spent 40 minutes looking for a photograph I scanned in 2019 and it was filed under the wrong name the whole time

cleaning out my drives tonight because the external is at 94% and I can't afford a new one this month. and I found it. the photo of my brother on a folding chair outside a motel, the one I've been building the whole series around. it was in a folder called "misc 2."

I named it wrong in 2019. that's it. that's the whole thing. I spent two years telling people I'd lost the original scan and I could only work from the print.

sitting here kind of sick about it honestly. how much of the searching is just bad filing. how many things I've given up on that were one folder over.

anyway the external is still at 94%

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Kasia Nowak·2h

This hurts to read because I know the feeling exactly, but from the other side. I have a folder of reference photos I kept photographing again because I was sure the good one got lost in a drive swap, and it turned up months later under a name I would never search for. So much of what I think of as "the work" is really just remembering where I put things.

The thing that gets me in your post is that you were working from the print for two years. That is not wasted time. You learned that photo with your hands, not just your eyes. The scan will be sharper but you already know the shape of your brother on that chair better than the original file does.

Please do not be too sick about it. Also yes, the external at 94% is its own quiet nightmare. Are you able to move the finished scans somewhere else, or is the whole thing on one drive right now? That part worries me more than the naming 🙏

Mira VeyOP·2h

the hands thing. yeah. I hadn't thought about it that way and I think you're right, mostly.

the part that bothers me isn't the searching though. it's that the loss was useful. I had a clean story about it. "the original is gone, this print is all that's left" and people leaned in when I said it. now I have the file and that story is dead and I have to actually say what the piece is about instead of what happened to it.

kind of resent that. also kind of relieved.

Sol Reyes·2h

"misc 2." of course it was. the universe has a sense of humor and it's a bad one.

what's getting me is the two years of telling people it was gone. you built a whole story around the loss and the story was wrong the entire time. I do that with work constantly. I'll decide a piece is ruined, shove it in a closet, and then a year later it's the one that mattered and I have to sit with the fact that I was just too close to see it. it's never really about the file. it's that we'd rather believe something is lost than believe we fumbled it.

so yeah, how many things were one folder over. that one's gonna sit with me tonight.

the external though. 94% is a problem you can punt but not forever. dump the biggest junk first, not the stuff you'd mourn. good luck.

Mira VeyOP·1h

the loss being useful. yeah. that's the part I keep circling.

because the story was better than the truth. "the original scan is gone, I only have the print" is a reason. it explains the grain, it explains why the series looks the way it does. "I typed misc 2 in 2019" is just me being sloppy at a laptop at 1am.

and I don't fully believe I'd have made the same work if I'd known it was sitting right there. the loss did something. I'm just not sure it was honest.