isoglossia

Let it end as it began:

This month of daily posting is at a close. Get ready for December.

This post is dedicated to Gaoo whose genuine interest in my Polish diary I found really touching. I’m afraid, though, that once Gaoo learns what my writing is about, she will never, ever, ever, ever want to read anything by me again.

I’m not quite sure if that comes from the emigrant syndrome or it comes with age but I can’t help but thinking that I’ve recently become marginally sentimental. Or, it also came to my mind, is it just that innate Polish-ness that draws me to meticulous reorganizing and cleaning up every time Christmas appears on the horizon. This year the phenomenon crept upon me unexpectedly around mid-November and, just in accordance with my recent tendency to minimize the amount of work that I actually do, I’ve been trying hard to introduce some logic to my photo archives.

Unfortunately, every single picture I come across brings some precious memories or bright thoughts, hence all I do is spend time trying to determine when, or where, or under what circumstances, or - most of all - why a certain picture was taken. Why’s appear every time I see myself doing something awfully embarrassing, or wearing clothes that no one else would wear even if that were to mean showing up naked. The biggest WHY of all, though, is the why that appears every time I’m trying to convince myself that I do belong to the family of S. (Slovenian branch, I mean, Elsa and Gaoo are my sisters no matter what).

Ever since Adam’s and later Alek’s arrival to this world I’ve been frantically trying to find some obvious resemblance between my sons and me. And the more I investigate, the more likely it appears that somebody here is trying to make me believe that these kids are mine as watching them on a daily basis I see no traces of me in either of them whatsoever. Duped? I might have been, yet facing the situation as it is, let’s at least make a humble attempt at placing myself within the family. So here’s my way of thinking.

The likeness of the two below is just uncanny, so there is no need to go into any discussion here.

The search for similarities between Adam and me, though, turned out to be more than challenging. Having found nothing or very little (two legs, two arms, one head analogy, mostly) that we have in common presence-wise I can always use JDS’s argument. Yet since I once choose not to believe what people say, I had no other way but to find some highly twisted sophisticated argumentation.

Which, by the way, I arrived at while browsing through our photo archives.

There is a whole set of pictures taken more than thirty years ago by AWB (respec!) with, probably, an old Smiena which constitutes a very vivid memory of my childhood as one of the treasures hidden in the front room cabinet together with family photographs and other stuff whose preciousness can only speak to an average Pole who experienced the eighties there.

So here are the photographs:

Which might seem familiar to those who read the weblog regularly and remind them of another photograph:

Which photograph depicts Aleksander Julian, brother of Adam Horace whose irrefutable affinity with JDS remains undoubted.
Of course I am aware of the fact that brotherhood between the two needs more evidence. So, let’s consider this:

Oh, no! That’s not the same baby seen from two different angles. Adam on the left, Alek on the right, right?
Both at more or less the same age, precious three months.

Thus…
Since Alek does appear to resemble Adam who, in turn, is undoubtedly JDS’s son and, at the same time, there is all evidence that me as a baby and Alek as a baby bear some common traces, I can quite safely assume that there are some elements of me in Adam, right?

Luckily, I can always go beyond physical resemblance and remember the heart-warming fact that Adam’s character, at least, resembles mine. He shows more or less the same amount of misanthropy as I do.

That, though, calls for another post.

Earlier today Magda posted the 3000th^[*] photo to our Flickr account. In the 30-odd months since we opened the account that’s a pretty good average, and when you consider that we’ve paid out only $75 for all that storage and bandwidth, not to mention good times, we still think Flickr is a great bargain. With life the way it is, though, we don’t post to Flickr nearly as much as we’d like, and once the pictures are there we are far less proactive about tagging, titling, describing, grouping, and generally archiving them as we might be. And this is telling, as only a tiny fraction of the pictures we take actually make it to Flickr at all; checking the cameras, it appears that in the last 30 months we’ve taken nearly 14,000 photographs.

Two friends, both readers of this site and enthusiastic photographers, are regular correspondents on topics that range far and wide, but which frequently touch on Backing Up. One, just today, writes:

“From what I can tell, you two are at opposite ends of the pack-rat
spectrum. What do you do about saving old photos? My iPhoto library
is over 25 GB and things are getting cumbersome. My little macbook
only has a 120 GB hard drive.”

Here’s what we do:

• Dump everything into iPhoto. We do this on two machines (desktop and laptop), which creates a de facto backup, though subsequent edits Magda (desktop) and I (laptop) do will not correspond.
• Delete obvious dogs, sometimes, but really not all that often. Okay, our library is full of shots of the inside of the camera bag. Jesus, and they’re all backed up all over the place, every one of them taking up 10 MB.
• Upload to Flickr the pictures we like the most, generally. In effect, Flickr replaces our obligation to cull in iPhoto, which further leads to an accruing mess of good and bad photos eternally taking up disc space/attention. In the manner of the serial denialist, I am happy to use Flickr as a backup of the photos I am too lazy to back up properly, and so, unlikely as it may seem today, it does concern me that one day Flickr could disappear or become compromised.

That’s it. Our so-called system is all but non-existent. There is a movement afoot to create a Platonic ideal of an iPhoto library consisting of both archival material and ever-changing new photos. For this task I am using the freeware iPhoto Library Manager to enable multiple libraries. This is a great thing; keep a small, manageable, portable library in your laptop and a master or archive library on an external disc. In theory, anyway. The problem with this system is that you have to manage it, and when I say ‘you’ I mean ’some human’, which is the weak link in our system to begin with.

I’d say (and my saying it does not mean that I actually do it myself) that the way to manage a large photo library is simple enough given a modicum of self-discipline:

• Delete in-camera the obvious dogs before dumping into a computer. Make a habit of turning the camera on and browsing in multi-thumbnail view to trash losers before you ever plug your camera in to the computer.
• Delete in iPhoto the pictures you know you are never going to use or want to look at again. One problem digital photography produces is the ability for non-pros to take 30 shots to get one keeper. Dump the 29 non-keepers.
• Establish a default library on an external disc and make it your archive. If disc space on a laptop is limited, manually add to a second library on that machine only the photos you know you want to work with immediately or will want to see frequently. If you ever miss anything, it’s safe and sound on the external drive.
• In general, I am not a big fan of backing up to DVD. (In fact, in my mind that is a technology that has become all but obsolete nearly as soon as it arose.) If I have to shuffle through multiple stacks of scratched-up plastic discs to find something, the photos are already lost.
• Look into iPhoto Diet, a freeware app that weeds out unnecessary multiple versions and so forth. I’ve used it a bit and frankly found it annoying and inadequate, but you get what you pay for and I am not ready to write it off completely pending a little more fooling around with it.

Other than the imperfect but (for us) currently adequate Flickr arrangement, we don’t have any experience with a backup-to-internet solution, but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who does.

The writer of the question above is highly conversant with tech of all kinds, and I doubt that any of what I’ve written above will be news, or even much help, to him. But he did ask, and he’s contemplating a move to a camera that will produce larger files even than those clogging up 25 GB of his disc drive.

So what advice would you give about managing photographs?

* Edited to add this note: Magda was unhappy about the wording of my reference to “super-secret private” photos, thinking it made us sound like basement pr0nographers, and has requested clarification: a handful of our photos are marked private pending Christmas.

…but what do you want? From the files:

Adam has learned to sing. He writes his own material. Latest hit: “Finger Monkey Moo”. The lyrics run something like this:

FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO! FINGER MONKEY MOO!

until you are 80 years old.

We may have to rethink this whole xylophone-for-Christmas-present idea.