Waiting for Goddam...

I don't know about you, but I hate it when I'm stuck waiting for other people to get around to doing things.

Tonight, I've been attempting to sort through photographs. Electronic photos, to be precise. Photographs Hubby took on his XZ-1500-MACH20022-Turbo-XVIII Nikon camera.

Okay, I don't really know the exact model of the camera. But I've been an AV technician for 19 years, and I can't take a picture with that damned thing.

He's got the resolution set so high it would take passable satellite photos of my nose from space. You'd be able to see the pores.

Hubby has never heard of "photograph albums." When I ask him to print me a picture he's taken, he hands me 8x10s. The usual dozen years of laughing, crying, arguing, screaming, and tearing my hair out, have finally worn one edge of him down enough that if I ask for a print, he'll give me a 4x6 - printed smack in the center of an 8x10 page.

Hubby takes amazing pictures - not that anyone would ever know. He never prints them. Oh well, to be sure, he prints some. But the main reason nobody ever sees the pictures he takes, is that he lets the camera name them.

So I go to the big drive where the pictures are kept, and am presented, within the "Photo" folder, with a series of dated folders. Year, month, and day the pictures were downloaded from his camera onto the computer. Click on any folder, and you get a list of each picture:
DSCN2107.NEF
DSCN2108.NEF
DSCN2109.NEF
DSCN2110.NEF

Get the picture? (Pun intended.)

Even this could be manageable, were it not for the fact that Hubby is an incredibly PROLIFIC photographer! When he finds and interesting subject, say, a grouping of six or more daddy-long-legs having an orgy on our house wall, he takes about 100 pictures.When we went camping with friends this summer, Hubby took 800 pictures! And he saves each and every one. No deleting in-camera. (That's what I do. I look at it, say I like it, I keep it. I don't like it, I dump it. There and then.)

When I download pictures to the computer, I already know I want each and every one of them. Oh, and they're a "normal" size, meaning they'll print at high res as a 4x6, so they can be printed on high quality paper, trimmed, and put in a photo album.
Where I can enjoy sitting with a cup of hot cocoa on my lap and a child curled up beside me and talk about the memories those pictures evoke.

But I digress. There I was today, and I managed to make it from 2003 to 2006 in not too bad time.

But then I hit the wall. Not a single photo had been changed from the NEF format to a JPG. That means, for those of you whose first language is English, 15 minutes from clicking on "open" to seeing the f&#*g picture. Then I drop the resolution, save a copy, and go back to the large drive and delete the original.

There are ten folders of photos from 2006 on. All I'm looking for are pictures of the pets, right now. Any shots I'd like printed, whether they are pets or children, I rename into human language, like "Dog at xmas". THAT, I can understand. And I can say to Hubby "go to this folder and print anything with a human name to it. As a FOUR BY SIX, dear, remember?"

Well, now I'm stuck waiting for Hubby to go on the computer and print the fifteen pictures I managed to get through tonight, and to go through the next ten folders and change NEF to JPEG so I could open them and see what they are before - you guessed it - the second coming of christ.

Or the breaking point of my blood pressure.