This month I hit an exciting milestone, 11 years of my Instagram photos are now uploaded to this website and my account at Instagram Facebook Meta is closed. After I downloaded all my data from Meta the photos sat on my hard drive gathering dust for a while and I dreaded the hours of manually uploading each one. But, I’m now done with the archive upload phases of the project.

The last photos I published to Instagram were a batch when I was in Milan on holiday in November 2018. Today, one of the next phases of the project is to fill in the gaps between then and now. After stopping using Instagram I started missing the feeling of processing and posting images online. That feeling is one of the driving forces behind working on this project. It is bonkers how quickly time has passed in front of me. I went from my first slow and clunky manual film camera, to low quality, expensive, bulky digital cameras, to publishing at any time just from a phone. Sadly, the story ends in the chasm of despair – attention addiction on mass to a shopping, tracking and advertising platform. Yikes.

I’m interested in the bit where I got to take, edit and publish photos (2009 – 2014). So I made that.

This project isn’t without its faults. I have completed some very basic styling using outdated CSS techniques, there are no responsive variants on the photo assets and worst of all, I probably shouldn’t have used Advanced Custom Fields to store the photos. It will need rebuilding, I’m okay with that. I’ve committed to this for the long run, I’d love to have this running for as long as I live. So, yeah, it’s on the long list to address these mistakes. I’d argue that the psychological power of getting off my arse and making the first version is more rewarding than gazing out the window wondering when my skills will be just right to achieve the standards I see in others.

One thing that really stood out through the upload phase was how pleasing it is to reflect back over time using photos. By contrast, if I open up Google Photos or my camera roll on my phone it’s too much. There is just too much data for me to take in. Curation really helps. A few old Instagram photos were selected for deletion while doing the upload. I used to post way too much. Terrible photos that I can only assume at the time I was using it more like Twitter. If it was a bad photo and I couldn’t really see a point in it, it got deleted. That isn’t to say all the photos are works of art.

If you’re looking through the photos wondering why some of those that made it were really all _that_ worthy? I’d probably chalk it up to keeping a visual memory. I ended up using Instagram in this way, not everything was a balanced, interesting and well composed snap – sometimes it was just some basic bitch insta snap of a cheesecake. And that’s fine with my basic self.

In writing down this entry on the /photo project, I’m scratching my head on what’s next. Also, I’m wondering how I keep on top of new snaps. I think it makes sense to batch download month by month the gap from November 2018 to now and pick my favourites, post-process them on my phone and go from there. When I’m up to the present day – who knows, I do wonder about the value of posting in the moment vs batching them weekly or monthly. Perhaps it’s a good ambient time kill activity to post the recent snaps when standing in a line waiting or on the tube. Perhaps it’s better just to be bored, let my thoughts wash over me. I guess I’ll find out when I try it.