Lately, I have been feeling swamped by media. Not TV, Internet, radio, magazines and the like (though the latter is kind of overwhelming sometimes, even though I only subscribe to a few!) but more my the media that blossoms with parenthood — digital photos and videos — and one that perhaps is becoming obsolete, but I still cling to — old fashioned CDs.
With those first two (photos and home video), I feel like my generation is kind of charting new waters here — the old fashioned musty photo albums with photos stuck in between sheets of plastic are a thing of the past. We have thousands and thousands of photos documenting our kids’ childhoods, which is awesome on one hand. But. As the keeper of such things (for the time being anyway), I feel like I need to figure out a meaningful way to manage, display and preserve them.
CDs
Right now I have three boxes of CDs that I need to organize and put into big CD wallets (I’ve already done about 1/3 of them). I ditch the cases, and many (but not all) of the liner notes. For more than two years, I have been living without access most of my music — thanks to half of them being "lost" in the depths of our attic after our move (back when I was hugely pregnant, and not participating in much of the packing and unpacking!) and the rest being fairly inaccessible to me on Lonnie’s computer.
That music is there, and I an access it via a program on my computer, but I find I rarely want to listen to music on my laptop (I don’t have decent speakers, just the internal ones). All his music is in a format that is incompatible with Itunes (flac, which is lossless & therefore the best for sound quality), which means no putting it on my Ipod, burning a new CD, yada yada yada. Sigh.
The project that is looming though, that I MUST break down and tackle, is sorting all these CDs alphabetically & by genre, getting them into the wallets. I have a couple big 300+ ones and several several ones for the kids. I also got one with a bunch of "removable wallets" with space for 10 or so CDs to put in the car, to take on trips, and to keep near our kitchen CD player. It shouldn’t be that hard, its just one of those projects that doesn’t work well with kids around, and since I don’t have a space to leave it out away from them, I kind of need to do in one (long) sitting. Blah. It will feel so good when its done, though! Soooo very tired of this taking up space in my living room…
Home Videos
Videos also are proving a challenge — I love taking them of the kids, and adore having these little memories saved for the future. It is so amazing to watch ones when the girls were littler — seeing what they did and said, remembering those times, OMG, love it. But, I don’t love dealing with with the actual video files (which can be huuuuuge!).
Even though I don’t think I take tons of video, they were rapidly filling up my laptop. Lonnie recently got an external drive to store them on, which has solved one issue. Lots of space now! But, downloading them, renaming them in a way that makes them easy to find again (with dates & descriptions) takes time. There are tons of old ones I still need to go through, separating out events, editing, etc. I’d love to got through and edit them down a bit (mostly just cutting out the boring or unusable parts) and I also would love to get them all on DVDs, maybe organized by year or something. Lonnie thinks DVD’s are not the best way to store media, which I suppose I understand, but I still feel like I’d like to have hard copies as well as having them all stored on our computer drives. Don’t you think? What do you do with home videos?
Digital Photographs
And then there’s photos. Man, do I take a lot of photos! I just want to capture these precious moments, document our daily life, so I can remember it and pass it along to my girls. Photos remind me about so many things I otherwise would forget — they feel so priceless to me. But right now, most of them are just sitting on my computer, not getting looked at.
Right now I try to edit them somewhat upon download or soon after — deleting bad ones, cropping & some amateur-ish editing to enhance color & contrast, lighting, etc. I try to download off the cameras every few days, and then upload most of them to our gallery (hosted on our server computers here at home) once they are edited (which I can then easily use on my blog if needed). They are all, obviously, also on my laptop. I NEED to back them up somewhere else, though.
I also want to print out a bunch of pictures, some high quality prints for framing and hanging (I’d like to do several photo walls in our home), some smaller ones for photo flip books for the kids, which they ADORE. I have plans to create more printed photo books, too — I was really happy with the Blurb book I made of the babies first 6 months, but just haven’t found the time since then (no hours upon hours in the nursing chair with laptop, ha ha). Anyone have other photo display ideas for me? Are those digital photo frame things worth having? I tend to use my screen saver as one — it automatically shows photos from one year ago, which is pretty great — I love seeing what we were doing a year ago, and to see how much the girls have grown!
So, here is my short list of things to do in the media management arena:
- Organize CDs into wallets
- Label, name & organize videos
- Burn videos to DVDs?
- Backup photos & videos (On disks? Online? Off-site somewhere?)
- Print photos, frame & hang some, put some into kid-friendly albums
- Create (and have printed) photo books, spanning increments of 6 months to a year
It will feel great if (when!) I get them done, that I know. But. I have a seriously hard time motivating myself to do them. It never seems like the perfect time to get started, ya’ know? Does anyone have some tricks or tips for me? How do you handle these things? Do you have a system that works? I’m all ears!
Since last night I actually did do a lot of work on the videos, I’ll leave you with a recent one from about a month ago. Delia had woken up early from nap and Emma and Elsie were still sleeping. Times like this are rare with twins, and it was really sweet to just have some Delia time….
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I recently had to focus on getting my home movies in order. I forced myself to spend time on it every evening until it was done. I used to store my movies and my pictures in separate files but I have since realized I prefer them sorted together by month/date. It’s easier to find images for me when they’re sorted like that.
I back up all of my images on an external hard drive and I burn them to DVD in 3 month increments as well. I store the DVDs and hard drive in separate fire boxes because I’m paranoid like that.
As for CDS – I don’t use them anymore. I loaded them all into iTunes and stored the whole lot of CDs in the attic. I haven’t needed to look for them for 5 years since they were put up there. We listen to music through my computer or from the iPod in the car (piped through the radio).