Oh those many many photos! Part 1, the task

My (android) phone kept sending "space is low, some functions may be affected" messages. The easy thing would have been to use the "free up space" option, which deletes all the photos from the device. They are still backed up in The Cloud and are available via googlephotos on my computer.

That's the easy option, and didn't appeal to me ... because ... I want to have access to my recent photos - um, why?? - well, to put on Instagram, to show people, to look at the cute videos of The Darling Grandbaby ... maybe because I'm so used to clutter?? ... but mostly because I'm totally out of the habit of doing things the easy way (why???)!

Because of the "low space" thing, the useful "delete from device" option isn't working. This is a very useful thing to do, when it's working. You select the photos you don't "need" (see above) to have on the phone, tap on the three dots at top right, and tap on "delete from device". Bingo, some space is freed up. A quicker way, if you take lots of pix at once, is to tap on the date and delete a day at a time. You can unselect some of the pix if you use that method.

But ... I can't "delete from device" at the moment so I'm spending an hour a day at the computer "sorting". The time is written into the (online) calendar for the rest of the month of August. 8am every day is supposed to be the starting time and 9am the stopping time, the breakfast-making time. If I need to start later, I reschedule on the calendar, which is also on my phone, rather than just say "I'll do it later sometime". 

This works for me. Back when I was writing a dissertation I had the short sharp shock of realising that in order to get it done in the two weeks of holiday leave that remained before the due date, I had to focus, really focus. There were kids to take to school, and meals to make, but 9-3 was My Time. The first week, it was so hard to sit down and Get On With It, but by the second week I was "in the flow" and was often surprised when 3pm came and it was time to rush to the school. And, being young and energetic, I could do a few more hours in the evening. It got done, and I had a new skill, something that had been missing in my erratic university career - sitting down to work at the appointed hour.

Later I learned about the value of having a stopping time, and respecting it. 

Just one hour in the files, every day, for a week at a time, that's the plan.

I hope to wrest back enough space, in the final week of August, for the "delete from device" to work. And hope to have sorted all of 2020 so far - up to date on IG, just a few choice "important" pix for showing people, and all the pix and the selected videos of Darling Grandbaby in one album.

With her beloved Blanket, formerly known as Deng

I'm learning that all too often I don't know what I took for granted - for instance, does "delete from device" also remove the photo from an album? The Learn Google Photos blog is proving useful. Also the google photos help - why didn't I look at this years ago?

So many photos!

The proliferation of photos on my phone - I use the phone camera exclusively these days, as so many people do - continues to be a concern. As does the clunkiness of google  photos, which kindly accumulates them on my computer, and it is on my computer that I try to tame them. 

Why oh why does google photos not have an easy way to put in album and archive with one click? This is what takes quite a lot of time; I try to do several sessions each week.

"On Tuesdays I polish my uncle" went a Raffi song from my son's childhood, or was it a poem we liked - well, on Fridays I file the week's photos of Freya. It's a bit like putting "real" photos into an album regularly. 

And while I'm at the computer, on Fridays and most other days, I file a few(!) more photos. It's a daunting task: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time ...

(via)

Some Rules have evolved.

Rule 1: only one month per session.

Rule 2: only three categories per session.

Rule 3: write down what you did.

Rule 4: delete duplicates as you go.

Rule 5: limit the time spent to an hour.

Rules 1 and 5 make for manageable chunks. Rule 4 makes for an easy task if you don't have much time or energy (but DO follow rule 3 - writing down you've done it is visible proof of progress). 

Rule 2, only three categories, is a recent implementation, and is my small way of overcoming some of the annoying clunkiness of google photos. Because...

...first you have to find the category, aka as Album. They are listed - in a small pop-up box - by date of earliest photo. Only vaguely, though -

And how easy is it to read that list?? There's no way of changing the type or enlarging the box. Grr.

(Still pondering what the secret, hidden, incomprehensible organising principle might be - date album was created? latest album added to? )

I choose a month - today it's Feb 2018 - and the three albums choose themselves. The easy ones, and sometimes I have to make new albums for them, are big projects I was working on, certain kinds of exhibitions, exhibitions in a time range, places (re)visited, that sort of thing. Also easy are classes (painting, woodblock printing, art history, etc) and types of work - textile collage, ceramics, book arts, etc. 

