The Beauty of a Tool that Works Well
It started innocently enough. A friend issued a challenge to post ten photos from past travels without comments or explanations. I did so. But then I just couldn’t let it go. No explanation, no comment seemed like shortchanging the few friends who would see my posts.
So I started a series on my blog 2C2V with those same photos and a bit more information. For some of the images it was just an identification of the location, For other my posts were a little more informative.
Then I came to “Challenge 5“, this photo:
Do you know what those are, or where they are located? You can probably figure it out by inspecting the photo more closely. Yes, they are supports for big guns. These happen to be located at Fort Pulaski in the mouth of the Savannah river.
I wanted some more illustration so I plugged in my archive drive to my laptop. It takes a few minutes to set up all the indices whenever that is done. Not a problem. Since some of my photos are from over a decade ago I clicked “All Photos” then entered “Savannah” in text search. Oh, I should tell you that I always use Microsoft Photo Gallery, there simply is no better tool for managing images.
Back in my early days of digital photography I did not manage the file names well and was rather casual with tagging. I hoped that looking for “Savannah” would get most of my old photos from that area and enough from Fort Pulaski to put together an interesting blog post. It worked. I had a nice selection. I grabbed the original NEF files so I could reprocess them – I do a much better job nowadays and this gave me the opportunity to rework some old photos.
One of the photos did not seem to belong, I just don’t remember this gate anywhere on Fort Pulaski:
Clearly this is one of the old forts in the Savannah area, I just could not remember which. There are several forts in the area. There is Fort Screven on Tybee Island with a number of its”batteries”; Battery Habersham, Battery Backus, Battery Brumby, Battery Garland, and many others. None of those places are very large and this image just didn’t fit.
Finally, after looking at some more of my photos, even consulting Google, I had the correct idea. Look at the photos taken before and after this one. Look at the time the photos were taken. With that it should be easy to locate the gate.
Sure enough, the photos taken before the gate are mostly from the beach at Tybee. Take a closer look.
Those two friendly totem poles can only be from one place, the Crab Shack restaurant on Tybee. And after the photos from the “gate” place and the riverside there are sights from Savannah.
So in this little episode we had been on the Beach at Tybee, then visited the Crab Shack, the “gate” place, and then traveled on to Savannah. No photos of Fort Pulaski in this group, we did not visit there on this trip. The only other fort is Fort Jackson.
The time stamp of the photo before the gate was 2:34. The “gate” at 3:13. That is easily enough time to drive the 13.7 miles according to Google.
After this bit of sleuthing, there was a bit of tagging to do so the photos can be found the next time. It would not do to just make the corrections on the copied photos. There is a neater way to get them all.
Photo Gallery lets you select photos by date taken and groups them together regardless of their file name or location.
It’s a snap to select all the Fort Jackson photos and to tag them all at once. This applies the tags to the files in the archive as well as the ones I copied and re-processed.
Since the original date taken is preserved in the files, even my derived artwork of those bottles is now properly tagged with the place where the underlying photos were taken.
Photo Gallery makes tagging and re-tagging really easy. My archive is definitely much more useful now.
.:. © 2020 Ludwig Keck