Buddy pictures on wall
I cannot tell you how many times I have lost a digital photo. The media gets overwritten or a duplicate filename replaces it. Hell, when we were setting up this blog I had Greg send me a bunch of photos from places he visited so we could have some great outdoor shots to be part of that rotating banner image, and guess what? The upload process for adding media didn’t bother to notify us of file name collisions. It was early days and not all of them had been used, but still.
You might have guessed this post is some fallout from “Our Last Goodnight.” While people may be able to deny my saying I used to have a bunch of pictures of him taken over the years, they cannot deny that thing hanging on the wall at my father’s place. I took those pictures. I gave them to my sister-in-law along with that frame and she used their photo printing stuff to put that gift together. I could not find those pictures while writing that post. I found _all_ of the thumb drives which I own, searched “myCloud” and my desktop. They are gone and, if you read the post I mentioned, you will realize there is no longer any possibility of taking new ones.
You can complain all you want about the piles of photo albums and shoe boxes. You can whine and snivel about how some photos will turn red or yellow with age. What you cannot do those is overwrite the photo. If you ever need it in electronic form you can scan it.
Sony Mavica
My Sony Mavica, flip phone, and pretty much even these 2-in-1 tablets I’m experimenting with all have the same flaw. They try to name things in an old DOS FAT-16 manner and the software developer was an idiot. Most likely this was an AGILE project.
Oh come on! You’ve all seen it. Default file names like IMGnnnnn.JPG where nnnnn is a sequential number. All because they are trying to auto-generate something which can be placed on the oldest of electronic storage media. The trouble is every photo taken by ever instance of the device where that idiot developer’s software is uses the same pattern. When people are in a hurry to get some great shots they don’t take the time (and in most cases are not offered the opportunity) to enter a name. Then the device gets full so you quick swap media or upload some place.
Doro 626 Phone Easy
In defense of my Mavic, it uses MVC and it really does record to FAT-16 formatted floppy disks. It had a legitimate excuse. When I’m taking lots of photos with it I have a stack of floppies and typically I rename them as I save the files to internal disk drives. Not always though.
My less than two year old flip phone which I use for spur of the moment shots has no such excuse. This was simply an AGILE project implemented by the typical shit development team which praises AGILE. You know how I know? Because I copied a ring tone with a long file name over there and it worked just fine. Absolutely no reason for IMGnnnnn.jpg naming. They could have easily done YYYYMMDD-hhmmsscc. For non-geeks that is 4-digit year, month, day – hour, minute, second and centisecond. If the timestamp in the operating system didn’t go down to cenitsecond, those last two digits could simply be a sequential number which was incremented each time a photo was taking.
Personally, I don’t own an idiot phone, but people email pics to me who have them and I see the same worthless IMGnnnnn.JPG naming schema. Maybe they used something old to take it then sent it from their phone?
The last pictures sent to me just before New Years Eve came from someone who has an idiot phone (not saying she used it to take them) but I received file names like:
20171229_111155.jpg
The naming schema only went down to the second. Again, I can tell the worthless AGILE method was used and the developer was allowed to write tests for their own code. A legitimate QA team would have tried taking more than one picture per second.
