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Rob Dempster
'Allo 'Allo Gardens! (AAG) Howick (uMngeni) AAG Blog A picture paints a thousand words!!! ... and ... 18 July 2025 |
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After Edith and I had been married and working for two years, we took up the Natal Teacher Union's offer of cheap flights to London for the December Christmas school holiday period. It was December 1972 when we set off on our adventure. Given that we were heading into a European Winter, I bought two pairs of long pants and borrowed a duffle coat.
Much to my surprise, my mother gave me a 35 mm Camera. As we traveled I took photographs. Unfortunately I never read the manual, and had not set the ISO to the setting that matched the film that I was using. That meant that most of the photographs I took with that camera were not worth keeping. Fortunately while we there, I also bought a compact camera that was also mostly automatic. Most of the photographs I took with this camera were worth keeping.
Since then I continued to take photographs using a Canon SX series camera that I upgraded at regular intervals. Then the cellphone arrived, and I have always based my choice of a cellphone on the quality/capabilities of its camera.
Since 1992 my desktop computer has mostly been a Black Box running a Linux distribution. That was briefly interrupted when I retired and bought an Apple iMac that ran macOS, a Linux lookalike. While I had the iMac, I also choose to move my collection of photographs to the online storage system that Apple introduced. It was a disaster because I had hardly finished sorting my photographs out, and Apple switched to a different online storage system and I was expected to migrate my photographs to the new system.
I eventually dumped the iMac and returned to a Black Box running the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Somewhere along the line I also dumped my email service (provided by Telkom) and switched to Gmail and the plethora of applications that Google provides. I also signed up for a chunk of on-line storage and started to migrate my collection pf photographs to Google Photos.
Somewhere along the line during the Google migration, my phone started uploading every photograph that I took using the phone. Sometimes I would take several photographs of a specific object or view intending to ultimately select one of the photographs and delete the rest. Unfortunately by the time I got to do that, Google had already uploaded them ALL to Google Photos. So I turned that functionality off.
It of course has not all been bad. It is great to have ones photographs reliably stored in albums, and Google Photos does that. I can also share albums, and that is also great. However the best feature of Google Photos is possible the most intrusive. Google also regularly sends me a post that features a selection of photographs that fit within a theme that Google Photographs has chosen. For example, the selection may feature photographs that all include my Blonde (Wheaten) Scottish Terrier, or alternatively, both Scottish Terriers that we currently have.
Eighteen years ago our first local grandchild was born. Given that he has spent a lot of time with us during the past eighteen years, the posts Google sends us are priceless, as they basically catalogue the time we shared together.
As they say, "A picture paints a thousand words!!!".
... and .., now for the, "and" part!!!".
The photographs that I have that are already stored on Google Photos are mostly sorted and stored in albums that identify the period (date) they were taken and/or stored. So given that I know when a photograph I am looking for was taken, I can probably find it quite easily.
The other photographs are also very crudely sorted into two groups. The photographs taken before the digital era and diligently stored in family albums, both my parent' albums, and my own family's albums. These photographs were kindly and diligently scanned by Bruce (my son).
These scanned photographs are in the Google Photos system and somewhere on my Personal Computer. Bruce probably also has copies. Given that they are stored in dated albums one can find a photograph if the approximate date it was taken is known.
The digital photographs are also named, initially named in terms of what ever system the phone that I had at the time was using. Of course whenever I used photographs within a particular context, I might have renamed the photographs to accommodate that context.
So!!!, while I have photographs and I have been able to use them in different contexts, it is not always easy to find a particular photograph that I would now like to use in a new context. My naming/filing system is not as helpful as I would like it to be!!!! What is needed is an International convention for naming photographs.
Here it is: date:time:three counting digits. and 1969:07:21:02:57:23:000.jpg is the name of the pic I took of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon. The next pic, 1969:07:21:03:48:12:000.jpg, was taken as he waved the American flag, ... and as they say, the rest is history.
I guess I have in the past not approved of the manner in which Google Photos was grabbing my photographs. However they were in a sense backing them up for me, and also allocating then to albums that were dated. All good. Then they started using face-recognition to put together videos that featured photographs of either X or Y, or X and Y. Even the dogs get featured.
I have really enjoyed receiving these videos. I do not know what else Google might be doing with our photographs, but I am prepared to trust them for now.
As for my phone and the AI revolution, that is another matter, and not something I appreciate.
The image (photograph) include below is linked to a video that Google Photos composed based in this instance on the presence of my local granson Ryan in the included photographs. They include portrait and landscape scenes, and that creates a presentation problem for me. The width of the window that the video plays in is set to 360. That setting is ideal for displaying portrait images on a cell phone.
The screen (monitor) on my desk that is attached to my Linux Box (Desktop PC) is in portrait mode. Viewing the video in a browser window that mimicks the physical screen is great for the landscape images, not so great for the portrait images. What would work in both instances, is a holgram display. It could easily switch between portrait and landscape modes adjusting the width and height of the image as required.
Given that Google is zooming the images as they display, this could be enhanced to intelligently zoom in on the subject(s) in the image as the image is being displayed. Where there may be more than one subject in an image, the principle subject could be choosen. Are you listening Google?
If you have any comments, corrections, suggestions or plain criticism,
I would appreciate it if you would communicate the same to me.
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