Sunday, November 17, 2019

ten thousand photographs

When I got a new camera for a new project which would involve taking a lot of photographs I bought a big memory card. The largest one that seemed sensible, in fact. The camera, however, was but a gussied-up compact. The sort of camera that provokes feelings of puzzlement; for anyone not serious enough to get a proper camera would surely just use their phone. I had my reasons, of course. I needed to take a lot of photos. But at the same time they needed to be snapshots. Not semi-pro flushed up gussied brochure picturelings. They needed to feel real; like a reference shot taken by a location scout, or an image taken by a pre-surveyor, just to show where everything is. They needed to be point and click, point and crunch, point and blur.

Ten thousand shots later, I find I have made a mistake. I plug in the camera as an external drive as normal and cannot see the latest set of photographs. Further investigation finds that the shots are on the camera, but everything above shot 9999 is labelled as shot 9999. Further investigation discovers that under some circumstances windows machines can be left unable to see the data as a result of the 9999 limitation. But this is a pretty rare problem. It doesn't always happen. But it has done, to me, now.

I've dropped the camera a few times, like you do, so that may have had an impact. The memory card is doubtless not the item of purest perfection it was back in its blister pack, thanks to the rigours of heat, humidity and a hard knock pocket life. Both are bits of hardware that deal more in replacement than repair. The computer is due an upgrade, but I found the exact same problem occurring on his more up-to-date sister. And that's me all out of easy fixes.

So now I'm setting up a human system to manage the 9999 limitation without eating up all of my time. But really, what a faff.


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