WIP Wednesday :: photo album stumbling block

Two months ago, I had grand plans for what was supposed to be a “quick” project. I blogged about it, I got two albums filled…and then I hit a snag. A pile of photos, printed a million*years ago (*in 2016), of our 2015 road trip to WA & the gulf country. Perfect, one would think, nice easy progress.

One would think wrong. There were at least five days at the start of the trip missing.

I pulled my working hard drive from the era of the move to the farm – nope. It only went back as far as 2017. I pulled two large archived externals – still no luck. They were mostly secondary backups client photos from my now-shuttered photography business. There was only one solution…it was container diving time. I would have to pull out my old PC tower, dust it off, fire it up, and go back a decade into the main hard drives to rescue my photos.

The tower has been living in the school room since early September. Today, I FINALLY got around to hooking it up to a monitor, left out from Beetle’s PS2 play over the weekend. Then, I realised I needed a mouse and a keyboard (clearly, I’ve been working from a laptop for too long!), messaged said tech support, found a spare mouse & keyboard in his left-at-home stash, and got to work.

Thankfully, the photos had been printed at my pro lab, and had file names on the back. Fileanmes that I had wisely & thankfully set to be DATE-FILENUMBER when I exported them from Lightroom room almost a decade ago. Once Lightroom 2019 creaked to life, I was able to pull up my culling filters, seperate by date, and find & export the missing photos.

The next workaround cropped up once I’d exported them. I was under very strict instructions to not connect the tower to the internet; it was running Windows 10, and tech support had decreed this was now an offline only computer. Fine…until I need to upload photos to print. I dug out a hard drive, plugged it in, and then remembered the front three USB ports don’t work any more. A switch to the back USBs and we were off and running. Photos dumped from PC to hard drive, drive ejected and connected to MacBook, photos uploaded via macbook to the printer…and now all I have to do is wait for them to be ready for collection, and I can get stuck into the next album.

yes, my computer is so old it still defaults to 4:3 display. I originally had it built in 2011, with upgrades in 2014 and 2018. It hasn’t had a hardware update since then

While I have the PC out, I’m hoping to power through the remaining printed photos, and then find the existing photo albums, and work out what years I haven’t printed yet. Ideally by the end of the year, I would love to have all the photos from 2006 – the year Bear was born – until now in slip in albums and neatly lined up on the bookshelves, ready for a fresh start for memory keeping in 2026.