093 - Organize all photos, digital and prints

In the good old days, we picked up our photos from a remote developer or a photo shop. They were stacked in an envelope with the dark negatives stored in a shorter pocket inside. We were limited by the size of the film role, usually 24 or 36, though we could sometimes squeeze an extra shot or two out of it.

Most of us--the normal ones, anyway--ripped open the envelope and rifled through the pictures. "Look at this one," was a pretty common phrase along with the variation: "Check this out." Then we put the envelopes full of photos in a shoebox with a promise to ourselves that we would have to load these things into a photo album.

Ahem...

Maybe I just dislike buying photo albums.

Then there is the situation such as the one at my parent's house. They have tons of old photos, most of them haphazardly stored in boxes, mixed like so much soil and gravel. A vein of their early years of marriage can be found, like a layer of sediment, only to abruptly end and a mix of color photos from Christmas in 1971 and my sister's junior high days in the 1980s dominates. You can sense there was once a rhyme and reason for the contents but it has long since been lost to browsers who were not privy to the system.

Not to fear, technology has created a wonderful cure: digital photos. Now we're only limited by the size of our storage cards or the memory on our cameras. We can review photos instantly, discard those we don't like, only keep the good ones, experiment with poses and angles and lighting and effects. Life is good.

Except now we have more photos than ever. And they're all over our virtual worlds. In fact, they might be more disorganized than the printed photos. If we don't have them stored somewhere besides our primary disk drive, we run the risk of losing them all...permanently.

Photos have never been more disorganized, unsafe, and plentiful as they are now. While technology is an enabler of this situation, it is also the savior. We can digitize everything. We can infinitely copy (assuming available storage) each photo.

Thus, task #093 on the 101 Things in 1,001 Days: organize all photos. Jocelyn and I will undoubtedly share this task. I'd like to organize all of our digital photos, digitize all of our old print photos, and archive (either online or to DVD or both) all of them.

This is a big task. Have you done this? Or are you one of those people that keeps everything nice and tidy?

I need tips, pointers, and lessons learned.

Twitter and tumblr

Two things (that are new for me) that I've been experimenting with are twitter and tumblr. First, I'll explain what they are, then why I'm even bothering, and why you might like to try them.

Twitter is for microblogging. Messages are text only and are limited to 140 characters. The "tweets" or twitter entries can be made via the site, sending text from a mobile device (like your cell phone) or via instant messenger.

People can sign up to follow you on twitter. When you post, they receive updates automatically. Sounds like a bit of overkill when it comes to keeping up with someone, but I can see how this could be useful when trying to coordinate a group and needing to broadcast information to multiple people (and receiving it from those people, also.)

I'm not worried about followers. I like twitter for it's quick notetaking aspect. I can text myself basically with any sort of feeling or observation. I have no worries about being verbose with a 140 character limit. These little notes help trigger memories without the seriousness of a journal or diary.

I've added twitter to the Happiness Notebook, where I've cleverly called it "a glimpse behind the curtain" and I removed the link to twitter. You can go to twitter and try it for yourself. You really don't want to receive a text message from me that says that "I'm at work on a Sunday."

If you do decide to follow anyone, twitter does provide controls so that you aren't inundated with updates or receive them during inconvenient hours.

The other toy I've been playing with is tumblr. This is a site that lets you maintain a "tumblelog" or tlog. Postings on a tlog are short and media driven. Photos, videos, quotes, links, short text entries, audio files, and chats are the types supported by tumblr.

It is exceptionally easy to use. I've created an RSS feed called "Happy Notes" right there on the right of this blog. Click on an entry and you'll be taken to my own tlog, which I intend to make a supportive, complementary, yet standalone version of the H-N. My tweets on twitter also end up on Happy Notes as short text entries. I could also automatically add a link to the tlog everytime I post here.

If you've thought about blogging, but aren't interested in doing all that much writing, then tumblr is a great alternative. Give it a shot and send me the link.

Tell me what you think of these sites and let me know of others like it that you use or prefer.