How many pictures/videos are on your iPhone right now? #iphoneography

I have a problem. I have over 2600 photos and 90-some videos on my iPhone right now. It’s irritating when I accidentally scroll to the very top of my camera roll and have to swipe down a million times to get back to the bottom. But I hate connecting my phone to my computer unless I absolutely have to (usually when there’s a firmware update available). I know this is bad, because if something were to happen to my phone, my photos and other data wouldn’t be backed up. (Setting up a backup strategy is for another blog post…)

I kind of like having every photo/video I’ve shot so far with my iPhone 4 still in my camera roll because I sometimes look back on photos I’ve taken as a sort of journal. Also, I take photos of things like book covers, magazine blurbs, ticket stubs, and product packaging to make quick notes. I don’t always remember to send those off to Evernote or whatever for separate archiving. But I’m sure having such a huge camera roll to maintain negatively affects my phone, eating up lots of memory, and taking up large parts of backups (when I think to do them).

I am also loathe to offload any photos because I keep going back to old ones to re-edit them with new apps I’ve found, or just finally get around to editing and posting photos I shot a long time ago but haven’t yet done anything with. This makes for a very cumbersome camera roll.

What do you do to maintain your iPhoneography archives? Weekly backups? Online storage? Optical disc backups? All of the above?

I suppose the smart thing to do would be to offload all my photos/videos, then create albums in iPhoto for stuff I want to put back onto the phone for future processing. I don’t really use iPhoto for editing or photo management, but am forced to use it if I want to sync photo albums to my phone. Why isn’t there native iOS capability to organize the camera roll into albums directly on the phone?? Grrrrr…

On a related note I know that traditionally iPhoneography means photos are taken, edited, and posted from the iPhone, but I am interested in editing some of my iPhone photos with desktop apps to see what I can do with them (although I do admit I much prefer the photo-editing apps on the iPhone). At the very least I’d be interested in putting together a photobook or two, especially since the new iPhoto has more themes. I know they’re not what you’d call “professional-grade”, but I’ve printed one out before and liked how it turned out. I could also try putting together a photobook on Blurb.com or some other service. Can’t do any of this without offloading at least some of my photos…

I’ll put it on my to-do list. We’ll see how many photos and videos get added to the current total before I get around to it. *smirk*