Then I go through all the days, deleting duplicates and filing pix into the three albums, only those three, and then re-selecting those pix and archiving them. It's easiest to do this one day at a time, rather than gather a lot over several days (I take dozens of pix on some days). Crikey it gets boring!

The three albums conveniently appear at the top of the list:

which saves unnecessary rootling around in the murk below.

Sometimes there's a photo that needs downloading for an upcoming blog post, or just to be able to find it again. This little distraction can waste a lot of time ... for instance, today I found this pic of the very beginning of my Footballers piece - 

It looked intriguing as a thumbnail ... and I can see possibilities for using the combination of outlines and random text, but that's another story for another time.

Voyager - to Uranus

These images are from a Sky at Night programme from 1986, when Voyager 2, which was launched in August 1977, had travelled beyond Saturn to this distant "ice giant" (temperature about -216 degrees). (Watch it and others on the BBC iplayer, here.)

Uranus has a small rocky core, but mostly consists of a hot, dense fluid of  water, methane and ammonia. It orbits the sun every 84 years, and rotates on its axis every 17 hours.

Interestingly, its axis is perpendicular to its orbit - the "hot spot" in the image is the south pole - and even more interestingly, because of the retention of heat by the atmosphere, and convection in its fluids, the temperature is much the same as at the north pole. The magnetic axis is tipped at 55 degrees from the axis of rotation, and the magnetic field is about a third the strength of Earth's - the planet's fast rotation creates a dynamo effect. 

Images show that Uranus has banding - the red spot is the south pole

The "donut" circles in the images are artefacts, due to the camera, and the pink crescent is an artefact of a different sort. The colours arise from the different filters used in separate photographs, for each of which the radius is different; combining them leaves "bare areas" around the edge -

 Special methane filters were used to look at the atmosphere. The blue crescent indicates the area of the planet that's free of high haze layers; the red ring shows areas of haze around the equator -

The atmosphere is now known to contain hydrogen, helium, and a little methane.

It was known from telescopic observation that Uranus had five moons, and Voyager discovered two more; now, it is known to have 27 moons, all named after characters in the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

Miranda "has canyons like Mars, grooves like Ganymede,
and compressional forms like Mercury" - a range of terrain

Umbriel has an old surface with very large craters

Titania has small craters and lots of rifts

The first picture of the 9 rings - some have "shepherd satellites" that
keep the fine particles of the rings organised

A longer exposure (96 seconds) in scattering light;
the long specks are due to the length of the exposure
as Voyager sped past at about a million miles a day,
50,000 miles above the planet

Next planet: Neptune

Having visited four planets,Voyager 2 is now - more than 40 years after launch - beyond the solar system, in interstellar space, having visited Neptune in 1989. The last solid body it studied was Neptune's moon Triton. It's travelling at 470 million kilometers a year, and Voyager 1, which visited Jupiter and Saturn, has also left the solar system, travelling 520 million kilometers a year on a different trajectory.

In those four decades, technology has made leaps and bounds - state of the art in 1986 still included computers with green screens, remember those? Digital manipulation - making false-colour images - took "a day or so", partly because of the low light levels at that distance from the sun.

Photo flurry

And now, all of a sudden it seems, my phone is full of photos, there's no more memory. I am archiving and deleting. And trying to empty the bin!

Emptying the bin has to be done a few items at a time, otherwise the phone gets stuck and needs to be turned off to have a little rest and consider the error of its willful ways. Tsk, tsk. 

I'm feeling a bit willful myself - hence the fixation on sorting out albums etc - and am starting to wonder why I'm not taking the easy way out and "obeying" the instructions on the phone. Once the photos are backed up in The Cloud, they can be archived and "you'll still be able to view them at any time". But given the problems with emptying the bin, I just don't trust The System....

Meanwhile there is no spare memory on the phone, and my efforts at archiving (10% have been archived this morning) seem to have had no effect. It's "interesting" to be unable to take photographs, especially of the pots in progress. Which is why there hasn't been progress on pots this week! I've been doing other things instead....

