Dad pointed out that if you look at the photo album on the site it seems as though our lives began in 2001. It’s like we were part of the witness protection program and got relocated that year. So we set about to start scanning in some photos but found out that like our printer that went from only printing in pink to not printing at all, our scanner seems to be completely buggered. I’ve been looking at this Epson as a replacement, since it is suppose to be good at doing both photos and slides, but I may need to find another solution for the slides if it doesn’t work out.

On top of the analog to digital conversion, I’ve started working on tagging the 56,000 or so photos that I have organized in Picasa. With a few videos, this takes up over 80 GB. I had been labeling them by putting them in albums, which allow for cross-referencing, but that solution became unwieldy with the number of albums I needed. It turns out that in Picasa, you can add keywords to your photos, although there is no obvious reference to this fact in the interface. You have to hit ctrl-k to bring up the keyword dialog for a given photo or set of photos. What is really nice is that for JPG files the keywords are added directly to the file in the IPTC keyword section. This means that if I send a picture to someone else, by whatever method, the associated keywords will be retained. Some services, like flickr, will even use the IPTC keywords as tags.

I’ve rather roughly tagged my way back to the end of 2006, but that’s where I run into a problem. You see, in January of 2007 I reinstalled Windows. The thing about Windows XP is that SP1, which is the version I have on my disk, does not understand drives over 138 GB (depending on what you mean by GB). So when I connected my 200GB hard drive, which had been running merrily under SP2, Windows attempted to ‘fix’ it and fried a whole bunch of files, seemingly at random. So I have to go back and create a list of all the photos that I lost and get a copy from whoever gave it to me. If it happens to be one of mine, I’m basically SOL. This is why we back things up, folks. This is also why I call Windows a virus.

As if all these photos weren’t taking up enough space, especially given that I’m now mirroring them on my NAS, I found a neat firmware hack for Canon Digic II & Digic III cameras (my Powershot SD1000 happens to have one of these chips). The two features that I find really cool are the ability to shoot in RAW and the ability to do automated bracketing. With this last feature and a nice Gimp plugin, I was very easily able to create an HDR photo. This hack also allows me to have the percentage of battery life left displayed on the screen at all times. On top of that, there’s a very interesting scripting interface. I currently have it set up so that I have to install the hack every time I want to use it, so that I can go back to the original firmware by just turning off the camera, but it is possible to install it permanently.

[Joe]