Since this is an off-year or us, for a trip to Ireland, I have embarked on a project that has been on the back burner for some time.  In 5 trips to Ireland since 2006, we have acquired numerous pictures located on various medium like sd  cards, thumb drives, back-up hard drives, cd discs, lap top, iPad, and iPhone.

     The back up hard drive has the most storage available, and suppose to be the safest place to put all those "impossible-to-replace" pictures.  DW has done a good job of that with a bazillion pictures of our kids and our Grand daughter from birth to almost 11! (Yes, the grand daughter we took to Ireland last fall.)

    However, the Ireland pictures have been languishing here and there, so I decided it was high time to organize them and store them in one humongous file....so that I could start going thru them to make some sense out of them on a trip by trip basis!  This file is appropriately named "All Ireland Pictures". It is comprised of 11,200 pictures that takes up 25 gig storage space!

     The first trip in 2006 we were using a great (but now non-functional) digital camera, brand new at that time,  netting a meager 500 plus pictures.  The other cameras we used were disposable 35 mm cameras, and we got very few decent pictures out of 6-7 cameras.  About 3 dozen of the best picture were scanned and added to the 2006 file sub-folder.

    The now non-functioning camera was only used by DW for 3 days during our 2nd trip in 2009, due to an accident in Ireland that resulted in a broken shoulder for DW.....and a broken camera!  Luckily the shoulder is now in much better shape than the camera.  She had threatened to get it repaired, but the digital camera technology had advanced so rapidly, she elected to buy a better one with more bells and whistles and mega pixels etc etc!

    My ultimate goal in all of this, is to create 6 slide shows.  One for each trip AND and one "All Ireland" slide show.  So I began honing my skills on locating files, copying, pasting, renaming, merging pictures from more than one source, transferring to thumb drives and to the ultimate final safe resting place on the back-up hard drive, which we should probably keep in a fire proof safe OR the bank box.....or Lord forbid "The Cloud!"

     I'm proud to brag, that I now have 2 slide shows finished: 2006 and 2009!  It is shoulder season for our business, and the tourist busy season starts when schools are out for the summer around mid-June.  Weekdays, during mid-afternoon allows me to get 2-3 hours of serious work done on these projects!  And I get the added benefit of an "Ireland Fix" looking at all those wonderful scenic shots and it brings back many fond memories!

     I have never been brave enough to put any of our pictures on the net like some of our regulars here do.....but maybe now with the finished project.......if any of our regulars have any advice for me, I would appreciate a private message.

     My next goal is to figure out what I need to get, to be able to put these pictures up on our large screen TV!  Paying a visit to some electronics gadget store will be on my agenda soon.  Would like to do it wirelessly, but a cable would be ok too.

     I hope many of you will get to go "Home" in 2015 or some time in the not too distant future!

Regards,

Dan