Tour of Emery Walker House in Hammersmith (website has a virtual tour; no photos allowed in the house; I sketched while listening) - downriver is Hammersmith Bridge, where his partner in Doves Press famously disposed of the type and molds for the Jensen typeface, what a story! Dorothy Walker lived in the house till her death in the 60s, and her companion till 1999, so it has original wallpaper and many other "William Morris" furnishings, as well as a lot of ceramics the family picked up on their travels, especially to Morocco. 

Talk at Geological Society -

Visit to Intaglio Printmaker for a look at supplies, brushes, etc for Japanese woodblock printing -

 Looking at the big, bright, haloed harvest moon -

... and the clear morning sky -

 A talk on Paula Rego's drawings (at Marlborough Gallery till 27 Oct)

Contemporary prints at Sotheby's (getting the room ready for the auction next day) -

 ... and some by Rembrandt, also Picasso ceramics

To Kew Gardens ... lovely combinations of plants in the renovated Temperate House -

Now, domestic chores and trying to make some room for future photos on the phone, and organise them so things can be found. 

Possibly a hopeless task, but worth a try. The plan (ah yes, there is always a plan!) is to do it a month at a time, starting a year ago. And here are the projected steps, lest I forget...

First, delete the sloppy stuff - blurs and duplicates. Note to self: be ruthless! or at least try to be ruthless. 

Second, do "big chunks" - multiple photos from exhibitions, for example. Walks. Courses / workshops. Those go into albums and then those pix are archived immediately. After that, go into the folder and add text (use the Tt icon) - what the show was, where the walk was, etc.

It may be possible, with Edit Album in the menu, to move pix around ("Select photos and drag to reorder") so that the most relevant/interesting/best/favourite are at the start, but that refinement will have to wait till the rough stuff is done.

It takes a long time to go through the photos (my phone holds about 19,000), but there are lovely surprises, and it's a pleasure to look back to this time last year ....

September 2017
After digging out all the deep roots and discussing the
placement of paving stones, it was such a pleasure to get
plants into the ground

September 2018
Some of last year''s plants survived and some even
self-seeded; it's a work in progress...

Addendum

A quick search found on "How do I delete photos from my phone but not Google Photos?" found this -

Delete selected device copy photos from the device in the photos menu

1. Open the Google Photos app on your mobile device .

1. Select one or more photos that are on the device.

1. At the top right, tap on the "3 dots" menu icon.

1. Select Delete Device Copy.

This may be the halfway-house solution that I subconsciously yearned for. But first I want to think carefully about why photos need to stay on the phone - what further use would they get - and thus, what subjects or situations could do with deleting. All those photos of gardens and plants, are they of interest to anyone but me ... and I have them on the computer ....

Camera tricks (android phone)

My phone camera produces unsatisfactory photos under certain lighting conditions - we get all sorts of lighting at the Drawing Tuesday show&tell sessions, and sometimes the photos are rather poor.

I've not been able to - no, that's not right, let me rephrase it: I've not looked for how to change the camera settings - they're not under the phone settings, so where could they be? A bit of web searching reveals that these things are hidden in plain sight! To find them, via such instructions, you do have to know the terminology. And the basic moves - swipe left, open from the app. And what the icons are called.

(There is a theory that not knowing the terminology is what stops many people (usually those of a certain age) from using "smart" technology. A publication along the lines of "what does it look like - what's it called - what does it do" that covers various devices could be useful.)

I discovered that the menu for the camera appears when you open the camera from the cluttered screenful of icons for apps, ie not by drawing a V on screen or double tapping (which I didn't know was possible!) and then you swipe from the left.

On this list is Manual, which I'd simply disregarded, but now had to investigate. Oh! There's a brightness setting, a sort of wheel that you can touch to move to adjust the colour cast - cloudy, daylight, auto, fluorescent, or incandescent - and what a difference that makes!

In daylight, indoors (bright white matte and gloss paint) -

Cloudy conditions

Under sunny skies

Auto (with bonus focal point!)

