This year my resolution is to try and keep my resolution from last year.
NOTE: this post is probably very boring for non-photographers
That being said, I've given up on trying to organize my photos in exactly the structure I originally wanted to. I had originally written a program to gather up my giant pile of photos, weed out the duplicates, and move around the remaining photos into a sensible folder structure (like year\month\day). (It also did other things, like add metadata for copyright, etc.) The original program was meant for a one-time use to clean out the attic, so to speak.
The program I use to view and fix up my photos, Lightroom, also imports into somewhat sensible folder structures, but unfortunately not the structure I liked. So I spent most of last year avoiding importing my photos because of this incongruence. When I was forced to import photos, I would (mis)use my program to do what I wanted, then re-import into Lightroom. This was quite a hassle, and on top of it, I couldn't use this technique for Carolyn because she has a Mac and my program was written for Windows. So I generally didn't touch my photos much.
I've decided to stop being so particular (Carolyn has a different word for it), and just let Lightroom import the way it wants. I've converted all my existing photos into the new structure, and I will do the same for Carolyn.
Furthermore, I finally gave up on building my own back-up server and just bought a NAS, so I can schedule daily backups of our photos (instead of manually backing up to external hard drives). It's all about stream-lining the process so that you don't even know it's there. Hopefully these changes will make the developing part of photography more enjoyable again.
PS For those of you who are interested in my folder structure hangup, this what I wanted:
< year >/< month# >-< month >/< day# >
where month is the name of the month, month# and day# are the ordinal values (like 01 for January).
For example, a given folder would look like:
2007/03-March/17
The months are sorted in the correct order, but you can still see the name for quick access. (Maybe it's just me, but my brain is slightly faster at recognizing 'March' as opposed to '03').
Unfortunately, Lightroom only provides something like the following:
< year >/< month# >/< day# >
or
< year >/< month >/< day# >
The former of which doesn't show the name, and the latter of which isn't nicely sorted. And for some reason, Lightroom does not allow customization of the folder structure, even though they provide customization of file names. I don't think that this would be very difficult to provide, but I expect they just don't have time.
This is what I eventually chose to use in Lightroom:
< year >/< year >-< month# >/< year >-< month# >-< day# >
It's not pretty, but it's organized.
An end to the Intrigue
All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my beloved 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue. The doctors..er.. mechanics say she needed some major operations just to make it through the winter, and her prospects in the spring didn't look to promising. So Carolyn and I took her for one final drive last night (but, not too far because we didn't want to have to walk home).
Somehow the car lasted 12 years, and almost 300,000km. We visited a lot of places together, including a 15,000km trip around the USA. In the blistering heat of New Mexico is where the temperature gauge stopped working. Here you can see the Check Engine light, faithfully assuring me that my engine was still located under the hood, ready to be checked.
Here is the Intrigue after the last drive. My father used to say "she looks a lot better than she drives". Very true.
The next morning she got strapped to the back of a trunk and taken to a better place. I can imagine her now... parked up there with the big guy himself (Henry Ford), looking down in jealousy at our awesome Toyota Matrix. So long Intrigue, it was fun.
