Weekend Projects

I have been trying to come up with projects that will allow me to step away from writing for a few hours and let my brain rest and play with ideas without forcing them. I have other projects -- The big one, of course, is pictures. And when I can, I love to go off and do pictures. I should go take some right now, in fact.

But one of the huge things that has driven me nuts over the years is the inability to find older pictures -- like anything more than a month ago. I have tried all kinds of picture sorting programs, but the problem is that I have too many pictures. I could not possibly get them all on one computer. So I end up doing sets, sorting them, putting them on disks -- but then I have to go through disk after disk trying to find stuff.

I decided the only way I could keep an easy way to find things would be on paper. I began thinking notecard size -- but then I realized I don't need much in info, so I could do it on business card size.

And this is a screen save of how it's working. I'm actually pretty pleased! Yes, it will take me years to get everything added in, but it's such a simple process that I think I can keep up with it.

I started with the pictures from my first digital camera, the Sony FD7, because I have the least number of pictures from this camera and they're all on one disk. There are only 2638 of them, and some of them aren't going to make it to the cards. (I've already taken 6810 pictures with the new camera, by the way, which I've only had since February.) The old FD7 was a less than 1 megapixel camera, so the pictures are quite small. I rarely look at them -- but there is some fun stuff here, like the house before we remodeled and cats who are no longer with us.

The great thing about this is that I can really do the cards of the pictures in any order I want. All I have to do is number the disk they come from and store those disks in sequential order somewhere so I can find the pictures later. If I skip from disk-to-disk, I'll have to be certain to put a slip of paper in saying which pictures on a disk are already done -- but again, no real problem there. I'll only do pictures off of disks -- nothing still on the hard drive since I wouldn't be able to tag it for a final destination. Eventually I'll even scan the print and slide stuff.

I can print off the pages at any time, and just save the original pages in sets and copy them off to disks without filling the computer up with every single picture. I'll likely buy some cheap thick paper instead of buying the actual business card stock, and cut them up myself. Though I think I have some business cards around here, and I'll probably start with them. I can print them in black and white if I want, but I think I'll go ahead and just do a draft color printing instead -- just enough to let me know what the picture really looks like.

When I have the cards done they'll be put in boxes by the top tag on the card, and then sorted by the second tag. (Cats/Zelda, Things/Computer, People/Russ, etc)

How many pictures do I have? I'm betting over 100,000. So far I've gotten 43 cards done. (grin)

See, this is the kind of thing I do because I think it's fun (yeah, I'm crazy) and because it's not hard work and keeps my mind off of other things -- like broken cars, lack of money, sick cats, etc. And it also allows my mind to wander though things like thinking about the new novel and coming up with bits and pieces to add in.

So, not much writing so far today, but a nice relaxing time.

As long as I keep the kittens off the keyboard.