You know what I miss most after losing my entire blog to a freak database disaster?

All your comments!

There was some great stuff in there - ideas, links, funnies…  You guys are great and your contributions make doing this so much more fun than eating peanut butter straight from the jar.

So, what are your plans for this weekend?  I’ll start Friday with a crop with friends (yeah, most of my friends still use paper to scrapbook) and head into the weekend with virtually no plans.  I’m finally over the crud that ruined last weekend (a holiday weekend, no less) so we’ll probably get out of the house and do something with the kids.  The nearby dinosaur park has been mentioned a lot recently by my little ones, so we may be in for some T-Rex action.  I’ve got to remember to put on my sunscreen, though.  Lately, even minimal exposure has resulted in pinkened skin and I’m not interested in hastening the aging process at this stage in my life.

My teenager is furiously working on her plan to “get out of Europe” for the summer and escape to the blistering heat of Arizona.  She’ll be gone for four weeks and thinks she’ll be going shopping-crazy while there but she forgets that the rest of us still have to eat back home in Dresden.  I’m desperately trying to complete the Shutterfly album I’ve started for her about her time here because I want her to have an easy way to share her experiences with friends and family back home.  The problem is getting pictures, names and stories from her to populate said album.  Like many teenagers, she likes to keep her “stuff” to herself.  I realize it’s part of her growing independence but, darn it! how am I supposed to make this gift for her if she won’t cooperate!?!  How do all you mothers of teens get the photos and stories to complete layouts of these creatures?  Without raiding their Facebook and MySpace albums?

Well, check in with your weekend plans and suggestions and I’ll try to drop in tomorrow with my promised paper pack.

Tschüss!

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This is the post that I thought I’d lost - possibly the one that brought down my blog.  I’ve since posted a new article with the template I’d originally given away, so I updated this post to include another template. Ignore the duplicated layout, but I didn’t feel like leaving it out.


The kids are in school and the husband is at work and I’ve got a day to myself!  That doesn’t happen often enough for my liking. 

So, what do you think I did today?  Laundry? Floors? Bathrooms?  Well… okay, I couldn’t let the house fall apart, so I did do laundry and dishes… and I made dinner… but I also got some designing and scrapbooking done. 

My simple templates project is really taking off and I made about four more today, though I haven’t gotten around to packaging them for distribution so they’re not ready for sharing.  Here’s the scrapbooking I got done, though.  See if you can guess which ones are made from my new templates.

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This one’s for the album I’m making for my teen to remind her of her time in Europe and all the great trips she’s been privileged to take.  I used my template (it’s free to download) and everything else is from ON Designs, kits number 14 and 15.

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Here are two more pages for her album using the scant few pictures I could snag of her trip to Vienna last summer.  Both pages used templates I made today, papers from the Shabby Princess Promise kit and an alpha from Jolly Brolly by Jan Crowley. (say that 10 times fast!)

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And these last two pages were just freestyle, using the Fling kit that I earned by participating in the ADSR3, Lili’s Handcut Paper alpha and two elements by ON Designs.

Okay, so I told you which ones used my templates, anyway, and you didn’t have to guess but now you know what’s coming down the line. You decide if it’s worth the wait.  While you’re waiting, though, here’s the template promised above:

gm200408_pre

Click image to download.

You know the drill by now.  Let me know what you think if you download, don’t link directly to the download and tell all your friends where to get this great template.  Also, if you use it, I’d love a link.

Tschüss!

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I missed it.  And I so wanted to be there for it.  I planned to join a chat, or two, and post a freebie, or two…  I’m sorry.

But it wasn’t because I forgot.  I was sick all weekend (which drove the kids up the wall because they were dying to go to the Neustadtfest and jump on the bungee-trampoline) and could barely keep my eyes open for more than half an hour at a time.  What I ended up doing was sorting through thousands of cached files to find my lost posts and, as I started feeling better, reposting those articles that were complete.

What I really wanted to do was join the fun and give you the promised freebies.  So, I’m thinking… better late than never, right?  Today, I’ll give you the template I promised and maybe tomorrow I’ll be brave enough to give you a sample of my recent attempts at making paper.  I’m never quite sure about my papers, so I’ll need some encouragement if you like what I offer.

GM210408_pre

As you know, I like my payment in comments, so please be generous.

Tschüss!

