70,267.
The moment the program finished running, this number appeared on my screen. I stared at it for several seconds. I had pressed the shutter button over seventy thousand times on my phone, and it could all be recorded crystal clear. Each time was a moment when I felt the world before my eyes was worth preserving.
An Accidental Digital Archaeology
I started using Claude’s Cowork feature in January this year, originally just wanting AI to help me handle those long-procrastinated trivial tasks on my computer—file organization, subscription integration, various technical debt. I didn’t expect the collaboration efficiency to far exceed expectations. Things that had been indefinitely postponed due to busyness were quickly assembled like building blocks. Following the schedule, this week it was time for years of accumulated photos.
Over seventy thousand images. I collaborated with AI to write a Python script that read the metadata of each photo, analyzed year distribution, extracted geographic coordinates, and finally output a JSON report. The process wasn’t smooth—without proper workflow setup, the computer crashed several times. But after seeing that report, it felt less like organizing files and more like conducting an excavation of life’s trajectory.
The Shape of the Time Curve
The year distribution chart from the organization revealed a curve I hadn’t anticipated.
2015 and 2016 were relatively gentle, with stable photo counts. But by 2018, the data suddenly exploded upward. Looking back, that was precisely the starting point of my life’s acceleration—new opportunities, career pivots, the most frequent period of cross-border movement. Cities were changing, scenes were shifting, work was transforming, travel and encounters intersected across different coordinates.
Some say that after fifty, life gradually converges: activities decrease, travel distances shorten, life tends toward stability. I once thought so too. But with the data laid out, I found my activity density increasing rather than decreasing. This isn’t motivational “staying forever young”—it’s what the data told me. I haven’t been converging.
This made me think of something: our narratives about our own lives are fluid. Not because of deliberate distortion, but because memory itself isn’t a reliable database.
The Honesty of Metadata
Memory deceives. Details get worn smooth by time, stories get reinterpreted by current emotions. You remember a trip as “seeming like summer,” but metadata tells you it was November. You feel a certain period “passed quite plainly,” but photo density says it was actually your most active year.
There’s a concept in theology I’ve always found compelling: human understanding of one’s own circumstances is often constrained by present feelings rather than facts. Augustine spent considerable space in his Confessions dealing with the relationship between memory and time—in modern terms, his point was that memory isn’t a copy of the past, but rather the present’s reconstruction of the past. Sixteen hundred years later, metadata confirms this in another way: timestamps and GPS coordinates in image parameters won’t be rewritten by emotions. Some foreign street, some meeting, some journey, some special photograph—they rest quietly in file parameters, far more honest than our minds.
This is what I find interesting about organizing photos. On the surface, it’s archiving images, but actually it’s converting fuzzy memories into searchable data. Building an index for your own time.
From Recollection to Query
Our generation’s “human” memory can now be preserved not only in brain cells. It can simultaneously exist in phone albums, cloud drives, social media posts, health tracking apps. With precise times and locations, migration paths between cities, social graphs between people, and moods from the moment of pressing the shutter. In some cases, it can even combine with physiological data—for example, if I wanted to cross-reference, my Fitbit data could tell me what my heart rate was at the moment a certain photo was taken.
When these fragments are organized, parameterized, and structured, they’re no longer just “memories.” They become something that can be searched, cross-referenced, and reorganized. Your relationship with your own past changes from “I remember…” to “Let me look that up…”
During the process of building paulkuo.tw, I came to understand something: when people systematically output their experiences, viewpoints, and trajectories, they’re no longer just living through life, but transforming the traces of having lived into an indexable existence. Photo organization is another facet of the same thing.
An Index for the Future
Watching images being converted into data structures, I pondered a question: ten, twenty years from now, when I look back at the “past,” what will I be able to find?
It’s not entirely a sentimental question, but a very practical one—if the future me needs to retrieve some fragment, has the present me left sufficient indexing? Time will continue forward, memory will continue to blur, but if the data structure remains, those moments once deemed worth preserving won’t completely disappear into time (if my flesh decays, can my memory agent still be renewed in mind and transformed? I don’t yet know).
Over seventy thousand time nodes. Behind each one lies some second’s worth of attachment or the lingering warmth of an exchange. They won’t remember what I was thinking then, but they remember where I was, when, facing what direction, longing for what, caring about what.
Perhaps that’s enough. The rest I’ll leave for my future self to fill in.
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