files. I keep most of my content even if just to view the evolution in my skill set. In fact, I am a bit of a content hoarder. When my camera memory card gets close to full, I find it difficult to remove photos to add space. This is somewhat ridiculous behavior since the pictures are already saved on my computer and an external hard drive.
Although I organize my work, I’ve gone through a few different methods of storing content and have yet to consolidate everything. I started by adding photos and projects to Google Drive folders and Adobe Spark pages. All of my high school design work is still viewable in my adobe spark portfolio, however, I’ve lost the actual files for the work. Then, I started using USBs so I could work on both school computers and my devices. Finally, I invested in a personal hard drive and have been using that to store my files ever since. However I only update it once or twice a year. It can sometimes take me a little while to find a specific project since there are a few storage locations it could be in.
I don’t think that content has an expiration date. Therefore, I tend to keep things that are important forever. Duplicates, work-in-progress files, or content that doesn’t hold any significance gets deleted when I run out of space on my device. However, I still love looking back at videos made when I was in elementary school and seeing old photographs. The memories get more valuable with age. I think you should keep the important content forever because it holds a memory that can’t be replaced.