My Photographs

Let's talk about pictures! They are one of my very favorite things after all and all the work that goes into taking, uploading, organizing, sharing, developing and storing them... well, it's a lot of work! And I have it down to a science.

It was probably right around when we purchased our Canon in late summer/early fall 2006 that I started taking full responsibility for all things picture-related. (Well, except that Craig does help take them - and he does a good job at that! He never complains when I ask him to take a picture and usually takes like 15 of the same thing so that I "have options". Bless his heart... he gets it! And while we're on the subject, how did parents survive before digital photography?? What a waste of frustration and money!) I'll get into all the nitty-gritty in a minute, but first, here's the camera that does all the work for me: http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=139&modelid=17316 We purchased this along with one bigger lens and have been very happy with it. At first, Craig and I were very interested in playing around with all the options, tailoring each setting appropriately for the shot, successfully capturing indoor basketball game pictures of my brothers and night time fireworks pictures on vacation. But that was before we had kids. There is zero time to wait when kids are the subjects in focus... or, if I'm being honest, OUT of focus on occasion. I'm no professional, but I at least recognize and appreciate good photography! Now, the camera is permanently left on AUTO and it does a very good job with that.

In addition to our camera, the other key piece of equipment would be the external hard drive. You HAVE to have somewhere to store all your precious pictures and it's too risky to leave them completely in the trust of your computer's internal hard drive. I've heard too many horror stories of computers crashing and memory loss and I would be the most pathetically depressed victim if that happened to me. So awhile back, my dear, sweet husband bought us a 120 GB external hard drive (same amount of storage space as what is ON the computer itself)... which we maxed out around Will's first birthday. In my defense, that did include all our music and videos as well and video storage takes up a ton of space. So, to replace our poor, insufficient drive, Craig selected this bad boy: http://http//www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=466. Two terabytes (essentially 2000 GB) of storage. Now, do not be fooled when reading this paragraph that I have any idea what I'm talking about, 'cause I don't. I had to ask Craig all this stuff and what it all means. What I DO understand, however, is that when I click on the properties of my G drive and it shows me a little pie chart explaining that I've only used one tiny little wedge of available storage space... I am a HAPPY GIRL!!! You know, a common thought-provoking question is "what would you save if your house was on fire?" And my answer would be "once my family was safe, I'd run back in for my hard drive" - LOL! :)

Okay, onto uploading and organizing. I upload nightly any pictures I have taken that day because when doing so, it allows me to type in today's date and it automatically labels each photo with that date and a number, i.e. 2010.04.13 001, followed by 002, 003, etc. I am super anal about the photos being dated correctly because my organizational system thrives on that being correct. If I have several days worth of photos on my camera, then I have to manually type in the date and number myself, and that's just annoying. Prior to becoming a blogger, I would simply upload the pictures into their respective files as needed. But now that I am in the habit of further uploading to Blogger, I upload all pictures from the camera to a desktop file labeled "New". This is where Craig's OCD comes into play. He is super finicky about our desktop being nearly blank - too many icons make for disorganization and the bunching of Craig's tighty-whiteys - so we typically have exactly two icons on the desktop: my "New" file (which took some persuasion) and the recycle bin. From there, I leave pictures in the new file until I have uploaded desired pictures to Blogger, Facebook (which is rare now), Snapfish, or anywhere else, and then move them to individual (hyper-organized) files within our hard drive's picture file. Make sense? This moving and organizing usually happens several times per week so that the new file stays mostly clean and small.

Here is a picture (yes, I took a picture of my computer screen) of my photo files: I'm not sure how visible that is, but here is the gist of it:

-I have a file for each holiday (including little holidays and "holiday picnics" such as Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc.) and within each holiday file are sub files broken down by year. Sometimes, if it's a really big event (like Christmas) I may even break that down into each party by date.

-Each member of our family has a main file with sub files by year. Craig and I don't have all that many pictures of just ourselves so ours aren't much further broken down. But the kids have each year broken down by month. So for example, if I open Will's file, I'll see 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. If I open 2009, I'll see "2009.01 - January", "2009.02 - February", etc. Within MY file, I also have sub files containing both pregnancies. And Craig recently scanned and organized a bunch of old pictures from high school and childhood within his file.

-Craig and I each have specific folders for hobbies, i.e. basketball, cars/bikes, food and (more recently) Tot School.

-There's a wedding file broken down with each individual wedding and respective date. A vacation file broken down the same. "School Stuff" that contains a lot of my siblings' sports and dance stuff or our own graduation stuff, etc.

-We have a "Family" file and a "Friends" file. Within family, we have listed: Rethman, Munoz, Skees, Riedeman, Konesky, etc. And now further still: "Mya & Stella" (which is soon going to require further breakdown) and "Celia".

-We have an "Our Home" file that contains every photo ever taken of home improvement, decoration, or just pictures of our important belongings that Craig took "for insurance purposes". :)

I like this system. It makes sense to me. Craig has argued that every photo should just be in chronological order by year. I vehemently disagree. What if I wanted to find a picture of the guys rock climbing the silo on Memorial Day? Or a specific photo of Will or Sophie at a specific age? Or of a friend's wedding when I couldn't remember the date? I would have to sift through an entire year's worth of photos to find what I want. That's ludicrous! No offense, honey.

So since I handle all the picture stuff in our family, my system remains. :)

And finally, there's the issue of developing and storing the hard copies. I've used Snapfish online for several years now. At 9 cents per print and home delivery, I can't see doing it at Walmart ever again! A couple years ago, I decided to reorganize all my photo albums. I found some nice albums (on this website: http://www.exposuresonline.com/ExposuresOnline/), covered in bookcloth and personalized by different subjects (i.e. William Dean volume 2, 3, Our Life volume 4, etc.) and I placed a huge order. It took me A VERY LONG TIME, but I moved all of our photos to matching memo albums and captioned most every picture. Here are my albums. Most are the buttercream color, but Will's are specifically blue and Sophie's are sage.
I prefer the memo albums so I can caption each photo.
And I love how neat and tidy they look on the shelves.

So that's my organizational system for photographs.

Also, I just wanted to add that, out of curiosity, I went back and totalled up all the photos taken for Will's first year and compared that to Sophie's first year. (Another nice feature of having them organized, you can just "select all" within each file and it totals them up for you.) You know how they always say you take a ridiculous number of photos of your first child and then the poor second child is lucky to have a picture blowing out candles on a birthday? Well Miss Sophia has nothing to worry about! :) In Will's first year (June 8th, 2007 - June 8th, 2008) I have 1,917 photos. Sophie has one week left until her birthday, and her current total (from April 20, 2009 - present) is 2,021! So I broke the statistic. Just sayin...