by Carol A.
 |
| Welcome Spring! |
I have been asked to welcome in our April Theme. With pleasure, I announce that our Monthly Focus will concentrate on SPRING! We are all anticipating it, yearning for it, looking for it. I didn't wear a coat today! And I immediately regretted it! Spring is not quite here yet in my neck of the woods! So if you were expecting from me more buds, babies, and sunshine, I'm afraid I will disappoint you! Stuck indoors still, I have been spring cleaning! Remember, my word for the year is "simplify" and I am trying, my dears, I'm trying. I do not mean that I have been wearing the kitchen gloves - I am talking about cleaning up my act re: photography.
Every year when I go to my Cape May workshop during the first week of May, something happens to my computer. It's almost a running joke. So this year starting January 2nd (literally) - I began preparing. First I signed up with an off site backup company - it took an entire month to do the initial back-up. Then I called my wonderful techie, whom I was referred to by my teacher last year, and asked him to help clean it up.
 |
| This is what I needed to persevere |
But it's always so embarrassing and confusing. I was one of the first to get Lightroom and I read two books as I installed it. I thought I was starting everything off perfectly. But then I read an article suggesting a different workflow, and another on a new labeling system. I sent things to other applications and to my desk top, I brought in scanned old photos. In short, I screwed it all up. As a result, he found images all over my hard drive, labelled all different ways - I would never have been able to find what I was looking for! The only way he could straighten me out was to move every single image off my drive , importing them to a huge external drive. Then he reimported through Lightroom by date to all my small external drives. I now have drives for each year and only 2013 on my laptop.Each January, I will move the current year off and begin a new one.
I am now: (1) Mountain Lioned
(2) Lightroom 4'd
(3) Import pre-setted
(4) External hard drived
(5) Off-site backed up
(6) i-clouded
(7) instructed to take my key-wording
more seriously
 |
| This is what I looked like when he was done explaining |
My intentions are so good, but my brain is swimming! I'm pedaling so hard to follow all these changes! I am determined to fully learn these systems! I can see that they will simplify and organize my process in the future - if I keep them up! I would encourage you all to try to keep up too! Maybe we can muddle through a simplified yearly clean-up together - so that we can spend the rest of our year pulling up beautiful pictures to show each other!
Now - lift me up, dear readers - post your SPRING shots of babies, and buds, and rabbits, and sunshine. We'll feature them. I need them to remember why I'm putting myself through all this!!
 |
| There was a simpler time.... |
Make sure to check out the Monthly Focus tab at the top of the blog to
see Leigh's lovely photo introducing our April theme of "spring"!
7 comments:
We have talked about this so many times, the importance of backing up off site. External hard drives are wonderful and I use them but one sits mere inches from my computer drive. If one goes, the other goes. Also, housekeeping, workflow ... sometimes so hard to get a handle on, isn't it? It took me a few years to devise a system and Lightroom helped me simplify. It's not perfect but it's light years better than when I started out. Keep up the good work, Carol!
You know that I know all about this kind of spring cleaning, although mine was fall cleaning! I think this has to happen to you before you really do something about it. I'm still far from perfectly organized, but I'm at least heading in the right direction. Our more "mature" brains find it a bit harder to learn all this new technology!
ugh...i tell you...the technology aspect of photography can be so uninspiring! i am hoping to get lightroom soon to help manage my files and get my workflow more efficient. the thing i need to do is work on is backing up more consistently. i have an external hard drive but i think i should probably look into offsite too! thanks for the reminder.
What is your fee to go over all of this with me? :) I have external hard drive, have researched off site, but not done anything about it yet, don't know how to use icloud. Have Lightroom, but fear that I may have my photos in multiple places and not even know it.. .Sigh....no spring cleaning here. Just confusion.
Hey Judy - I can explain some of it - and I can tell you how to see if they're all over - but I have to swallow the rest of it for a while! I think once I start working with it, it will make more sense! I hope so!
Oh I know he joys of backing up I have just done a complete backup of my computer we have backups in 3 different places and this time it took 24 hours !!!!!
I'm with Judy, with everything else going on, I don't hardly have a minute to edit photos right now. I could use some spring cleaning in my brain, my house, my hard drive....calgon take me away! haha
Post a Comment
Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. If for any reason you are unable to leave a comment here on this post, please leave your comment on our Facebook page or in our Flickr discussion group. We love hearing from you!