*This is a boring post that explains why I haven't written in a while. I will save you the trouble of reading it if you don't understand photography or computers. But if you know about computers, please read this. *
Oh here I am. After being home from my trip, that I wrote so fondly of, for over 2 weeks. I had all this neat stuff to write about and I still want to, but I got hung up on the one thing...my pictures. I must have taken 700 pictures on the trip. Did I mention that I LOVE my digital camera? But uploading, sorting, organizing, resizing, sharing and trying to get so many of the dang things on the internet is, well, time consuming at best. I have literally taken the last 3 whole days to get them all uploaded to a printer of choice, and order the ones I want. Throw in a photo shoot and an upcoming trip to my Dad's that I realized I also needed to order about 50 pictures from the last year to take to him, and putting together photos from a women's ministry event and you have a mess. It takes so dang long to upload just one photo. There is no really reliable way to do it more than one at a time, and I have probably had to upload over a thousand of them over the last 3 days. I spent the 2 weeks before that poking at the job, but not really doing anything about it. Well, between about 4 different printers, I am only going to end up with about 200 prints. Some are duplicates, some are for that photo shoot I did today, and some are for the women's ministry. I got in on some free deals by ordering them from different labs-although I paid extra to have my photo shoot from today and some nature pics done by my pro lab. No, had to be more than 200 cause that only came to $38 (+or-) and I know I've spent over $60 today on photo developing. I can't tell you how many times I have stared at an "upload failed" message and pulled my hair out over it.
So if any computer developers out there read this. Please develop a program that does quick fixes on pics like red eye correction, lightening and saturation, a good sharpener, that you can upload pics in batches from a thumbnail browser, TO THE PROCESSOR OF CHOICE. UGH! I had to use a different program for each of these tasks and each processor has a different way of uploading. I like the thumb browser at Mpix.com, the correcting tools of Picasa2, the detailed corrections of PS7 (although quick fixes are hard because the program is so involved and well, it just takes forever to load the darn program), and the fact that I can order pictures and pick them up in an hour at Wal-Mart. Wal-Marts BIGGEST drawback, is that the processing is cheap looking, even the paper is flimsy. Picasa does great quick corrections, but I have yet to figure out how to save them. You have to send those corrections to THEIR developers and while I chose Wal-Mart, I would like to have sent some to Mpix.
Okay, this is really a gripe session that no one but a photographer or a programmer will understand. Thank you for allowing me to do it. I will move on now.
