Last night’s sleep was crummy. Note the post from 3:30 AM. Today I was all about Star Wars, but now that I’m home I just want sleep. Bellana went to a birthday/Christmas party tonight and I promised Jen I’d stay awake until she got home. I don’t think she’s left her friend’s house yet so I’m still up. This seemingly simple task is getting more difficult by the second.

Tomorrow I have a ton of stuff to do. I need to finish my Christmas prep, clean the house so it’s ready for Christmas Eve, go to the tall and fat men’s clothing store to buy jeans, seeing as I’ve found tears in the only three pairs of jeans that I own, and I have to sleep too but I think I’ve already mentioned that.

I have to work on Monday but I have both Tuesday and Wednesday off. I’ll be busy all day on both of those days. There’s a holiday or something.

With all this going on I’m not sure when I’ll have the chance to go see Star Wars again.

Because I am so definitely seeing it again.

I’m going to publish this post now but I’m so tired I can’t see clearly enough to proof read it. Look at me living all dangerously.

We just got home from the movie theater.  We have seen Episode IX.  My self imposed social media blackout has been lifted.

Here is my one word, spoiler free review:

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have so freakin’ many albums in Flickr.  The list is seven pages long.  I started on page seven because I wanted to go forward in time and end with the most recent stuff.  Why?  I don’t know, stop bothering me.  Also, page seven only had 14 albums on it and that was by far the shortest list.

The annoying news.  I knew this part, but Flickr lets you download photos albums in .zip format.  That’s not annoying, but it makes you wait while the .zip is being created and you have to go to a second page to download it.  That’s annoying.

The good news.  Google Photos won’t upload duplicates but if you try to upload a duplicate it acts as if you did.  Here’s what I mean.  Almost everything in my Flickr is also in my Google.  I downloaded an album from Flickr and then uploaded it to Google.  It should have created a duplicate of each file, but Google blocks the upload of said duplicates.  When the “upload” is finished it gives you the option to create a new album, and the images it pulls into the new album are the original images that I actually uploaded 11 years ago.  So I get a new album with the correct images without adding any new images.  It’s like a really good search function for people who are too lazy to actually search.  Thanks, Google!

The really friggin’ infuriating news.  Google doesn’t seem to play nicely with the select all function.  I download the .zip from Flickr, unzip it into a new folder, open the folder from the Google Photos upload link, press command-A to select all of the files, and click okay to upload.  When the upload is done there are a shit load of images missing.  What?  I tried again, same thing.  Why?  I tried again but instead of using select all I clicked on the first file, scrolled to the end, shift-clicked on the last file to actually select everything, click okay, and then everything is uploaded.  WhatWhatWhat?  There has to be something else going on here.  Maybe it’s a problem with the unzip?  I can’t imagine the select all doesn’t work.  Maybe it’s the browser?  I don’t know, but it’s stupid.

Now a test.  The only way to make a photo public in Google Photos is to share it with someone.  Maybe I’ll create a second Google account and share it with that and then it will work?  Maybe?  I am not hopeful.  Google does offer a shared folder function.  Maybe that will work for me?

If you can see this image, then shared folders work…

I can see it, but that might be because I am signed in to Google.  I’ll have to try viewing this post while I’m not signed in.  Duck and cover, everyone.

 

Addendum: I think it worked.  I opened a private browser window and I could see the image.  I wonder then if I could see the image without using a shared folder.  I think I tried that once before and it didn’t work.  I’ll try again later.

It’s 3:30 am. Seven hours from now we will be at the movie theater and Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker will be just about to start.

Get Hype my brothers and sisters in The Force! After 42 years the day has finally arrived!

Star Wars!

Star Wars!

Star Wars!

Star Wars!

Star Wars!

WOOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Now I’m going back to sleep because it’s 3:30 in the freakin’ morning.

Kinda ready for this to be over. Just get here so we can do it already.

HoHoHo

I’m just brainstorming on what I can do to try and save this stupid blog an it’s 11 years worth of stuff should Flickr, my primary image host, die the death it appears to working toward.

