Now, I did wonder, having had a lengthy and nerve racking experience some years back with Google Picasa, if this was a tongue in cheek "National Day" direct from Google...if you allow Picasa access to your images it saves and saves and saves them...we ended up with so many duplicate files before we managed to eradicate it from our computers. I think in the end we grew so desperate with the situation that many legitimate files also got deleted, sigh...there is no such thing as a free lunch nor a quick photo saving programme.
Back in the day, a pre-digital day I am talking about here, photographs were things I had to save quite hard for. Firstly there was the camera. As a child my first camera was a wonky old Box Brownie inherited from older siblings...one simply worked out how to use it by trial and error. Films were a costly item on one with a very slim allowance, boosted by washing family cars and cleaning shoes and boots...then after all that effort and the anxiety of having to manually wind the film to the next position, chopping off peoples heads when taking the shot, getting the light wrong, one needed to get the film developed. This was also fraught with anxiety and expense all over again. One paid for the images whether or not they were viewable, (mine mostly were too overexposed or blurry).
Eventually I transitioned to my first Instamatic, with it's dinky little film cartridges and my life became a lot simpler...it was such a breeze by comparison...but no easier financially. I did, though, manage to take more successful images than previously.
To get back to the topic of saving ones photographs, back then it was comparatively easy as they were so much fewer in number. Nowadays, with my phone able to give me the quality of image sufficient to my needs, wherever and whenever I fancy, things have become far more difficult...images by the thousands!
When my parents had both died, a lovely brother-in-law scanned a lot of the family images from their photo albums and then distributed them about the family, so at least we had some of those precious images available. The quality was not brilliant but it did feel as if at least we had those memory prompts of past happy days to cling onto. Great...the technology was improving, get them into a database, I thought. Scan the contents of our own albums and shoe boxes full of photos. Easy peasy! Good old days of ignorance, if only I knew!
Now, although having a suitably sized EHD, (and we are talking several terabytes here), dedicated to the storage of our images, I find that we still have the problem of file duplication. Both with multiple folders added by various family members full of unsorted images of which 99.9% need to be deleted. I tend to dump all images off my phone into a folder on my computer, date it and think to sort and edit later...there are many of these, still waiting.
As well, there may be multiple images of the one subject, as taking digital photographs is just too easy. One takes several images, thinking to delete the surplus ones when editing is completed and the best image kept, but somehow one doesn't always complete these tasks, and so it goes...now we have just as big a mess within our digital files as when the hard copy images were all jumbled into boxes and rummaged through with abandon by the children while seeking a specific photo.
Truly, I would rather not think about it. I did try, a few years back after a back injury laid me up for some months, but the job was one of those boring and very repetitive tasks that require a lot of concentration and I gave up on it as being too difficult as I didn't really have a definite purpose. Just why I wanted them organised and catalogued, I couldn't say, other than as I generally like to be (very) organised, maybe this failure in managing the streamlined storage of a few thousand photographs is what is causing me such angst...meanwhile, I wonder if one can set fire to an EHD...resolve the issue permanently...mmm
However, none of this waffling gets me closer to a decision regarding the focus of my inchie for today. Oh, but wait...yes it does!
For the matting layer I used a scrap of printed paper with a display of photo frames...it seemed appropriate.
The weather here is quite lovely at the moment, warm sunny days but with still a lovely bit of chill over night. I have planted out most of the seedlings I have had growing...Tim is not best pleased as he needs to water them morning and evening for me until they get established, but the garden, small and basic that it is, is starting to look more settled and all the plants seem to have settled into their allotted spaces most comfortably. The mulching should keep the weeds under control, fingies crossed, for him...gardening was never on his favourite activity list!
I have been getting some gardening assistance from a pair of white cheeked rosellas on the deck. They have been having a ball pruning my succulents...nipping off some stems, chomping on some flower heads and having a happy time of it, bless them!
Bye for now, salad to make for supper,
Di.