About Pictures, how to upload, and why some are missing

Because the blog has evolved and because our needs are changing, I now have most of the pictures on my FlickR site. All since February 2007 are safe for as long as FlickR survives. Storing them there allows me to do other things without worrying about what will happen to the photos. It was getting increasingly difficult for me to do any meaningful maintenance to the website because photos were scattered throughout. FlickR stores, keeps them organized, and keeps them backed up for me.

More photos than I would like were lost or corrupted in the last move in November 2008. There are two types of files. Straight text files are uploaded/downloaded one way (Ascii) and encoded files are uploaded another way (Binary). The ones that were uploaded to folders that were mostly images were downloaded safely. The ones that weren't are the ones that are missing/corrupted or out of place. When I'm downloading several thousand files for the purpose of moving the website, it is difficult and tedious to do them one at a time in the necessary format so I downloaded the whole website in "Automatic" mode. "Automatic" mode is supposed to identify each file based on its file extension and download it accordingly. It works OK for a few files but not so well for larger batches of files. Some binary files got downloaded in ascii format and were corrupted. If you see some missing, note the date of the entry and email me. I may just have it out of place. If you have copies of any of the missing photos, please send them along to me.

Unless you want to open your own FlickR account, it's better and easier for you to just send them to me to post. It really is no trouble at all for me and I much prefer it.

Updated March 22, 2009