Digital Camera, I Love You!

Back when my daughter was born, we were taking pictures of everything. "What a cute smile!" (click) "Oh she is biting that toy" (click) "She's finally asleep!" (click) (click) (click) (click) (click). This ended up to be one roll of standard 35mm film each day. Two months later, we were spending more on film developing, than on diapers! We started doing research on the multitude of options. The day before my sister-in-law's wedding in June 2002, we bought a Sony digital camera.

This camera, along with a 128mb memory stick (MS) allowed us to take approximately 60 pictures at a time. During the wedding, one of us would run upstairs in the hotel, download pictures, and come back. If I remember right, we took close to 600 pictures this way. According to family members, some of our pictures turned out better than the professional photographers. :) We were able to share our pictures out on Ofoto, and anyone could view them within a few days after the wedding. (The photographer took almost 2 months.) Plus, they could order copies for themselves, and we did not have to pay for the processing!!

Now 3 years later, we still have that camera, and have invested in second, smaller Sony camera (DSC-W5). This camera, has 32mb on-board and can use the Sony PRO Memory Sticks! With our 4GB PRO memory stick, we can take 1,660 (5 megapixel) pictures on a single outing! We never transfered pictures to the laptop the entire 8-days in Maui (over 750 pictures and videos). Additionally, the camera and 4Gb MS allow us to record up to 3 hours of continuous DVD quality video! No longer need to bring along our bulky Mini-DV video camera either!!

Unfortunately with digital cameras there are a number of technical considerations. If my computer where I am storing all the images dies, catches fire, or is stolen, I will lose 3 years of pictures. Also, with the simplicity of taking pictures and considering the low cost of viewing them, we now take multiples of each image (horizontal, vertical, with smiles, with a pose, candid, standing in front of the car, behind the car, etc.). In essence, there is virtually no limitations to how many pictures we can take on a single outing.
Technically, what does all this mean?

• Storage concerns: Well, we currently have over 20gb or at least 10,000 pictures stored on my computer at home. To make sure I do not lose all 3 years of pictures, I backup the pictures, in folders to DVD-R's on a regular basis. In addition to off-line storage, I am now looking into adding a third hard drive to my comptuer to mirror the drives. This will create a real-time copy of all our pictures on a second source. If the first hard drive crashes, I would always have the second.
• Indexing: To help categorize all my pictures and help locate images, a year ago, I added an index document to each collection of pictures. The index file is a simple text document containing a list of words describing the collection of pictures ("trip to SF Zoo", "My Birtday Party"). Using Windows SEARCH functionality, I search all the subfolders for this single document containing for keywords in each document. "My Birthday".
• Organization: To make it easier to locate a single image, I have been organizing images into folders based on date downloaded from the camera. At first I was using OFoto's utility to download the images, but this did not accomodate the videos on the camera. So they had to be transfered by hand. Then I developed a Batch Script to process photos and one to process the videos. Finally I combined the script into a single button press on my computer.I insert the MS into my card reader, then double-click the icon to run the script! The script moves all the images to a new folder (on Windows XP) to "My Documents\My Pictures\Year\Date" and the Videos to "My Documents\My Videos\Year\Date". The script even copies the index file into the new folder and opens it for editing

To use the attached file, you will need a unZIPing program like WinZip or 7-Zip. Open the file and extract the two files to your My Pictures folder. I'd suggest creating a shortcut on your desktop. (Hold down right-mouse button, drag to your desktop, release file and select "Create Shortcut".)

Copy and paste the following code into a file called MoveFiles.BAT. You will need to edit the script to reference the drive your memory stick connects to. Change the line Set MyMS= to point to your drive.

The attached VBScript is a work in progress. It needs a file set up on your removable media to read from. Then you can run the script to move files either direction. I use the same script to move MP3s onto my SD Ram chip.