Organizing videos from past years

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My collection of digital photographic files on my hard drive starts in 1998.

Since then I’ve been trying to keep the image files organized by date and event.
 

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Within my PhotoArchive1 folder are more than 63,000 digital images that I’ve taken from 1998 through 2010. This folder is subdivided into folders arranged by year and some folders are further subdivided by month, day and event name.

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Since it’s inception I’ve used Adobe Lightroom to organize and edit most of my photographs. As an ardent user of Lightroom I’ve benefited from the new and powerful features that Adobe continues to add to this software. I’ve spent many, many hours using Lightroom to tag the images and can now easily search for images by date, name, event, category, more.

Two weeks ago as I was going through these older images I realized that I haven’t done a good job organizing the videos that were taken at the same times as the still photos. I’m now reminded that video recording was missing from the digital cameras that I used. It wasn’t until about 2004 that my first digital camera had video capability. These videos were small sized producing 320 x 216 resolution movies. By about 2006, the resolution of my movies jumped to about 640 x 480. Since then resolution has grown by leaps and bounds with many non-professional cameras offering 1920 x 1080 and some even having 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160.

Let’s get back to my past videos. I use Lightroom to easily spot the videos. then I make digital copies of all of these videos with a set of filenames that clearly identifies the date of the recording.

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With Lightroom I’m looking at the contents of the 040523_Birthday folder where I see two videos files – one 9 seconds and another 15 seconds in length. From here I Export a copy of these videos and separately rename them with a prefix of 2004_04_ to make it easy to determine the date taken.

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I repeated the process of Exporting the videos from Lightroom from each folder. This took many hours over a several day period. When I finished, I had processed more than 1150 videos.


Above you can see a group of the renamed exported videos. All of these videos (more than 1000) are now in a single folder that other members of the household can view at their leisure.

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The year and month prefix (in this example 2010_09_) help to put the videos into a chronological context but is not helpful otherwise. However the small thumbnail photo provides a better way to key in on the contents of the video. It’s not perfect, but is certainly a better way than keeping the videos hidden within my PhotoArchive1 folder.

Would you be surprised to learn that I have never viewed many of these videos? Up to now I have concentrated on the still images in my large collection and have largely ignored the videos. With my videos now more organized I am anxious to view these “motion pictures” – some going back almost 20 years.

One of my future missions is to uncover the videos that I took from 2011 to the present.
 
 
Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

Pictures With No Other Purpose Other Than Fun

The majority of my photos are portraits, events, scenery, wildlife or commercial work for business.

Every once in a while I run across a situation that is hilarious or just plain funny. Below are from those occasions which I caught on camera.
 

Have you injected a little humor into your photography?
 
 
Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed photography since I was a youngster. This in turn is the reason that my picture taking has spanned more than five decades.

I categorize the photos that I take into one of two “camps” – the snapshots and the memorable photos.

This article is the another in a series of articles that I’ve called “About this photo” to draw attention to a few of those memorable photos that may be hiding in a shoebox or on your hard drive.

Unlike some people who have photographic memories, I instead have memories about certain photographs.

Most of these special photographs were taken long, long ago. They are indelible and remain riveted in my mind. And so, in this “About this photo” series, I’d like to key in on one of these unforgettable photographs to bring you back to the time and circumstances under which it was taken.

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Taken late summer 1970, this is a photo of my girlfriend along Lake Michigan. We spent many weekends at this beach that summer. Usually the beach was very crowded, but on this cloudy and windy day, we had the run of the sand and shore to ourselves. The red lighthouse was a familiar site to anyone who knows this area and remains a key attraction to the beach today. It’s a lucky coincidence that my girlfriend’s jacket was about the same shade of red as the lighthouse. The reason that this photo is etched in my mind is that I’ve been married to this lovely lady for 50 years now.

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Now let’s skip forward some 40+ years. This photo was taken a few summers ago. Here we have two young girls having fun at the same location on Lake Michigan. You can see the same red lighthouse along the water albeit at a slightly different angle. These are two of our young grandchildren. As we were walking along the beach I was reminded of the 1970 photograph when we approached the red lighthouse. I asked the two girls to pose on the bench in the foreground. This photo captures the familiar feelings of warmth and affection that has somehow remained with me for more than 50 years.

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Along the way, I’ve taken a huge number of snapshots. However, the number of memorable photos that I’ve taken is far smaller. Yet it’s the memorable ones that have a magical ability to steer emotions, feelings and pleasure into our minds, even years later. Simply amazing.

 

Written by Arnie Lee

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