Adding value

I've managed to take somewhere around 100,000 photos in the last 10 years. I have to guestimate it because they won't all fit on this laptop, so I've had to remove everything before the start of 2007 just to allow the current stuff to fit.

Over time people have convinced me that I take photos that are better than average. You can see some of them over at my Flickr account. I've participated in Around the Coyote, an art fair in Chicago, and actually sold some of my photos a few years ago.

So, now I've got this big pile of photos, so of which actually seem to be valuable to other people. However, the shear size of it is daunting in it's own right (more than 120 Gb when last in one place). It's so many photos that I can't even give them a cursory review without spending months of South Shore commuting time.

I want to add value to the collection.. I have a few strategies that I'm going to use to help:

• reduce the number of photos by weeding out the poor ones
• add metadata to all of the remaining photos using IPTC labeling
• put most of them up on Flickr (which will read and auto-apply tags from the IPTC labels)
• keep an archive of everything current on my work machine in sync with SyncToy
• keep backups on DVD-R
• watch my stats on Flickr to see what people like
• use the Creative-Commons license to give them away
• geotag photos so that people can find them when they look for things in a given location
• blog more photos

I signed up for a Flickr pro account a long time ago... it's a superb value. You get unlimited uploads for a mere $20/year. The statistics feature I recently signed up for helps you find out what people are viewing, and how they found the photos... it's very useful.

Blogging is always fun, even when you only get about 10 hits/day... I'd like to get it up higher, but it's not realistic to think it's going to skyrocket. Slow and steady works for me... it's a habit I'm trying to build in this and other endeavors.

Thanks for reading... comments always welcome.