organize my photos

Love taking shots in this light. This is a rare one with full-on circular jesus rays. It was fairly spectak.

Just a reminder to Backup all your photos and documents regularly – either by uploading to a photo site, or burning to cd/dvd and then storing it out of your house somewhere…

My hard drive crashed recently and I lost about 95% of my photos and videos including about 4 years worth of stuff and mostly of my 4 year old son. : [

So remember to figure out a back up system and if it seems overwhelming – at least START it… because something is better than nothing!

So, my yahoo photos is moving to flicker – except that when I tried to access it to download my photos (stuff I uploaded with my old computer which I’ve since lost) to my new computer, it wouldn’t let me access things because it was right in the middle of moving all the stuff to flicker. I held off linking up my yahoo photos and flickr accts. because (various reasons) but anyway, I was panicked because I thought, oh god – this is all I have left! and now I can’t even access this! But I have been steadily trying to move everything on yahoo photos back down to my new hard drive – one by one – no way to batch it – bastiges!!! but at least it’s working.

Also: i remembered at some point that a few photos were posted on 43T along the way so I’ve been working on grabbing those down as well.

Also: Sandi said that she was going through things the other day and found a bunch of JD she’s going to give me – so that rocks.

Remember to keep asking people to give me what they’ve got!

So I lost everything digital that I had… (see my ‘thing’ about killing my hard drive http://www.43things.com/things/view/1694713) and only had a small percentage printed, so… I’m trying to find everything I can that might be “out there.” Now yahoomail is going away – or the photo section is moving to flickr and since what I have on yahoo photos is all I got, I’m not taking any chances. That means I have to download all my photos that are on there, one by one as they do NOT SUPPORT batch downloading for some ridiculous reason!!! argh.

BAD NEWS:
I just found out I lost EVERYTHING on my hard drive. ALL my digital photos from the last 4 years and all my digital movies from the last couple years. (plus all of my work and personal stuff – oh gad zooks! I can’t even go there – I don’t even want to remember all of it!) but of course the killer is the photos and home movies – especially those of my 4 year old son.

SO BACK UP YOUR STUFF!
I had only gotten prints made sporadically and backed things up onto CD even less frequently… consequently, I lost about 95% of my photos. I had only recently gotten serious about backing them up or uploading them so I didn’t get very far before this happened.

MY ADVICE:
Get into a rigid habit of uploading your photos to a photo service for printing AS SOON AS you transfer them from your camera to the computer, go ahead and upload them! Even if you don’t get them printed right away the service will have reliable back up servers. When you get the prints made, you can enjoy the photos more and it also serves as another back up to your digital storage. Also, don’t forget to learn how to burn your digital camera movies onto DVDs and do it regularly. Set up an exchange with your friends or families so you have a back up set stored at someone else’s house in case you have a fire or water damage. These are precious memories! Take care in backing them up.

ELECTRICAL SURGES:
We think this happened due to a series of storms we had a few weeks ago -we ended up without power for about 5 days. I had an old surge protector which I unplugged from the wall when the storms started. I’ve since been advised most surge protectors are only reliable for a year and need to be replace regularly. They get damaged over time depending on the frequency of power surges you experience. I had no idea this is how they worked. We also had a transformer blow behind our house the night before the storm. While we were out of power, I plugged my computer and printer into an extension cord run from across the street. It booted up fine and worked great for half an hour and then crashed suddenly with no warning. I kept trying to reboot it after getting error messages and I believe this actually caused more damage. Our computer technicians couldn’t do anything with it and recommended sending it to a high-tech lab in Canada but they also weren’t able to do anything with it…

Don’t let my trauma be for naught – back up your stuff today like it’s the last chance you have to do it and you will not regret it!! Thanks for listening,

This one should be fun. All other moms with kids with special needs. So no sadness looking at baby pictures or any of that – or if there is, you know you’re in good company. I am not sure yet what I will work on maybe I’ll just see what tips and tricks other people have for organizing things?? I need help!

Spent 3 hours at Archiver’s sunday for my birthday. Only finished one page, but I got all my albums identified and worked out an outline for what projects I have going – so it was an organization session which was really needed.

I think it’s wise to keep up with ordering the prints and focus on scrapbooking the current stuff and gradually work backwards. I am definitely NOT going to make a high-art statement for every page. I am going to make more of a decorated photo album with maybe some journaling added in. OK, that sounds like a scrapbook, but I don’t have time to design page after page – what ARE These people thinking?!

Found winkflash – seemed like it had the best prices and nice quality prints… I just got back an order of over 300 prints (most of which I shouldn’t have gotten printed! – will have to cull more carefully next time) but anyway, it was only like $25. Well worth it! I am going to try to gradually get everything I have on my hard drive (that’s worth saving) printed – then I will have 2 back up systems – 1) photos will be stored on winkflash system 2) I will have prints. So that’s kind of a relief because I just had a close call with my computer not long ago and had that feeling like – UGH! I have just lost all of Jibby’s childhood.

Still need to figure out a way to get the digital movies from my camera onto DVD somehow. The things I’ve tried so far haven’t worked. I don’t have time for this!!