This Graph Captures the Struggle of Organizing Your Photo Library

The photo organization struggle is real. Whether you’re a professional photographer shooting thousands of photos per client, or a hobbyist who can’t resist grabbing your phone for every sunset, today’s xkcd comic captures your photo organization struggles beautifully.

The comic graph shows the relationship between the number of photos you take, and the amount of time you have to organize them. The more photos you take, the harder it is to keep it organized and the more time you have to invest. Eventually, you either don’t have enough time and fall into the “Can’t find good photos among the thousands of bad ones” sector of the graph, or you dedicate all your time to organizing and “Can’t sleep, too busy sifting through photos to find the best ones.”

As usual, if you hover over the comic, xkcd creator Randall Munroe adds to the visual with this helpful life hack:

A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage.

A photo library organizational “fail safe” of sorts. Unfortunately, for professional photographers whose job it is to cull thousands of photos for clients on a weekly basis, we’re all very likely to eventually fall into the “Can’t Sleep” section of the graph.