Although the first digital camera, developed in the Eastman Kodak laboratories by Steven Sasson, dates from 1975 it wasn’t really until the new millennium that the public ditched analogue film for digital cameras. Today even the market for digital cameras is restricted to those that have truly professional features: for most people point-and-shoot cameras have been replaced by mobile phones’ increasingly sophisticated picture taking features.

My own history of the transition from analogue to digital can be read in my post at https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/death-of-analogue/

The problem about digital photographs is that one collects too many of them! What wouldn’t I give to have just a few more analogue photos of the time I spent at school and college? I’m, thus, during this strange lockdown time going through my photos and cataloguing  their folders so that I can find (or try to find!) particular people and places.

There are automated processes for organizing photos;for example, image recognition programs can identify anything from plants to people. The one I use is Plantnet which is brilliant for identifying plants from photos of their leaves or flowers. Tagging images can also help. Every photo taken on a cellphone has latitude and longitude coordinates listed under GPS in its properties. These figures can be input into Google Maps and identify the precise location where a photo was taken. However, organizing pictures still remains more difficult than identifying a text or a music file.

One sometimes has to have some emotional strength to identify and organise photos for each image is a monument to a particular stage in one’s life. Things change. Life is an evanescent process and we must all depart at some point. Only the memory remains (if that) and the photographs of departed loved ones are both joyful and painful.

Nature, on the other hand is ever with us, generating both death and rebirth. True, I have photos of forests and meadows that have disappeared, cut down by disease, motorway schemes or sheer vandalism but I rejoice that I have the possibility of returning to a loved place and finding it still there in all its transcendent beauty.

One area which is particularly dear to me are the slopes of the Prato Fiorito, the whale-backed mountain dominating the Lima valley in Tuscany. I was meant to have reached it last April but if I can get to it by September I’ll be happy enough. What I’m, however,  missing out at present are the incredible May flowerings of jonquils on its slopes, a wonder that inspired Shelley’s poetry.

I have written a post of this phenomenon at https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/the-elysian-fields-of-prato-fiorito/ if you want to find out more. For the time being I’ll just display some photos I took on my first visit to this angelic vision in 2006….and label them! Better luck next year…