COLUMBUS, Ohio — Area man Dennis Pruitt, 44, received a “Storage Almost Full” notification Tuesday evening, a development he traced to 4,000 photographs of a single rectangle of asphalt at the Westerville Value Plaza, none of which he has looked at since taking them.

“I take a wide shot, a close shot, and one of the pillar with the number on it,” said Pruitt, standing in the lot at 9:40 p.m. and pressing the unlock button on his key fob in a slow, widening arc. “Then I take a video of me walking away, for context. The system is airtight.”

Pruitt’s method, which he refers to as “the protocol,” involves a minimum of 40 photos per visit, including several burst-mode sequences of his own car in the act of being parked. He said the approach has been in place for six years and has produced a searchable archive of every parking space he has used, a number he estimated at “a lot, honestly.”

When asked why he did not simply open the most recent photo, Pruitt paused for several seconds.

“That would require me to go into the phone,” he said. “And once you’re in the phone, you’re in the phone.”

Dr. Marguerite Oyelaran-Finch, a senior fellow at the Institute for Applied Retrieval Failure at the Lower Midwest Center for Cognitive Logistics, said Pruitt’s behavior is a textbook case of what her field calls “archival confidence.”

“The subject experiences a profound sense of security from having recorded the information,” said Oyelaran-Finch. “That feeling is entirely separate from the information being retrievable. He has built a flawless vault and thrown away the door.”

Oyelaran-Finch added that her own research found 71 percent of documentation enthusiasts feel a calm they describe as “spiritual” in the moment the shutter clicks, followed by a second, unrelated calm when they eventually find the car by accident.

Pruitt’s phone, a model he said he bought “for the camera,” now contains 4,112 images from the Westerville lot alone. Roughly 3,900 are nearly indistinguishable, and one is of his thumb. A second folder, titled “Level 3 (Real),” contains photos of a parking garage he said he is “90 percent sure” is in a different state.

“I have never lost a car. I have only temporarily lost access to its location.”

Pruitt’s wife, Janet, who has stopped accompanying him to the plaza, said the family has adapted. “I wait by the entrance,” she said. “At some point a silver Corolla comes around the corner, very slowly, with the windows down. That’s him.”

At press time, Pruitt had located the vehicle in the adjacent lot, where he had parked it that morning after finding the first lot full, and was taking 40 photos of the space.