Photo albums, a blast from the past

By Alison
5 September, 2009
Comments Off on Photo albums, a blast from the past

I finally got around to putting random photos back in my albums. All those photos that I took out at one time or another to scan have been sitting in piles in a box for far too long, and I only just made myself put them back. This shouldn’t have been a difficult task, since I am slightly anal on the whole photo album front. Each one has a code, and all the photos I took out are marked with their code and then a reference number. For example, a photograph with C403 scrawled on the back will have come out of album C4 (that will be of the honeymoon era) and will match an empty pocket with 04 written beside it.

Simples! Right?

Almost. I discovered that while I might be anal, I am pretty bad at keeping count. I duplicated numbers, I dyslexed numbers, and then I just forgot where I was and started counting again. Most of the time it was pretty obvious when a photo may have been numerically correct, but didn’t belong in the empty pocket presented. A quick flick found the right home several pages later.

So the pile is now down by about half. This is quite an achievement. But my albums now have a stunning collection of post-it-notes scattered through them. These mark still-empty pockets which are – for the most part – not marked by reference numbers. My analability has failed me. I’ve broken the album law and snatched photos out without marking them. This now means that I have to sort through the pile of unmarked photos, most of which I HAD thought were duplicates, and try and match them to a timeline.

For some places that’s easy. I’ve only been to Italy twice, and the second time was in the “digital” era, so any photos of vaguely italian architecture and fields of sunflowers will be found in the B albums. This does present a slight problem though… I took those back to Sydney and left them there. They were very heavy in the hand luggage!

I have – in this house – 18 photo albums. These span from the honeymoon (1999) to the present day. When I was 16, I think my mother had 6 albums. When my daughters are 16, at this rate, I might be nearing 100. But it has to be said – I am much more picky about what I print out now that it’s digital, and having kids and being nearly broke may just have influenced that. That leaves something like 14 albums in my storage locker in Sydney which cover childhood, teen years, and early twenties.

I am digital now – have been fully digital since September 2004. I got a digital camera for our anniversary in January 2002, but it was just a point and shoot affair, so it wasn’t until I replaced my Nikon F60 with a Nikon D70 that I really embraced the digital me.

According to iphoto, I have 812 events with 16,127 photos/videos. That really is a staggering number of photos. Digital media allows you to take far more shots than you would have when you had to pay for film regardless of whether the shot of a cow’s bum turned out or not. I do try and cull them, especially since I now make use of the repeated shooting feature to churn out half a dozen shots that are exactly the same, any real differences being imperceptible to the naked human eye. And then when I try and narrow it down I can’t decide which one is better, so I end up keeping them all. So much for sensible storage!

I’ve only recently got into using Flickr, and so impressed was I that I paid for pro. Actually, I paid for pro because I was trying to upload more than my monthly limit while on holiday in Guernsey. But I think it’s an excellent service for the money. Especially since it’s virtually one click from iphoto. In fact, it’s so easy to use that I’ve almost completely stopped uploading photos to my website, which leaves that section of the site rather dusty and forgotten.

Since I upgraded my site to the latest version of moveabletype I’ve had to learn a few new tricks. But the templates for the site are stupidly complex (and I am talking here about spayce.com, NOT www.pixielation.com, which is new and pretty simple. Pretty blog-like for someone who apparently doesn’t blog, but that’s a subject for another day!). That’s mainly because I wanted different categories to behave in vastly different ways, the photography section is pretty much a case in point.

After upgrading, I’ve found that MT now has a new way of dealing with uploads, and has an area to manage them called assets. So my dilemma is this – do I ditch my photography section and create a portal to flickr for photos I want to show, or do I learn to use the new assets whatsit on my own site? I may procrastinate about this for some time I am afraid, while I amass a large amount of photos to use that go unused.

Meanwhile I’d better get back to finding those missing pictures. Because if I ever need to replace them I’ll have to find the negatives and work out how on earth I work out which photos are missing from those!

Simples!