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I totally stumbled and missed last month’s Songbird Avenue kit, but I didn’t want you to miss out on this opportunity.  For the month of May, Songbird Avenue’s guest designers have come together to create a big, beautiful collaboration kit to benefit the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

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This kit is created by Shabby Princess, Dianne Rigdon, Gina Miller, Robin Carlton, Carrie Stephens, Nancie Rowe-Janitz, Amy Wolff, Jenna Desai, Kate Hadfield, Jacque Larson, Michelle Coleman, Shabby Miss Jenn, Susan Bartolini, Kate Teague, Leora Sanford, Meredith Fenwick, Jan Crowley and Janet Phillips.  How cool is that?

The papers alone are enough to drool over but the elements are even more fabulous!  There’s something for everyone - whether you love wordart, sequins, buttons, ribbons or frames.

Remember, these kits are available for only one month so you just can’t put this off.  Go now and do your part for breast cancer while filling your stash with high-quality products.

Tschüss!

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Now that you’ve purchased a digital camera and begun taking photos, you need to start thinking about how to store and organize those images. 

My digital photos are getting out of hand.  Four year’s worth now, and all in a jumble.  I’d like to buy some software that will help manage all these files.” wrote Deborah W. of Benicia, California.

Digital photography seems so simple until you find yourself with a “My Pictures” folder on your computer filled with hundreds, possibly thousands, of photos and no way to locate a single specific photo that you’d like to print and send to your friends and family. What to do?

The Problems ~
This isn’t just a single problem, of course.  Nothing could be so easy.  Our problems are these:

  • Too many photos
  • Obscure, uninformative file and folder names
  • Potential loss of images

We have too many photos for several reasons.  First, we take more digital photos than we ever took when using film because the cost is no longer a factor.  Your raw footage has more than doubled if you’re like most of us.  Secondly, we don’t usually delete bad or unnecessary photos. It’s emotionally difficult to delete a photo and there’s always justification for keeping it.  And, finally, we’ve uploaded the photos more than once, renaming the files and placing them in different folders.

File names don’t make sense to most of us.  Your camera names your photos with a series of numbers that may not make sense to you if you never selected a setting other than “default.”  Your uploading software may offer to rename the files, but you have to make changes to the settings to take advantage of this feature.

Data loss plagues us all.  For those of us who’ve experienced a computer crash, the threat of data loss is the stuff of nightmares. But loss of data doesn’t have to be the result of something as apparent as a hard-drive crash ‘n’ burn.  It can creep in on “little cat feet” and steal your image files through corrupted CDs and DVDs.

Solutions ~

No one solution will provide everyone with satisfaction.  That’s why there are so many software products available for sorting and organizing photos. 

Deborah pled with her online friends at ClubScrapChat to help her find a good software solution for getting organized, but four years’ worth of photos may be an undertaking most of us would like to avoid.  If you’re just starting out, read on for ideas to keep you from the panic felt by Deborah.  If you’re like Deborah, we’ll still do our best to help you out of the quagmire.

Eliminate Problem of Too Many Photos
For the problem of too many photos, I’d never suggest that you take fewer photos.  The more photos we take, the better our photography skills become, so take photos of everything, everywhere.  What I will suggest, though, is that you discard photos that have no value - blurred-beyond-recognition shots, pix with your fingers displayed prominently, photos taken while your camera was in VGA mode (that aren’t intended for web use) and duplicates (how many pictures of the same giraffe do you need?). 

Learn to be brutal.  Review all your photos when you have enough time to really examine the picture for artistic value, lighting and framing.  Try to avoid deleting shots on-the-fly because you’re running short on media space.  Buy enough media cards to take all the photos you want.  That gives you the opportunity to determine what made a bad shot bad and a good shot good. Then delete the ones that you wouldn’t waste the money to print.

If you’ve just uploaded the photos more than once, you’re probably well-suited to a software program that puts your photos automatically into logical file folders and compares the file data to those already uploaded and notifies you when there is a conflict.  It’s also a good idea to delete the files from your media card and reformat it each time you perform an upload.

Fix File and Folder Names
Of all the problems associated with digital photography, this is the one that gets the most airtime.  Once a photo is uploaded, it’s impossible to locate unless your folders and file names are well-organized in a format that you’ll remember and understand.

You can make the file names of your photos mean something to you and to a recipient.  For some, that means using descriptive text.  For others, it’s more meaningful to use sequential numbering, while still others prefer a numbered date format.  This is a difference that can be accommodated by different software packages and, in some cases, by your camera itself.

digipi1 Responses to Deborah’s plea overwhelmingly suggested using a date-format folder system.  Jill Pechauer, of Illinois, organizes her folders in a folder tree similar to figure 1, while Peg Callihan suggested numbering the months to ensure that they remain in order even when Windows Explorer refreshes and alphabetizes.  Several respondents, like Jackie Baum, ordered their folders chronologically but added sub-categories to identify specific events like recitals, vacations or birthdays.  Peggy Schaefer uses a software program to help her rename her photos according to the event, then adds them to folders by date.