Google photos.  I currently have 42,179 files on Flickr.  Most, but not quite all, of those are also backed up on my Google Photos account.  Those files are just dumped there though.  Flickr is organized (poorly, but still) with every file being in at least one album and having at least one tag.  Google has a few albums but mostly the only organization is that they are sorted by the date they were taken.  I could download each individual album from Flickr and re-upload it to Google and create a new album for each bulk upload.  That should take about 20 years.

That would take care of creating a somewhat organized hosting alternative.  Granted Google’s photos aren’t public by default.  I’d have to figure out if and how to change that.  The next step would be to go through the 10 zillion blog posts and match the Flickr file with the corresponding Google file.  I could probably add a comment to the HTML that holds the Google link.  That way if/when Flickr dies it’s seemingly inevitable death I could go back through the HTML and replace the Flickr image links with Google image links.  All of that should take an additional 20 years or so.

That’s one set of options.  It’s a horrible set of options, but at least it’s there.

Fuck.

I am a Flickr Pro member and have been since 2009.  I didn’t get this email, but it’s probably sitting in an inbox in some alternate email account that I just haven’t checked yet (probably yahoo).  I saw this on reddit today and promptly shit myself.  If Flickr goes away I lose 10 years worth of photos on this little blog.  Poof, all gone.  I couldn’t even begin to consider fixing every image link.  There are thousands of image links here, and that is a conservative estimate.

The state of Flickr (email from CEO)

Dear Flickr Pros, First, and above all else: thank you. Thank you for being a part of our community. Thank you for caring about Flickr. Thank you for supporting Flickr. Thank you for being a Flickr Pro.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

And yet, Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—still needs your help.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Flickr still needs your help. It’s still losing money. You, and hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive, and we need your help to share the story of Flickr.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

As you know, Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community.

Please, help us spread the word. Help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure Flickr has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to give you a coupon code to share with friends, family, or anyone who shares your love of photography and community so they can enjoy the same 25% discount before the campaign starts.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to help everyone upgrade to a Pro membership.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers and by photographers, we need your help.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek SmugMug + Flickr

So the wide angle lens on the iPhone 11 Pro Max is really wide.

I posted these pictures last night but I am going to re-post to prove a point.  As we were sitting in the finest concert hall on the planet Earth, Symphony Hall in Boston, I was snapping away like a doof while we waited for the Boston Pops Christmas show to start.  I did something I don’t usually do anymore.  I took a panoramic pic of my view of the stage.  It’s awful, but in a goofy, funny kinda way.  Here it is (again):

Wow… that’s really bad.  When you take a pano you need to move the camera around the lens rather than actually move the lens.  I, clearly, move the lens.  But I digress.  Next we have a picture using the new iPhone’s wide angle lens (.5x).  This one looks a whole lot better:

So you’re saying to yourself, “hey fat boy, what’s the significance of all this?”  Well I’ll tell you.

The panorama and the wide angle cover almost exactly the same amount of space.  The pano is a little wider, and I could have made it wider still, but after viewing the .5x pic it turns out I didn’t need to take the pano at all.  The new lens gave me the same shot only without the awful distortions.

So what I’m saying is, that new wide lens is really wide!

My tickets for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker are for 12:30 tomorrow afternoon.  Now that the movie is actually out it is time for me to implement a total social media blackout to avoid all spoilers, hints, speculations, and discussions.

I am serious about this.  I was just listening to a podcast discussing the season two finale of Castle Rock and they mentioned that JJ Abrams (who produces the show) directed the new Star Wars and BANG, I turned it off.  I really don’t want to hear anything at all.  I want a clean Star Wars slate.  I don’t want some asshole hater coloring my impressions of the flick.  I have waited 42 years for this.  Don’t screw with my fanboydom, okay?  I’m super cereal.

Given that I am a total social media whore though, the chances of me staying off everything are slim to none.  I will do my best.

Wish me luck, and may the Force be with you.

Pano…