Home Movies

I recently installed a larger capacity hard drive in my computer at home. I went from two 250GB drives to a 1.5TB drive. I also freed up a 1TB external USB drive that I was using for Downloads and general backups.

One of the unexpected benefits of having everything on one drive is that it is SO MUCH EASIER to sort the data. I am loading up my Plex Media Server queue with all kinds of crap. Old photos? Yup. Cell phone videos? You know it! And, I have so much extra space to play with that I am going to start ripping more of my DVDs. Not that I ever have time to watch a movie, but, you know, a boy can dream.

This computer upgrade/Plex project is running in parallel with the “Hannan pays to convert his Super 8 movies to digital” project. My family kicked in a good chunk of money to get us started on this endeavor, so I took a ride out to Newton on Boxing Day, thinking that this might be a good day for a place like this to be open. Turns out I was wrong and I will be taking the ride again this Saturday. I’ll be using the same 1TB USB2.0 drive that I just liberated by getting this larger drive installed in the computer to hold the converted Super 8 files.

Anyway, later in the day, Jenny’s brother came by for Xmas with Calin. I silently fired up Plex on the living room TV and started playing “home movies”. Calin sat down to watch. The BiL sat down to watch. Even Jenny sat down to watch. We lasted about 15 minutes or so, but that is a ton of 10 second cell phone videos to go through. Everyone enjoyed it.

The next day, after sorting through more photos on the hard drive, I ran the same experiment, but without BiL and with just still photos. 20 minutes, no problem. Again, this is a ton of photos to look at for just a couple of seconds apiece in a random slideshow. Jenny LOVED it. Not only were there endless pics of her baby boy, but a good sampling of her pictures from pre-Hannan days. She’s not seen these pictures since her computer died a couple of years back. I managed to grab them off the old hard drive and have been shuffling them around the cloud since then. Paying for the 1TB DropBox account is well worth it, in my opinion.

In the Photos folder, I have sub-folders for 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and then a folder called “2010 and before-Jenny’s Photos” and another called “Matt’s Photos” so that it doesn’t get mixed up or cause confusion with her folder. I figure we didn’t get married until the middle of the year 2010 and it takes newlyweds a little while to really mesh up, so we were still our own people for 2010. But 2011 on forward, we are V’ger. Inside the “Matt’s Photos” folder, I have a number of folders labeled as years, “2010” going back to “1968”. Inside each of these, I have folders for the months: “01”, “02”, etc. With the photos that started their lives as digital, it is easy to figure out what month they are from, but with the analog scans, this is tougher. It isn’t an exact science, but I think it works.

Anyway, Plex has made it really easy to get these photos back into our lives, which is really where they should be. Sure, there are hundreds of crappy pictures that can be tossed, but just getting organized is the first step.

Do you guys tag your photos in anyway?