Technology Update: Digital Image Storage and “Image of the Day” Photoblog Redesign.
Once home after the Patagonia Photography Workshop, my first priority was uploading and backing up images from the trip to my primary storage and backup hard drives. During this process, I discovered that one of my Western Digital My Book 2 TB disk arrays was having problems. Then when restoring images lost on the Western Digital My Book disk array, I found that my backup Western Digital My Book array was also having problems. I ended up restoring the images from a number of Western Digital Passport USB drives (tertiary backup). Even though the backup drives are USB 2.0, the transfer rate was slow and it took almost two weeks to completely restore the lost files. In the middle of this process I also lost a HP Pavillion HDX9200 laptop during the ice storm. I was surprised that the UPS power supply didn’t protect the laptop during the several power disruptions. I have used the time to rebuild and optimize my Lightroom Catalogs. This has significantly improved the performance to find images within Lightroom.
I have updated the layout of my WordPress “Image of the Day” Photoblog site. A thumbnail slider for the current month goes across the top of the display. Images from the most recent three posts, and slides on chronologically going back several years. This replaces thumbnails for the most recent 8 posts. Which allows the most recent post and image to be front and center. The calendar for the current month then moves to the top of the right hand sidebar column. Clicking on any of the dates highlighted in blue get to the post for that date. Below the calendar, is Tag Cloud. I’ve gone back and tagged all of the posts with keywords. The tag cloud shows the top ~50 tags, with the font size related to the number of times the tag shows up in all of my posts. (Thanks to Hans for using tags). Below the tag cloud is a Blog Search function that searches all of the posts and images. Thumbnail links to the Monthly “Images of the Day” Galleries in Photoshelter. PhotoShelter is where all of my posted images are stored, and is the online location where images can be purchased. At the very bottom on each of my pages there is a PhotoShelter Search app, where all images stored in the David Mathre Image Gallery can be searched by keyword.
Comments regarding the Images of the Day Photoblog redesign are appreciated. The goal was to make the site easier to use and navigate.