Mindless Drivel from a Drivelling Mind: January 2008

One of my many unfinished projects is to go through and label, categorize then upload and/or delete all the digital photos I have taken. Ideally I will put them all on flickr or picasa but see no point in jumping the gun and paying for an upgraded membership or anything like that until I have the photo organization under control. What I am thinking is that if I properly rename all the photos to say "Grand Canyon Walk 6" instead of "IMG0034.JPG" then I don't have to bother labelling/tagging them all when I upload them. That also means that I can know at a glance what they are rather than relying on labels for the originals on my computer.

I used to be a picky photographer when using film in that I would _ONLY_ take a picture if I felt it was a keeper and preferred those without people since they tend to ruin the scenery. And I was a meticulous note taker as well. What I mean is that I would write down what every shot was as I took it so even when they did not turn out, I knew what it was supposed to be. One of my favorites is photo taken on a trip to Rome many years ago. It is actually labelled and in the photo album. I think it was the Roman Forum but it looks like, well, absolutely nothing; it is just a blurry streak of lights snapped as the tour bus drove by at night.

I am much better about that now in that I tolerate people (in some shots) and as a general rule am also more willing to just snap away and sort it out later. But one thing that has not changed is that I am just as bad about thinking every photo is a keeper, even when it is not (nor was it intended to be). So instead, I just dump them into folders on the computer every now and then. [My digital camera holds ~960 shots before I have to download and have never gotten within 200 of filling it but that also illustrates how seldom I am forced to download.]

Well, I recently entertained the idea of starting that long delayed project and began consolidating the various scattered downloaded photos and trying to do a first level sorting by folder names. Admittedly, I did not get far but _DID_ delete some not worth keeping, so accomplished something at least. While doing it I also pulled out a few that I liked, including some that I took when playing with the highspeed/action mode on the camera and wanted to use to see how the embedded slideshow feature from Picasa works (the real point of this blog). I assume there are better methods available but I did not feel like researching them now. So it is entirely possible that one day, this blog will be reposted with newer photo/slideshow settings as well as additional photos as I work through the rest.

Bad Hair Day