Gallery Woe

Well, maybe not woe.  Pre-resignation-frustration.

Ok, there’s a new rule:  All camera and gps clocks must be synchronized before we put in!

You may stop reading now.  Just remember the new rule.

I spent some time this morning, trying to refine the mass keyword tagging of Richard’s Picasa Web Albums (PWA).  Every image has a collection of common tags e.g. Richard Grove,kayak,paddle,river,river guide etc.  The idea here is to make it easy for people to find the information they’re looking for…  Given that there are 1,700 images from his Etowah trek alone, I mass-inserted a collection of tags expecting to eventually visit each image and refine those specific tags.

Now, I can’t usually tell where a photograph was taken, so I clicked the heels of my ruby slippers together, which scuffed them up and now I can’t return them.  Just kidding!  I got them from REI.  Of course I can return them.  I did, after all, find them stuck in the intake grate of a Power Georgia plant (Plant Hammond?) and what the river giveth, REI taketh back.  I worked as an REI customer service peon for two wasted years at the REI Perimeter location in Atlanta, Georgia, so I know what I’m talking about!

Anyway, photographs. So the image file tells me when it was taken according to the camera’s timestamp.  I mate this with the GPS track to display the images along the track’s timeline.  Magic.  Geotagged photographs!  Not quite.  If the clock on the camera and GPS are out of sync’ by a few seconds, the images are geotagged with the wrong location.  If you change batteries and do not resync’  you make it worse.  Then, if you cross a timezone and sync’ one device and not the other -ouch.

The best for last: 12:00am or 12:00pm?  There were some bright as day midnights on that trek!  I was ploughing through the tagging process on picasa, being methodical, going day by day, reading Desi’s post and adding names to faces, adjusting the photo’s location on the map etc.  I suddenly realized that the text was referring to images in the previous day’s gallery.  A period of panic as I considered the possibility that all of my work, album naming conventions; file grouping; tagging; etc was off by 24hrs.  Yikes.  As it turns out, that would be an easier fix than the current reality. Some images are off by +12hrs, others by 23 minutes, some +24hrs.  So much for batch automation.  WE‘re going to have to go through each image and geotag it manually by dragging it on picasa’s map.

It makes you long for the good ole days, when you were lucky if your mom had even bothered to write a blurb on the back of the photo’.  Who were those ladies with their eyes scribbled out in black pen?  Oh, just some girls that your father used to date before she met him…

Stupid internet.