Don't Let Your Photos Languish - Enjoy Them!
Posted by bilofsky on January 05, 2010
Remember the old days, when treasured photographic memories sat in photo albums that gathered dust, and you never looked at them?
Today's digital photos are easier than ever to take. Yet so many of them languish as piles of JPEGs on hard drives.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Here are some ways you can enjoy your memories every day - including a hot bargain!
The bargain is a digital picture frame on sale at Newegg for $42, including shipping. It's an 8" diagonal screen with decent 800x600 resolution, and takes an SD card or thumb drive with the photos. As of this writing, it's $47 with shipping, less $5 if you apply promo code EMCLMLS64 on checkout.
This frame only shows photos in order, not randomized, and has few bells and whistles. But at the price, it's a reasonable way to get your memories off the hard drive and onto your desk or wall.
If even that price is too high, one zero cost approach is to rotate your photos as your Windows desktop background. But that doesn't work if your screen is as cluttered as mine. You could make them a screen saver, but it's better to be green and let your idle computer go into sleep mode. My desktop runs in sleep mode at less than 20% power consumption, and wakes up in a few seconds when I need it.
A better solution, in my view, is to hang your photos on the wall. And not tacking up just one or two - hang hundreds or thousands. Here's how.
Have you upgraded to a new wide screen monitor? Is the old flat panel display lying around? Many new computers have a second monitor output.
So remove the base from that spare flat panel, hang it on the wall behind your computer, and run a slide show of your photos on it. I use a program called My Slide Show. The latest version can display the show on your second monitor.
Use My Slide Show to create an executable file. Then make the show run automatically on bootup, by putting a shortcut to the executable in the Startup folder on your All Programs menu.
For years, I've been displaying a stand-alone slide show on a larger flat panel on our dining room wall. It runs off a mini-ITX computer that only draws 20 watts. If you have an old laptop sitting around, here's a use for it. Plug that spare flat panel into it (or spring for a big new display), hang the panel on the wall, and run a slide show of your best photos.
Now if you're like me, you worry about the monitor being on all the time. So I only run it when someone's in the room. Here's how - with thanks to Rube Goldberg.
Hanging near the entrance to our dining room is an inexpensive X-10 motion sensor. When someone enters the room, the sensor sends a wireless signal to an X-10 switch, turns on the monitor, and leaves it on for an hour. This saves power and prolongs the monitor's life.
So don't let your photographic memories moulder on your hard drive. Enjoy them every day, as we do.
Today's digital photos are easier than ever to take. Yet so many of them languish as piles of JPEGs on hard drives.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Here are some ways you can enjoy your memories every day - including a hot bargain!
The bargain is a digital picture frame on sale at Newegg for $42, including shipping. It's an 8" diagonal screen with decent 800x600 resolution, and takes an SD card or thumb drive with the photos. As of this writing, it's $47 with shipping, less $5 if you apply promo code EMCLMLS64 on checkout.
This frame only shows photos in order, not randomized, and has few bells and whistles. But at the price, it's a reasonable way to get your memories off the hard drive and onto your desk or wall.
If even that price is too high, one zero cost approach is to rotate your photos as your Windows desktop background. But that doesn't work if your screen is as cluttered as mine. You could make them a screen saver, but it's better to be green and let your idle computer go into sleep mode. My desktop runs in sleep mode at less than 20% power consumption, and wakes up in a few seconds when I need it.
A better solution, in my view, is to hang your photos on the wall. And not tacking up just one or two - hang hundreds or thousands. Here's how.
Have you upgraded to a new wide screen monitor? Is the old flat panel display lying around? Many new computers have a second monitor output.
So remove the base from that spare flat panel, hang it on the wall behind your computer, and run a slide show of your photos on it. I use a program called My Slide Show. The latest version can display the show on your second monitor.
Use My Slide Show to create an executable file. Then make the show run automatically on bootup, by putting a shortcut to the executable in the Startup folder on your All Programs menu.
For years, I've been displaying a stand-alone slide show on a larger flat panel on our dining room wall. It runs off a mini-ITX computer that only draws 20 watts. If you have an old laptop sitting around, here's a use for it. Plug that spare flat panel into it (or spring for a big new display), hang the panel on the wall, and run a slide show of your best photos.
Now if you're like me, you worry about the monitor being on all the time. So I only run it when someone's in the room. Here's how - with thanks to Rube Goldberg.
Hanging near the entrance to our dining room is an inexpensive X-10 motion sensor. When someone enters the room, the sensor sends a wireless signal to an X-10 switch, turns on the monitor, and leaves it on for an hour. This saves power and prolongs the monitor's life.
So don't let your photographic memories moulder on your hard drive. Enjoy them every day, as we do.