When I say "compulsive," I'm mainly talking about FOMO. That "Fear of Missing Out" that forces me (literally) to scroll through an entire blog or image gallery to make sure I don't miss a gem. I don't have an exact definition of what a gem is, especially since it varies quite a bit from one moment to the next. So this drama of being a collector has been going on for over 25 years, ever since my first internet connection (1998), although I must admit that broadband and now very high-speed broadband have considerably increased the possibilities, and I've also tended to collect films (mainly French gonzo productions and films from the 70s to the 2000s). But it takes up a lot of space, despite the tens of terabytes of storage space I have. So I limit myself as much as possible to photos, and I admit that's what I prefer anyway.
I've pushed it a little further. It's obvious that hundreds of thousands of images are difficult to manage. So I create PDFs from the images in question. When I've accumulated a decent amount during my surfing session (let's say between 1,000 and 2,000 images), I use a Python script I wrote to turn them into 200-page PDFs, taking care (again, thanks to the script) to resize the photos because, even though I'm a collector, I like them to be "clean and tidy." 1280 px wide is enough for me to enjoy them on my screen.
So I have thousands of PDFs, each made up of hundreds of images. And that makes me happy.
I won't go into detail about the categories of content I keep, because they cover a wide variety of themes. My only regret is that places to share all these images at will have become rare… in any case, this isn't where I can give free rein to my joy of sharing. Too bad, there are so many other images besides those in my collection! Besides, I have to hurry up and download them.
And you, do you collect things too?