I mentioned in my last post that I was doing some server work here at the house – and actually somewhat enjoying it this time around. Though truthfully, it’s likely as much about seeing things I’ve wanted to do for ages finally come about.  As of this writing, it’s about 85% complete and I’m taking a small break to write a couple of posts. As I write, data is being copied from one drive to another, so it’s sort of wasted time anyway if I don’t do anything else.

See, when it’s projects that disrupt the house or my daily procedures, I tend to get obsessed.  Shocking, I know! 8 days straight of obsession like this though and I need to reset my sleep schedule so I can go out and run errands / see clients during the day.

I’ve spent too many very long nights lately working on this and an adjacent project.  Most mornings, I go to bed around the time Ryan gets up for work but last Wednesday night, I ended up doing an accidental all-nighter. That’s not been unusual for my career in IT but it’s unhealthy right now and not just for the physical injuries I’ve caused myself in the past year.

Nearing completion though means that the Grist and Nocodb databases – fibre database and photo database (the adjacent project I mentioned above) and a sewing machine/fabric stash inventory to follow – that I mentioned are up and running permanently on a Ubuntu Linux server and running far better than they did on my Windows desktop which is more powerful than the server but not as well suited to the task.  I’ve started keeping my journal (which is more of a glorified to do list) and various other things in Grist in an effort to streamline my work and home life.  The way I was running both programs before didn’t let me access them from anywhere other than my desktop.  I suspect I know why but it was just not priority at the time.  The way things are set up now, I can access all of these charts/lists/databases/spreadsheets from anywhere in the house, and even from outside the house if I want. Building this server and refreshing some of my IT skills have had me planning how to make the databases even more powerful.

I’m also finding lots of other ways to geek out with this server.  Lots of monitoring and such that just wasn’t as easy when I built the last server in 2015 (and continually updated rather than starting fresh) and media serving options – I’ll have a photo gallery again! – so I’m spending more time tweaking it than I should.  I have a few more programs to still configure and the backups and the data transfer.  Yesterday, it became the main server in the house and I decommissioned the one I first built in 2006.  Yes, I’ve been running 18 year old hardware for critical duty server work.  It was still reliable so I’ve had trouble putting it out to pasture but it’s just too slow for some of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while.  Not to mention I’m transferring and working on bigger files than I used to thanks to my renewed photography interests. Better still, I’m streamlining from two servers to one.  That means in theory, half the maintenance and less power usage.

This project superseded the photo project I started in January.  January started with Grist again.  That was the photography database I mentioned above.

(If anyone from Grist ever reads this, can I please beg yet again for a gallery view?  I get that image handling in and adjacent to databases is a tricky thing but others have managed it, I have every confidence in you!)

I wanted to keep track of film types (sometimes this can help in the digital processing when trying to match the original look), cameras used, locations, subjects, dates, thumbnails, etc – a lot of the regular metadata/tags you would keep in Lightroom for instance for easy searching.  I just didn’t want to be locked into an Adobe subscription*.  That’s also not taking into account that LR (and in fact no program I’ve seen yet) can handle all of the file formats I’ve shot photos in over the past 30+ years. I also don’t need a program that creates 100s of GB of cache files, like Lightroom does – not for the cataloguing part anyway.

*Note: there is a setting in Lightroom to write tags to the images but it’s not the default and lots of people don’t know to do it.

When I’m gone and someone needs to handle my estate (something I seem to think about more as I near a half century of time on the planet), there’s inevitably going to be a situation where some of the photos are needed.  Whoever is searching shouldn’t lose access to the metadata / tags because they cancelled the Lightroom subscription.

Editor’s note to the executor of the estate:  Tammi is profoundly sorry about the sheer weight of all of the sewing machines!

I got as far as cataloguing the rolls but then realized that I’d had a very poor organizational scheme for too many years so it also became a file moving exercise.  This is where the server rebuild came in.  There seems to be some sort of change to Windows File Explorer lately.  Some folks have said it’s rolled back to about 2019 and that possibly it’s about EU GDPR requirements and most talk about the search function but I find it incredibly buggy with copying and moving files about lately and bugs in the view options.  Windows will just spontaneously forget what it’s doing and stop responding and crash everything.  And it’s happening on more than one machine.  I rolled back a few updates, rebuilt indexes, reset things and everything else I can think of and it’s somewhat better but as a Systems Admin who can handle Linux, I opted for the switch I’d been meaning to do for years. It just hadn’t become uncomfortable enough until now.  This basic file organization that should have taken a few hours, took nearly 16.  That was pain enough to make the switch.

As for the photo organization, here’s the naming / filing scheme I’ve landed on:

For Digital Cameras:

Camera Body / Year /  Month / Day

This is easy because it’s how lots of digital camera manufacturers like to set up their import software.

i.e.

drive:\Canon 40D\2012\05\16\Img_1346.CR2

For Film Cameras:

drive:\Scanner\Format\Colour or B&W\Roll#-DateIfKnown\roll#-frame#

i.e.

drive:\Minolta\645\Colour\Roll001-20060214\001-05A.tif

I didn’t keep notes on dates.  Many I can “just remember”, lots I said I’d remember and didn’t but several are also recoverable from colour film processing I had done because there are often dates on the backs of the prints.  That of course meant organizing the prints in the same manner as the physical negatives. Which made me realize there’s a handful of negative sheets missing, so naturally I had to go looking for those.

This.  This is why I don’t sleep and am a little “off” most days even if I did sleep! I digress.

For Phones:

drive:Phones\Year\Month

i.e.

drive:\iPhones\2023\06

And well, that’s as far as I got before the file explorer stuff hit the fan.  Partly because a particular phone maker whose product name inspiration may or may not sometimes fall off of trees has changed their directory structures at least once in recent history.  I also know there’s a lot of weeding to do in the phone directories because there are screenshots and photos of things that don’t matter after the day they’re taken (pics of the grocery list, for instance). This is the one I’m struggling a bit with because while you’d often shoot a subject or a handful of subjects on a roll of film or in a day on a camera, a phone can hold nearly anything over the space of a day/week/month.

I’ve also started taking a photo with my phone whenever I shoot with a camera. That can give me lots of metadata to transfer to the other files.

While I was working on the camera directories, I added every roll into the database and added  the details above.  I can happily say I only forgot a handful of last names.  Oh! And I just remembered one of them!

Once I’m finished with the server, I’ll get back to the photo project. With the rolls finished, it’s on to the images themselves.  Generating thumbnails for each photo and adding tags/metadata. Then, to add the formulas, relations, charts, etc. that will make this truly powerful.  Lastly will be finding a way to automate it.  That way I won’t put off adding to it.  It’s a huge project but if I can keep it up, I should recoup all the time I took in the data entry and developing the structure of the database in time savings (and more!) from how I now search for a particular image I’m pretty sure I might have taken on film sometime between 2004 and 2009.

In fact, developing the database and doing the data entry for the photos has managed to re-spark my interest in some of my old software development skills. I’m going to more seriously look into what it would take to make a gallery for this database and if no one else will take it on, maybe I’ll see if I can learn enough to start it.  The power is in my pocket, I might as well use it to control what I can in my life.

How about you?  How do you keep this stuff organized?

Today’s post title inspired by Sass Jordan – High Road Easy.  She’s a Canadian artist who was very popular in the 90s which were my formative years for the musical taste I’ve carried into my entire adulthood.

“Got a pocket full of power
Got a handle on control
Take a better man than you, babe
Rectify the damage to my soul
‘Cause you took me down so easy
Got the devil in your veins
I may remember what was good
But I won’t forget the pain
No, I won’t forget the pain”