Mixed Up

 

This week I’ve spent some time trying to come up with better ways of (re-)organizing my photos on the computer.

Right now I’m at a stage in the process where I seem to be in danger of just making more of a mess of things than I started out with.

I switched to digital photography in 2006; but for the first three years, I still only took about 3-400 pictures a year. I filed them per month, and it was not a problem. I also had prints made of the best ones and continued to paste those into proper photo albums.

Last year in July, all of a sudden I went photo-crazy. I had been keeping this blog for six months. In July on top of that I joined the shared photo blog Soaring Through The World. From then on, I started taking my camera with me where ever I went. And made use of it… It’s been fun, and I’ve learned a lot . BUT. Since 1 July 2009 until now I have taken over 5300 photos. (My camera is keeping count.) I.e. more photos per month than I used to take per year. (It should also be noted that I have not even been further than ~20 km away from my home during this time…)

The 5300 are only “straight from the camera” shots and do not include edited copies, or collages, or scanned pictures. Those come into “problem” categories of their own.

I’m sure that in this digital age of ours, I’m not the only one with photo-organizing problems. What I’d be curious to know is:

How do you do it? How do you file and store your digital photos in a clever way that makes it easy (?) to find your way back to the pictures that you no longer remember exactly when you took?

I started out with a filing system which came with my camera. But that got messed up when I started moving pictures around, making changes in my original folder system. Then I started over. Then my (old) computer crashed. I had the originals saved, but not my edits. I started over again, on my (old) laptop. And then a few months later started over again on my new laptop; now tagging all new photos in Photoshop Elements. After a few months I find this too is growing into a complex science in itself, with Categories and Sub-Categories and Keyword tags… which, it seems, do not get automatically transferred to copies I make using other software (like Picasa).

Picasa on the other hand goes kind of crazy when I start making extra copies of folders, like I’m doing now (so as to be sure I don’t lose anything while messing around).

What I was hoping to accomplish was really to simplify things, by abandoning a system with too many sub-folders (which were not a big problem with Picasa, but causing me a lot of tiresome clicking and searching with Windows Live Writer).

If anyone has some words of wisdom and experience to share, please do so before I get even worse entangled…!

By now you’re probably wondering about the photos in this post. The common thread between text and pictures is supposed to be expressed in the title - “mixed up”…

Yesterday I went to have a look at a temporary fashion outlet in an exhibition hall (originally an engine shed). The new clothes for sale turned out to be all mixed up with old machinery and stuff borrowed from the Textile Industry Museum.

I did not find anything I wanted to buy (typical teenage fashion) but it was an interesting place to take photos!

Oh, and you should imagine disco music in the background, too (rather loud).

Mixed Up: Mixed together in an uncertain manner; confused, muddled or bewildered.

Collector's Madness

Are you a Collector of anything? I mean, are you really possessed by that Collecting Mania that makes you want "the complete set" of whatever-it-may-be?

So far, I have not thought of myself as one. I guess I have some collector's instincts, but in my own opinion they were never really all that strong. I do have a lot of books, and quite a few CD's and DVD's. With books, if there is a series where the individual books connect to each other with an ongoing plot (and if I like them), I do of course like to have them all. However, most of my books are paperbacks, or bought on sale; I'm not really a collector of valuable First Editions or The Complete Works Of.

In later years, DVD boxes of old TV series have become very popular. My brother does have quite a nice collection, and he is more of a proper Collector than I am - which I benefit from, since I get to borrow them, or get copies! And when he does buy a DVD series, he usually wants the whole set - seasons one through whatever.

My own collection is smaller, and more random. When a true Collector looks at my collection, he may approve of my owning a number of first seasons of various series; because a first season can be seen as a beginning to be followed by more. What the Collector finds much harder to understand, is why someone would have just season 4 out of 9 of  Seinfeld, or seasons 4-6 of M*A*S*H (out of 11). When a Collector sees a lonely season 4 out of a much higher number, something within him is deeply disturbed. Eyebrows go up, forehead gets wrinkled; something is not quite right in the world...

Until just recently, I owned only one Complete Series of that Many-Seasons kind. And even that collection is not quite right from a Collector's point of view, because I have seasons 3 and 4 recorded from TV (with one episode missing), and then bought the rest (1,2,4,5,6,7). The series? Gilmore Girls. My absolute favourite American 21st century series (2000-2007), starring Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel. (The dialogue is marvellous, which to me means I can watch it over and over and pick up new things every time. And funny without ha-ha studio laughter.)

Last week, however, I must have got a stroke of collector's madness.

Looking in on one of the websites from where I sometimes order things, there happened to be a sale. As a result,I can no longer brag about being completely free of collector's syndrome, and hold up my seasons 4-6 of M*A*S*H as evidence; because today I received a package containing not only seasons 1-3, but also seasons 7-11.(There will always, however, be some evidence left that I did not buy the whole series at the same time, because while my old seasons 4-6 came in the old-fashioned thick kind of covers, seasons 1-3 and 7-11 arrived in the slim kind of covers...)

If I wasn't insane before, I probably will be after watching them all in one swoop. Do I really want 11 seasons of dirt-coloured Army Hospital humour??? Well, that remains to be seen...