I think it was a sign. I should have know that this was how my day was going to begin. I started up my Xbox 360 and I got the red rings of death. This is not the first time this has happened to me, but I’m especially pissed since this was Microsoft’s idea of a home media center, their answer to having all media consolidated in one box doesn’t work when I need it to.
So there is my 2 year, screaming and tantrum-ing because he wants to watch Little Einsteins and that is not happening because of the red rings of death. So, I distract him and turn on the DVR to show him some recorded shows.
Well, with that over, I go to my trusty laptop running Mac OS X. The night before, I fired up ViewNX and spent the whole night organizing my photos in that program and got them ready for uploading to myPictureTown. The program comes with a built in uploader to myPictureTown. That’s nice, but the uploader program is a little strange. For example, when the uploads are done, it displays the Console program, which is a program that is usually used for reporting errors. The uploader uses it to tell me that the pictures have been uploaded.
ViewNX is also a little strange. It is slower than iPhoto and you can’t view all of your photos in one pane: it segregates photos by the folders they are in which is a real pain in the butt if you have many images you want to upload spanning multiple folders.
Well for now, I wasn’t going to lament. I spent the time tagging my photos and used the myPictureTown photo uploader to upload the pictures to my account.
Well, my Xbox died and I had to calm down my son. After that, I went upstairs expecting to see the console program telling me that the uploads were done. Instead I see the uploader still trying to upload pictures and telling me that it still has 26 images to go… WTF!!! That was over 12 hours ago!
What was happening? I tried canceling the upload process. Nope. That cancel button works as well as the cancel button did on the AOL download progress dialog. Click click click and nothing happens… nothing happens… nothing… happens…
I had to force quit the program and check my account to see if any images had uploaded. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
All right. Take a deep breath. Quit the programs and try again. This time, I’ll only do one image.
Nope. It doesn’t work. No image or new album created.
So. Now what. I guess I’ll reinvent the wheel. Why? Because there’s nothing else out there that works like I want it too.
I want a program that is easy and fast like iPhoto, but has the image editing and tagging like ViewNX. CaptureNX is too slow on my laptop. Adobe Lightroom you say? No, the image quality out of that program is simply not good enough.
So to start, I’m going to create a program that let’s me easily organize all of my photos. From there, I think I’ll create an uploader to Flickr. myPictureTown is nice, but I end up uploading to Flickr anyway from there and myPictureTown strips out the EXIF data, so I might as well go straight to where I want to go…