Turns out, digital isn't always easier

Railfans peer out the windows while locomotive No. 071 shoves its excursion train around the connection at Limerick Junction, Ireland, in May 2016. From here, the train will head straight out across the diamond for Dublin Connolly. Photo by Brian Schmidt

You know, I've been home from the Trains Magazine tour of Europe for more than two months, but have barely started on editing the hundreds of photos that I returned with.

A decade ago, we were sold on convenience of digital photography. Instant gratification! No film or developing cost! Unlimited copies! The list goes on. But, as it turns out, managing a digital photo collection seems to be more of a pain than "real" photos.

When I got slides back from the lab, I would label the date and location almost immediately. Truly awful slides went right in the trash. Later in life, I got smarter and stored the slides, grouped by subject, in metal slide file boxes. To share photos, I'd load them up in a Kodak carousel, or sometimes just take the metal boxes if the host had a stack loader for the projector.

Now? I transfer the files to a hard drive, delete the worst images, and then backup to a second hard drive. Then I have to edit each raw file before I can upload them to flickr, or build a digital presentation. If a slide was a little crooked or underexposed, people understood that. In the digital world, not so much.

Throughout the almost three-week trip, I shot around 32 gigabytes of digital images. That's a lot to review, and even more troublesome to process for sharing.

So what do you prefer to work with – film or digital images?