As you may recall, I discussed my desire to (re)jumpstart my paper photo scanning efforts in late January. This is a task I return to again and again—I wrote about this same topic in April 2016 and then again in February 2017, too—but never complete. The problem? I have too many photos, in dozens of albums and, worse, loose in several large boxes—and it’s just too monumental. So, I scan some number of photos for some period of time, lose interest or get distracted by other projects or just life in general, and then return to the task again some (many) months later. On and on it goes, and I have always felt that I’d never really finish scanning.

The desire to scan these paper photos isn’t just about preserving memories, though that is obviously a big deal. It’s also a small part of a broader goal of achieving a more minimalist existence, with the basic goal of being more mobile, in the sense that we could move to a new home, state, or even country more easily in the future. Be able to downsize. Like most people, we get bogged down in stuff, and the sheer weight of that stuff plays a big role in indecisiveness and an inability to move forward.