Fluorescent lighting

Incandescent lighting

The  little round lamp is an LED light, shining on a white wall -

Set to cloudy

sunshine/daylight

auto

fluorescent

incandescent

Another possibility for getting a brighter photo is playing with the ISO setting. A higher setting indicates a faster "film", ie shorter shutter speed needed, so to get more light into the camera, use a smaller ISO number, maybe 200 or 100. If lighting is confusing, eg spotlights indoors, the camera doesn't know what to do.

All very interesting, but the proof will be in the pudding when, next time we meet round a table in a spotlit corner of a cafe, the Drawing Tuesday photos are taken.

Did you notice the "focal point" - the double circle? This appears when you touch the "camera" screen, and using it is a good idea in tricky lighting conditions. Sometimes the camera takes a little moment to adjust and focus, and premature clicking results in blurry photos. This is like the "hold the button halfway down before clicking all the way" on a proper camera - it's giving the machine time to do its very best.

Of course some editing can be done in camera or on computer, and often the "auto colour correct" function works fine ... but not always. I use googlephotos because they are automatically downloaded from the phone onto my laptop, and that program offers rotation, colour correction (tricky if the colour balance is bad to start with!), cropping... There's a keystroke for downloading, eg to Photoshop, where you can do more complicated things there, but laziness usually wins.  The laziest thing of all is to take a good photo in the first place!

It only takes a minute

Coming back to the computer after a day of gallivanting in town, I found it had closed itself down, as it sometimes does, and had also changed the wallpaper on the desktop, as it should but sometimes doesn't. 

During the latest incident of "it's going so slow, I'd better back up immediately before it dies altogether" my son had helpfully got rid of all the things I don't need: "They slow it down and make it work harder, Mum, and when did you last use them?" All too true, but when do we ever make time for computer housekeeping?

But this is not about that - what sparked this little story is seeing the photo that happened to appear from the many possibilities in my files.

Lovely drawing, very striking - but as a photograph, it's dreadful. There are the reflections, which in situ you can't do much about ... what you can do something about is the "composition" - get that square thing squarely into the frame! It just takes a moment to tilt the camera or smartphone.

This is where "post-processing" is so useful. The editing in the camera or phone might not be able to straighten up that picture, but Photoshop and probably other editing programs can.

I've had to do this often, and use keystrokes. Control-A selects the entire photo - you see dotted lines around it. Control-T is "transform" and puts boxes (handles) at the corners and middles that you can drag out into the background till the lines of the picture frame are parallel with the edges of the photo. Click to accept, then use the Crop tool to get rid of the unwanted background.

Now that my screengrab of the photo was starting to look good, I wanted to get rid of the recycle-bin icon. With the Clone Stamp you select a "good" spot to use as a replacement, and overlay that onto the unwanted bit - it works like an eraser -

Getting your "wallpaper" from you photo files is rather frustrating. You have no clue about the picture - when or where was it taken, what does it show? Usually you do remember why you took it though - in this case, because I struggle with depicting rocks (among other things!) and wanted to look at how this artist (name lost, of course) did it.

Should have taken a moment to get the framing right ... saves a bit of work further down the line.

Photoshop discovery - quick selection

This exciting new facet of Photoshop is due to the slip of a curson. Colour in bright areas tends to disappear when the camera is set on automatic. I was trying to restore the pale pink to the white peonies, and instead of clicking on the Lasso tool, I got the Quick Selection tool instead ... something I've not used but now obviously have to investigate.

The text on the screenshot points to the Quick Selection tool. Once you've clicked on it, you go to your image and click on the areas you want to work with - and it quickly defines the borders of an area of uniform colour. You can select many areas, one after another.

After you've selected the area(s), you can manipulate the colour.

To make the white less bright - ie, to give the other shades a chance - I used Levels (Ctrl+L). Note the position of the sliders in the original, above, and the manipulated version, below.

You can see the difference in the photo, especially in the pink of the larger flower.

Not a great photo, there's no subtlety, but at least you get an idea of the colour and texture rather than seeing just a block of brightness.

I used this trick in the larger flowers of the hydrangeo -

 but not in the foxglove -