w.o.k. wednesday (or, picasa had me at hello)

It's Whiskers-on-Kittens Wednesday again already, which means you get to be subjected to my expounding on one of my newest favorite things.

So, I've been having image anxiety lately. Not about my own image which is, as they say, what it is (i.e. sometimes meh, sometimes rather J. Garner-ish (if frequent, random comments by strangers are to be believed), and sometimes (to moi, at least) a little Krypt Keeper-ish - 5 a.m. mirror check after being up grading papers until midnight, anyone?).

Ah, January...

No, what's been making me lose little bytes of sleep here and there ever since my laptop started acting out a few months ago are those literally thousands of digital photos I have stored on the hard drive. Not a good idea, I know, especially since I'm shooting with a 10 mp D80, and most of those files are still in their original size. At least I don't have any RAW files on there, but still. I know they've been slowing down the Dell's performance significantly, and if the system ever had a major hotflash, all those precious images could be toast.

t. greenwood's premiere reading of Two Rivers in Flagstaff

Now, I'm not a total butthead. I have been backing up the files, to an extent: I've been a (mostly) happy Shutterfly customer for year, and I've found it to be an easy way to organize, share and print photos (I even made a leather-bound photobook for my dad's birthday a few years back, and it turned out really well). I also have a few jumpdrives that are packed to the gills. Still, I was fairly disorganized about backing stuff up, and most of the original files were still on my hard drive, because Shutterfly does not do high-resolution downloads (which means you can't pull the original files back off their site for editing in, say, Photoshop after you have uploaded them to Shutterfly). Result: Total virtual clutter (e-clutter? iclutter?) on the 'puter, and while I'm hardly FlyLady, I do grow less tolerant of unnecessary clutter as the offspring grow.

Happy 23rd Birthday to my guy, Zzari!

So, the hunt was on for an online storage site that would allow me to upload and store lots and lots of images and would also allow me to download the full-res, original files for frequent Photoshop playdates before re-uploading the revised files. I didn't care much about editing features of the prospective site, since these features are generally pretty limited and I'm a PS groupie at heart. So, I hunted and I gathered, checking out sites like Fotki (which looks pretty cool) and Carbonite (which has gotten great reviews, but is more like an entire system backup tool - and which I may end up using anyway).

Congrats on your new family, little Belle!

Enter Picasa. Not only is it free (unless you want a ton of storage space - which I do), but it automatically uploads images from your hard drive and organizes them in a logical way. Plus, you can pull those original files any time. Also, since it's Google's baby, chances are it's not going to go belly-up overnight (and I'm not going to wake up one morning to find that all my images have vanished into the ether). I still won't use it as my only backup, but I'm pretty secure with Google since I use it daily for email/browsing and since my employer has recently switched over to Gmail as well.

So, I'm sold, and I'm sleeping better at night, too. Which means I may start to resemble the Krypt Keeper a little a less and the female half of Bennifer a little more. (Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?)

What's not to love?

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