Snaps

Today was wet, grey, and rather wintery. It was a good day to make sure there was stuff to do in the house. As the Gorse Fox has been processing the recently found box of photos, that seemed like a good project.

So it was that he started to sort, scan, and catalogue the old photos from 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984. Very satisfying to get them done and onto the digital library. By tonight they will also exist on two separate backup systems and they are already on the web library.

Talking of digital library - the Gorse Fox manages his photo library using Google's Picasa. This has been a wonderful tool over the years but, in their infinite wisdom, Google have decided to cease development. Though the system will continue to work for now - there is now long term guarantee that it will not be broken by some update that comes along in the Operating System. This gives the Gorse Fox a bit of a dilemma. With well over 33,000 photos in his catalogue, he cannot afford to have a management system that may randomly collapse in the future. For this reason, he has started to look for an alternative solution that will respect his current library structure and offer the same sorts of facilities as Picasa.

At first "Aperture" seemed like a great fit - the the Gorse Fox read that that too had been withdrawn from development. There seem to be plenty of solutions, but few that allow the GF to maintain his existing (well-thought out) library structure. Unfortunately the solution that seems to be closest to what's needed is "Lightroom" - and that is a bit pricey. The Gorse Fox is also fairly convinced that the migration from Picasa will involve a vast amount of hand crafting.