One idea to help identify photos in a folder that should appeal to scrapbookers and journal-keepers is to create a text file for each folder identifying each photo by file name and providing notes.  A program that does something similar and also assists in renaming files is Picnam by Andrew Rowley.  A 30-day free trial will let you decide if creating text files to help identify your pictures is something that will work for you.

If all you want is to have a software program assist you in the uploading and sorting process, there are several programs designed for just this.  ClubScrapChat members Jennifer Merrill, Deborah Love and Salina Z. all recommended Google’s free program Picasa for locating images on your computer and organizing them into orderly folders.  Photoshop Album was another program suggested by Yvette Patko and Staci B. and it’s often included as a trial or limited version with the purchase of a new computer.  Now might be the time to remind you that your digital camera likely came with software for uploading and organizing your photos, as well.

And now that your photos are organized on your computer, it’s time to tackle the problem of data loss.  Deborah’s question spurred comments from many indicating that organization should extend from the computer’s hard-drive to additional storage media and avoiding data loss was the natural evolution of the discussion.

Eliminate or Reduce Data Loss
When we took photos using film, we only had to ensure that we kept our negatives in relative safety to ensure that we could reproduce an image. Now, archiving photos takes on new challenges.

  • File format
    It’s important to archive your images in file formats that will be supported across software platforms and for many years, so choose a standardized format for saving your files.  TIFF and BMP are good uncompressed formats that should stay around for a while (do NOT use 8-bit BMP as this is not a true-color format!) Archiving JPG files is only recommended if the original photo was saved in JPG format. Do not convert image files to JPG then archive them. While you’ll save space, the conversion will cause unwanted loss of quality. 
  • Storage media issues
    archivalgold_productline The most common media for archiving images are currently the CD-R disc*or DVDs.  As a former Sales Associate for Staples, I was constantly amazed to learn that many of our customers believed their data to be permanently and safely stored once burned to a disc when, in fact, the life of a disc can be as short as two years and as long as 100 years.  Most people expect that each advance in media brings a greater level of permanence but damage can shorten the life of discs and the dyes used in manufacturing determine the disc’s life and stability. Interestingly, permanent markers were not found to inflict as much damage to discs as the adhesives in do-it-yourself labels.  For detailed information about disc life determined by disc composition, read this article in Information Week by Fred Langa.

    The factors determining longevity are varied, but average disc life is 5-10 years with proper care and storage.  Jennifer Huedepohl of Iowa works for her local newspaper archiving their digital photos and, as a matter of course, uses expensive archival-quality discs by Delkin.  It’s natural to lean toward a storage media with the longest life, but that leads to the final point.

  • Archiving strategies
    In my lifetime, I’ve seen the introduction of the microwave oven, cable television and personal computers, to name just a few.  Since I first became interested in computers, storage media has evolved from punch cards to magnetic tape to 5.25 floppies to 3.5 floppies to CDs to DVDs to flash memory.  Who, today, has a computer that will read any of the first three? or four?  The point is, media evolves and the devices that read them disappear.  Regardless of the method you choose to use to store your digital photographs, you’ll have to update it in ten years or less.  If you don’t plan to migrate your data as technology changes, you have to plan to lose it.  So, spending the extra money for a CD that lasts 100+ years may make sense if you need the peace of mind that comes with that reliability but, if cost is a factor, a medium-quality disc will perform adequately.

Deborah’s Decision ~
After sifting through all the advice, Deborah decided to download Picasa, the free program from Google, and is now, “happily organizing away!” 

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I’ve been working like crazy recovering posts from cache files in my temporary folder and my eyes are literally crossing.  It’s a seriously time-consuming project and I’m so grateful for the suggestion of one of the DST members to use Windows Live Writer for posting.  Not only has it solved my image posting issues (WordPress totally sucks at it) it’s made it easy to back up all my posts.  Such a relief!

So, what that means for you is not a lot of new posts in the coming days but you will get a chance to stroll down memory lane as I put back all those recovered old posts.

Tschüss!

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Right before my blog crashed and burned, I’d posted a template freebie.  So, for those who missed out, here it is again.

 Template

 And here’s what I did with it… so far…

 Alhambra

As you can see, while I can make a symmetrical template, I can’t “color between the lines” when it comes to using it myself. ;)

Click here to download and make sure to leave a comment.  It’s what keeps me going.

Tschüss!

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