Camera Diarrhea

This is an acute malady created by the prevalence of digital cameras combined with a lack of a variety of skills. It is perhaps related to the psychological issues of compulsive hoarding.

Just like diarrhea the sufferer produces untold amounts of waste images (in some case hundreds of thousands) few of which will (thankfully) never be seen by their family (imagine the horror of uncle bob's slide show night multiplied by 2 orders of magnitude).

Sufferers usually have no concept of what they are doing, how the images will be stored, and the amounts of time required to store and categorise their growing data horde. Even professionals seem to fall prey to this malady producing upwards of 10,000 raw images for a wedding (can't wait to edit that lot)

Pathology

While hard to identify photographers, it seems that photographers with film cameras in their history have some immunity, as they have had some sense of economy in their picture taking. Forced upon them by thinking that it would be impossible to justify taking 138 rolls of film at cousin cindy's engagement party. However with the apparent freedom of a digital camera they loose control (and any sense of photographic vision) and blaze away producing 5000 images on their CF or SD cards.

This is not as problematic as it may seem, because the vast majority of these images will be lost when hard drives fail or are simply never copied across to a PC in the first place before the card is formatted for the next gig.

Familys of sufferers can perhaps gain insight to the impending onset of this condition by the voiced desire to buy "external media storage" systems in preparation for a family vacation and discussion of how many gigabytes will be needed for such a thing.

Unlike other diseases of indulgence there are no known support groups. So sadly you're on your own.

Some external drive storage companies are rumored to be taking advantage of sufferers of this malady with low prices on USB mass storage and cheap bulk lots of DVD-R