Or rather..trying to do so. Today is a day to stay in and begin on my 2014 project. What project you might ask? To organize the gadzillion images I’ve captured the past three years and reorganize them.
See, I’ve made a big mess of my files. Using both a desktop and a laptop, I have images one place and not another. With additional external hard drives I seem to have images triplicated, and sometimes not at all. So I’ve been pondering for a while on just how I might manage to make sense out of all the mess I’ve created.
Step one – try to get all of my files loaded onto one place. I looked into online cloud storage services like Dropbox, but I wasn’t quite sold on the monthly fees. The external hard drives are up to 2 Terabytes of memory, but I’m guessing I’ll need more room due to my duplication of files.
I started thinking that I would require my own server at home so that I can access my images from one memory bank from either the desktop or the laptop. But as a total non-geek, techie novice servers intimidated me.
Visiting Office Depot yesterday I discovered a new product on the market. This three terabyte WD My Cloud became available at the end of the year. For about $150.00 I could have my private cloud with secured access. The cost of of just a year’s fees with the online services.
This seemed like a brilliant plan and I began trying to get it set up today. With a new wireless router, it was easy to set up the WD My Cloud. Transferring my 30,000 + images from my laptop proved to be a lot more challenging.
It seemed that the cloud drive kept freezing up once it created the folders and didn’t want to upload the images to the drive. Although I could see them in the “network” section under my Windows 7 computer listing, the images wouldn’t show up on the drive. Then all of sudden the images started to upload. Don’t ask me why, I’ve learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Now I’m waiting for…8 hours for them to upload to the drive. This reminds me of the time when I first purchased an iPod, I probably spent over 40 hours uploading each CD that was in the household library.
Perhaps I’ve bored you with techie stuff, but it’ll be fun to see how I manage to figure all this ‘stuff’ out. Perhaps I can help someone else out there that is struggling with digital memory issues like myself.
In between trying not to get frustrated with computer stuff, I received a notice that an American Pipit was seen at a nearby park. I had heard one on my last trip to Florida, but I have yet to see one, so officially a “lifer.” So I jumped in my car and headed to the park.
It was misty and cool out, with a foggy feeling. the white Fort Smallwood blended in with the fog along the Patuxent River.
Captured with my iPhone 4S as I had the beast already set up on my Canon 7D.
I’m not sure what it is, the past two days, the 500mm has been slow to focus, the images aren’t sharp. Is it the 7D? Is it that now the 500mm needs to be serviced? I promise !! I didn’t drop it.
The American Pipit was alone along the cold beach. She was sweet and darling. However one of her feet seemed stumped. Luckily it didn’t stop her from flying beautifully which she did shortly after my arrival.
Categories: 2013 Project 365
Emily Carter ~ Nature as Art 
30,000! that is a ton of your beautiful photos 🙂 I’m going to needing a drive with that capacity soon myself for my unpolished photos 🙂
That’s awesome Andy ! I’ve got to blame the birds and the project 365 for so many images. It also is from the past two-three years, so plenty of images. It’ll be great to get them organized but will take a lot of time.
I have been struggling with the whole concept of storage for a couple of years. Technology is changing rapidly. its not only my photos, but all of home videos that I took over the past years, which are priceless to me. thank you for the idea of WD My Cloud.
Wow that’s a lot of photos! I’m awful at organization, so I wish you much luck getting there. You can do it!
That’s a lot of work, Emily. Good luck. Love the sweet birdie. 🙂
Congrats on the pipit!
I’ve just about filled an external 1T drive, next up, a 3T drive.
Good luck with your project!
Well, Bella, once the project is done, you have all the time in the world to organize your “stuff”. I have the same problem with the little pictures that I have. And yes, the poor birdie has a crooked leg. It appears to look like common bird.
And my husband grumbles about the 3,000 images I took on our last trip. I’ve been spending time just tagging my photos and that’s been a great help when looking for images. But I really do need to look at some serious back up. I’ll also check out the WD My Cloud.
Organizing is so much fun though! Yea right! But it is a necessary evil unfortunately. I admire your dedication to your project 365 and your willingness to take off to a park for the chance to take bird pics!
Ok, so you’re a super pro. How do you manage your file storage problem? This WD My Cloud didn’t work at all!! Looking at Just Cloud and at least creating one master backup.
I have two 1TB hard drives in my PC. One is for programs, the other for picture files. Then I have two external hard drives for backup. One of those is a 2TB and the other is a 1TB. And to top it off I use Crashplan to back it all up to the cloud. So far so good!
I’m amazed that you don’t have more memory requirements. You’re the second person to mention Crashplan. I’ll go check it out. Supposedly the Just Cloud can manage RAW files while most others don’t. The upload churned all night, still only at 14%.
Were looking to get organized for our move this year! I have to check out the My Cloud thing I think it’s worth the investment!
Good luck with the organisation – not a pleasant task, but an essential one. I had a WD My Cloud but sent it back to Amazon in the end – everything was just so slow over the wireless network. Changed to good old reliable external hard drives with cables – but then all my files/processing are held in one place anyway.
That’s where I’m at Mark. The WD My Cloud didn’t work at all for me and I’ve made even more of a mess. I’ll be posting about it tonight. AAUUURRRGGGHHHH!!!
Oh dear…..I’m sure you’ll get it sorted in the end 😊