Photo Pain

I have had photos online since 1996 or so. Obviously I like taking pictures, as I'm in the tens of thousands, all captioned and organized. My harddrive took a hit this last winter -- not to worry, I didn't lose any data. But the online solution failed with the drive and I've been working ever so slowly to rebuild the system in a functional manner. All sorts of things have gone awry, including network connectivity, router setup, plumbing issues, etc. (The January Plumbing Debacle took the PCs in the basement offline for a while for safety's sake)

So it's been six months and the albums are not yet available. I've been amassiing the images all this time, and as we get closer to being able to relaunch them they've been slowly sorting themselves. But there's a lot of work to be done there yet.

In the meanwhile, you can check my Picasa web albums or my facebook albums. Most of those are pics from my phone, but the quality is not bad at all. In fact as I've been sorting images I'm becoming less and less able to determine the source - camera or phone camera. Which is either an endorsement of my phone, or a signal that I need a new camera.

I have looked at alternate hosting solutions, as well. I really really really really like hosting my own images as it offers a local, convenient, highly customizable solution. And it won't file chapter 11 and take my images with it, like an online host may. It doesn't offer instant offsite storage, links to professional printers, etc. But it's home and comfortable for me. That said, I'm trying very hard to like Picasa and their web album technologies. One of the reasons I like my homebrew system is that I have a slick captioning system. But Picasa Web Albums have an even slicker way of associating people with images, which is half the reason I caption - for the searchability. Obviously I'm picky about all of this.

But rest assured the photo albums will be back, and when they do come back I plan on having an RSS feed so you can tell when and what the new albums are, etc. I'll also post to this blog when I get them back online and stable. I'll also be trying my very best to get the daily Craig Kid Picture emails working again. I know lots of Grandmas and Aunts and Uncles are jonesing for their Craig pictures!