or: Organising travel photos for FB challenge

I’ve been nominated to post 10 travel images on consecutive days with no explanation on my Facebook page and to nominate someone else on each of these days. 

The places need to have made some impact on me.

Every place has some impact on me so I knew this would be a challenge.

Before I go any further, let me first say that I realise that I am incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunities and means to travel, both in the country I’ve been living at the time as well as to others.

I have traveled both for work and pleasure and sometimes I’ve been able to combine both. This has been the most economical way for overseas travel for me.

Anyway, once I was nominated, I decided I needed to organise my photos so I didn’t have to think for too long each day about what I’d post. My photos are stored across both iCloud and Google’s cloud so I’d also need to organise them a bit better.

I dived into iCloud first and knew some of the images I would use immediately so I saved those to a separate folder.

Then I searched for particular holidays (I’m not someone that has albums organised for every trip since it’s just as fast to search due to geo tagging and date sorting). Piles of digital photos later and I was well over 100 and hadn’t even found photos from all the places I wanted to include. I had multiple photos from quite a few locations. 

It’s difficult to narrow these down to one to sum up the entire experience there.

I decided not to include places where I was living at the time.

That reduced it somewhat but still way too many.

I decided not to include people posing (also since I hadn’t recently asked for their permission to post) and to use naturally posed photos (where faces were less recognizable) or scenery instead. 

This worked well until I realised there were a couple of me that should be included but it did whittle out a few others.

As I continued searching and trying to cull, I was thinking about all the great times I’ve had all over the place and how these places and the people I’ve met along the way have impacted me.

It was timely given the lockdown that we’re under at the moment and that I was feeling a bit down since I’d heard that it was going to be extended further and it would be even longer until I could dive again. 

This exercise has helped cheer me, remind me of all these amazing opportunities and people I have in my life and that this current situation is also an opportunity.

It is one of the reasons why I’m tagging those I meet along the way as the next people to participate in the challenge. I’d like to nominate more each time however I think that might get a little overwhelming for people!

It’s an opportunity to reconnect with people and an opportunity to stop and think about things (this can be harder for some than others, especially in isolation).

It was also a good reminder once I started posting (from a friend’s comment) that not everyone can participate in these exercises equally so I’ve adjusted the way I post as a result. I hadn’t considered that some use text-to-speech software to use social media and would be missing out if I just posted a photo with no explanation.

Interesting to realise how easy it is to forget about others when I’m in the majority group too. This has me thinking about a few things now.

Every day is a learning day and an opportunity to appreciate that while I may not be able to leave the house right now, I’ve been able to leave where I’ve been living more than most over the years.

Thanks to everyone that’s joined me over the years and for unintentionally being a part of my virtual holiday now! 

Thanks to Jamiroquai for the title to this post.