I shall return...

OK, so I have been asked by enough people now about when I will return to writing my blog.  I am going to start up again in the next days, I have just been updating my "blogging environment" which is so say reinstalling all the applications I have used to create this masterpiece of mediocraty.

In case you are curious... what kept me off blogging for the past (many) months?

Aside from laziness on my part, the main thing keeping me from the blog was photo management.  I was trying to find a way to get my photos under control.   Picasa has been my traditional go-to program, but as the volume of photos grew and my HD filled up, I became less satisfied with it.  I wanted to move all my photos to a network drive.  In the version of Picasa I had last summer, there did not seem to be a way to do this.

I gave Adobe Photoshop Elements a try, which had a couple of features I really liked
1) chance to have all photos on a network location
2) chance to make "stacks" of similar photos to save space.

Elements had a free 30 day trial so I gave it a go.  It was ok, but I became discouraged quickly based on two things.  First, the initial time needed to organize my quite huge photo collection was daunting and second, the program performance was slow.  The second one was the killer for me, a slow running program will kill my enthusiasm pretty fast.  I hate to wait and Picasa had made me very accustomed to a fast response time.

So, my compromise is to have muliple photo repositories... on my main system, I keep all my photos on the network drive, then on the laptop I blog from, a copy of the last 12 months photos.  That keeps the program running fast and my photo storage needs to a reasonable level.

Honestly that was about my biggest limiter and when I write it out here, it makes me think I was just being lazy. 

So, I am not sure how well I keep at the blog this time, but I will do what I can to have some posts go up relatively regularly.

-F