From WNYC Studios, I'm Anusha Samarote and this is Note To Self.

I really like to take pictures of ordinary people doing nothing special in ordinary places.

The tech show about being human.

I just started to read anything. I don't need to remember that. I don't want that picture. That's not important.

Imagine that instead of going to work, walking the dog, buying groceries, you spend every day taking up to a thousand photos.

It's not your job. You just feel compelled to do it. You take mostly landscapes and hundreds and hundreds of them.

Then you go home and you spend three to five hours uploading and going through those photos.

Your days are so full of photos. You never delete them. You can't delete them. You just take and store more and more of them.

You stop seeing friends. You don't sleep well. You have computers and hard drives all over the place.

You're convinced that you might need these photos in the future.

This is the real medical profile of a 47-year-old man in the Netherlands.

The doctors who published this case last month say this unidentified man is the first patient ever to be described in scientific literature as suffering from, quote, digital hoarding.

I mean, that really struck me.

Because we, everyday folks, joke about digital hoarding all the time.

But in the medical field, this is something new. And this Dutch team wants digital hoarding to be officially classified as a new medical diagnosis, a subtype of regular hoarding.

And they've got some specific ideas for how to treat it.

But before we get to that, let's talk about you, dear listeners, and your relationship to photos.

This Dutch case was published, coincidentally, just as note to self's photo decluttering episode came out a few weeks ago.

You might remember we asked organizational tech guru Alan Henry of LifeHacker to come up with a plan.

So the first day, they're going to turn on auto upload and they're going to get those photos centralized.

On the second day, then they're going to start hunting around for their other digital photos, the ones that are important to them.

If you didn't hear that episode the first time around and you're intrigued, just go back and you can hear Alan's specific instructions and the three photo taking personality types he identified.

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