Some of you may remember my fledgling attempts at blogging, in which I broadly hinted to The Boss that I would love a digital camera. (You can read that here!) And several posts ago, I hinted that we had some answered prayer to report (here). Well, you guessed it! Through the hands of my in-laws, the Lord has answered my wanna-be techie heart's cry and blessed us with a digital camera! YIPPEE! The Gang has gone digital!I'm not totally grasping all that The Boss tried to teach me in that first lesson, but I have on at least one occasion today successfully uploaded two or three pictures on my own and sent them off to a friend. (Promises Fulfilled, did ya get those pics I sent?!) I was seriously motivated to do so, because Baby Blue Eyes has agreed that it is time to part with a select few of his Rescue Heroes collection (don't worry, it's mostly duplicates that are waving bye-bye!) and we are selling them on our local craig's list. We're planning on putting the money into our Adoption Jar. And after BBE agreed that his 4th Billy Blazes and 2nd Jake Justice would do well to serve and protect in another little boy's home, he cheerfully agreed that maybe it was time to sell his Geo Traxx train set. So I snapped some photos of both sets of toys, posted the classified and added photos. All by my lonesome. Well, mostly today by myself. Last night The Boss gave me that quick run-thru lesson.
There's only one problem: I am terrified that in the uploading and storing of our new pics, The Boss and I will have completely differing ideas of where to store, how to label said storage, and what to store. I mean, already he took a picture of Dr. Doolittle and labeled it Whitney Pics in a little album on our software. Honestly, did he think that I needed to know that this was a Whitney Pic as opposed to, say a Walker Pic? Or a Smith Pic? a Jones Pic? Come on, aren't all of them essentially Whitney Pics? I mean, SERIOUSLY?!
Our conversation last night about what to do with the photos once I upload them was all too reminiscent of the night we bought our first file cabinet. I had visions of neatly labeled, alphabetically placed files hanging in a row, top drawer filled first. The Boss just started stuffing things that "looked like they belonged together" into files, scribbling titles and putting them in both drawers. My eyes started twitching and I developed this weird tic in the side of my neck when I tried to patiently explain that this must be done in an orderly fashion. "Kitchen Appliance Manuals" must be printed neatly and all successive titles should be similarly printed for consistency. Cut to 15 or so years later and this venture into the digital world has me twitching again. Can you feel my pain?
I made The Boss promise me last night that we would try to do this uploading and storing thing in some semblance of order. The thing I didn't nail him down on was who's order we were talking about! I think that I need to go back and clarify exactly what I mean. After all, the family photos have traditionally been my domain to sort, maintain, file and utilize. If left to his devices, The Boss would probably never even take the camera with him for family trips, birthday parties and other important outings. He worked so hard to pick just the perfect one when he bought our last camera, and I have had to work twice as hard to get him to BRING it anywhere. And actually displaying or framing any of the photos we take? That's all me, baby; all me! I know the novelty of this digital answer to prayer will wear off and family photos will return to my area of responsibility. I just need to clarify that I need a system. A system that makes sense and is easy to use. After all, isn't the new digital age supposed to make our lives easier?!
Thank you Mom and Dad W, for sharing your camera! It really is a blessing to have, and all of us really appreciate the thoughtful generosity. Enjoy your trip to Alaska, take lots of pics with your new one and tell the polar bears hi for me! :)
6 comments:
You gave me a chuckle. Welcome to the digital age!! Or at least until something better comes out. You know someone will invent something better. It's in the rules somewhere. Just when we get use to what we've got - something new comes out to make our equipment very inferior.
I'm glad that I was of help to you! Wasp spray does kill the cicada killers...though, don't be surprised if it crawls out of it's hole. When we had one in our back yard last year, it crawled out after I doused about half the can into it's home. Freaky.
It's very nice to meet you!! I'm going to check out the hummingbird moths. :-)
Bleach Free Blessings!
PS - Hummingbird hawk-moths are KEWL!!! Though, if I met one unknowingly, I think I'd want a tennis racket. *L*
I find that chronological order is all I really need to store my pictures. I think I have thousands of them by now. Just keep taking pictures and seeing what you want to do. You will be fine.
Well, you are way ahead of me now. Actually, we are on our second digital camera, but the whole uploading, downloading, whatever thing is still a mystery to me. I'm sure it's all very doable, but do I have to learn it?
Your family is adorable...they look just like you....Can't wait to read/see more!! If you need help with the digi camera, I'm a photographer on the side. I could give you an easy tutorial sometime.
Just thought I'd share our system, as my dh and I often disagree / don't understand each other's organization methods. And my dh is quite a photographer... he can easily take 100 pics in one day (fortunately not EVERY day!)
Our system has worked well for both of us for almost four years now. We store chronologically, with a separate folder for each date in which we took pictures, named in YearMonthDay order. So for today the folder would be 20070823. This method keeps them sorted in date order. If there are special pics or a special event from that day, we would tack that info on after the date, such as 20070832_Hiking_with_Smiths.
Our camera assigns a number to each picture. For a little while, we were changing the names of the really good pictures, but we since found it better to always keep the picture number, since there is order in those as well. So to label a pic that's extra good and we want to remember it, we also tack a description to the end of the name. (A pic named img60521.jpg becomes img60521_family_in_canoe.jpg)
We also use a free photo-browsing software called IrfanView (google it) which makes it easy to look through the pictures quickly to find the ones we are looking for. Albums are useful too, like the one you mentioned that the Boss created. Albums are usually not where the picture is stored. It's more like a place to group and print pictures, but it doesn't usually change the underlying organization. So if you set up the underlying folders properly in the beginning, the Boss can have his albums that don't make sense to you, and you can still make other albums that reference some of the same pics (and other pics).
Just my two (hundred) cents in the matter :)
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