The traveling shutterbug

Those who know me as an avid photographer won't be surprised when informed that I managed to take over 2500 photos in my two-week trip. You think that’s too much? Whilst in Europe, I took 3300 pics in three weeks! That makes about one photo every 8 minutes. I must admit, the hardest part was waking up at night every eight minutes to take that damned picture.

Storage issues

Of course, when you take 2500 photos, you have to store them somehow. Since all I took for the trip was a couple of memory cards totaling about 280 megs, I had to buy myself another card. Not just any card, but a 1 Gigabyte card! As you can imagine, I filled that one in less than four days. So I was always on the lookout for places where I could download my pictures to a CD and wipe the card.  Being on a schedule, I couldn’t be too picky as to where I could go to download my pics. Stationary stores, pharmacies, photo labs... Any place was good! Those circumstances led to the fateful situation I am to tell you about.

Photo tragedy

(Act One)

While on the second leg of the trip, New York, I was quite anxious to empty my brand new 1 meg card. So I walked into a drug store and asked to put my photos on a disc. The usual person wasn’t there, but a very young guy said he could do it. That right there was Warning Number One. He popped the card onto the photo machine and downloaded all the photos to a disk. It took a long while, almost 10 minutes. That was Warning Number Two. At the end, he handed me just one 700 Megabytes disc where he had fitted 1000 Megabytes of images. That was my Third and Final Warning. But I chose to ignore all three.
 

Photo tragedy

(Act Two)

Confident that my photos were all safe on a CD, I proceeded to erase the card.
(Cue ominous music here)

Photo tragedy

(Act Three)

Back home I started to download all the photos onto my computer. When I came to the disk that drugstore guy made me, i noticed the download was fast. Too fast. I checked the folder where those photos were and it read 290 Megabytes. Confused, I checked out the images themselves. In utter horror I discovered that the MORON had shrinked ALL my photos to less than a third in size!!!! So instead of a 1200 x1600 pixel image, I had a 580 x 623 thumbprint. I thought I was gonna convulse, puke and pass out all at the very same time. I wanted to cry, I wanted to die. Only by sheer force of will did I prevent my bowels from losing it completely. The photos became utterly useless. Not only did the guy reduce them, but he erased the metafile data (the part of the image that says when the image was taken, if flash was used, if the image is vertical or horizontal, etc.). Even the original names were erased.

Now, what?

Well, obviously murdering that idiotic drugstore guy is out of the question, now that I am back here in Kzanderallia. So I’ve had to concentrate on making peace with the fact that most of the photos on that card will be lost permanently. There is a bit of hope, however.

The obligatory library analogy

Just like a computer disc is never fully erased, a memory card always retains a bit of info after erasure. Think of the disk as a library that has program files instead of books. It also has a couple of drawers with all the files sorted by title, genre or author. Imagine that you set fire to the drawers, but the files stay intact. That’s what happens when you erase a hard disk or a memory card. The books are fine, but searching for a particular title now requires a lot of extra work.

Hackers to the rescue!

I’ve asked a hacker friend to help me out. He is a major computer geek.
If he can’t get them pictures, NO ONE WILL.
So hopefully, by next Friday I’ll have some of my photos back and maybe my homicidal thirst toward drugstore employees will be satiated.
Or not.