Organizing Photos of Twins

My project this weekend, and possibly for the rest of my natural life, is to get my well over 15,000 pictures of my kids organized.  Step one was getting them all in one place, which happened over the course of a week a few months ago.  Next was importing them into Lightroom 5.  It's been a few hours and that's still going on.  I've decided to start the daunting and near impossible task of tagging the pictures that have loaded so far.  An hour and a half in, I'm on 614.  Um, yeah...

It's not like I didn't start out with a system I thought would work.  I fired up iPhoto on my MacBook back in the day (like 2008), saw the tagging options, and went with it.  Little did I realize that a little laptop was in no way going to be able to contain the sheer amount of photos I was going to take in the next 4 years.  "Bogged down system" doesn't even begin to describe my situation in early 2012.

So now the network drive is holding the colossus, with digital and physical backups scattered across various platforms.  I looked through some of the Lightroom 5 video tutorials and decided to give it a free 30 day try.  Within the software, you are presented with a number of ways to rate, flag, tag, and color code your pictures.  What I am primarily interested in was the tagging.

In the case of identical twins, I may be the only person on the planet that can tell them apart in pictures.  It helps that I took them, certainly, but it's also a matter of staring at their faces every single day.  Sometimes you can cheat and use visual clues (different shoes, certain clothes, etc.), and honestly, sometimes I even have to just guess.  The bottom line is, though, if I get hit by a turnip truck tomorrow, I'd like family to be able to know who is who later on.

Facebook has the best tagging, with a giant square smack dab over their faces.  Anyone can come along and figure that out.  All of the other software I've used keeps the tags as essentially text slapped in some data file somewhere.  This presents a problem for me.  Tagging a picture with both "Alex" and "Zach" tells me they are in there somewhere, but not which is which.  So, the best I could come up with is a 4 tag system that looks like this:

LZach, Alex
LAlex, Zach

(c) Lollipopz Photography

The "L" at the beginning stands for "Left", telling me who is on the left side as I am looking at the picture.  So the tags for the above picture would be "LZach" and "Alex", since Zach is wearing the striped shirt.  My rule of thumb is whoever has a body part closest to the left side of the picture wins the "L".  It can get tricky when they are wrestling on the bed, but I'm ok with a small margin of error.  Plus I never just take one photo of anything.  Check the 10 before and after it and I'm sure you can figure it out.

 

I choose to put the "L" first so if I'm typing in the tags, two keystrokes will get me the auto fill for what I want.  If you put it at the end, you're going to have to do more work.

 

This also gives me the potential benefit of being able to find pictures of just one or the other, assuming Lightroom will let me exclude tags.  So if I want ones of just Zach by himself, I'd search for pictures with "Zach" but without "LAlex".  We will see if this is possible.

Hitting the Road

In a couple of days we will be loading up all of our junk into a rented RV and heading to my parent's house about 550 miles away.  I'd always said I wanted to rent one and head west, where it was more about the journey than the destination.  So when we started weighing our options when visiting my family, it fit the bill the best.  They don't really have room for us at their house, we are super early at getting up and going to bed, and the nearest hotel is 45min away.  To top it off, they already had an RV pad and hookups from hosting my grandfather's a number of times.

You'd think I'd be leaping around, tossing flowers, and singing with happiness at the thought of scratching an item off my bucket list.  I. am. not. I'm scared and have been combatting my anxiety with overplanning activities for the trip.  Pinterest became my enabler and I didn't look back.  If you're looking for things that will be completely overkill for a 9-10hr trip, you've come to the right place.

I made both 4yr old boys a bag of goodies to keep with them during the trip:

1. Pizza baking sheet and three containers from Dollar Tree.  I glued magnets to the bottom of the containers so they wouldn't slide.  The store was out of the regular cookie sheets, so this was the best I could do.  Turns out they fit perfectly on their laps between the arms of their car seat.  I experimented with hot gluing foam on the bottoms, but I was too lazy and didn't like the look.
2. Reusable grocery bag I had left over from the Doc McStuffins party.
3. Random toys from the dollar store.  I wrapped some, including funny socks, a pocket fan, toy helicopter, and a ball on a lanyard.
4. My homemade "I Spy" jar of rice and little items.  The container and rice are from the dollar store.  You can see my laminated answer key thing below.  The reusable fruit ice cubes and the plastic heart are dollar store buys.  The rest are foam stickers from Walmart.
   
   
5. Ignore this.  I covered it in #3 and am too tired to go back and change the picture.
6. A Super Fantastic Binder that belongs to Alex, obviously!

I managed to jam a ton of stuff into a 1.5in binder, as you can see above.

1. One of those baggies with hair gel and food coloring in it, that you draw on with a q-tip.  I put it in a 3 ring binder zipper pouch for safe keeping.
2. A bunch of sheets ripped out from the Kumon books at Costco.  I went with mazes and cutting.
3. A clear 3 ring binder pencil case full of foam and regular stickers, purchased at Walmart and Dollar Tree.
4. A clear 3 ring binder pencil case full of pipe cleaners, kid scissors, feather pen, washable crayons, and ring stamps.  Everything was from the dollar store.
5. Construction paper, pages ripped out of a truck coloring book, and a letter recognition sheet that you stamp with bingo markers.
6. A composition notebook, 3 ring pouch to put it in, and a blank white paper pad.

You don't honestly think I stopped there, do you?  I wasn't kidding when I said overboard.  Here are the supplemental materials I'll have with me, to hand out as needed.

1. I wasted a whole number to point out a reusable grocery bag, which is identical to the last one I showed you.
2. Laminated memory game cards (4).  You cover the pictures with tokens and try to find the matching ones.  I literally googled "cute clipart" and picked what I liked for a total of 10 images.
3. A gallon bag with giant foam dice (bookmarked kids dice games), paper fish with paper clips (to make a fishing game on the fly with the ball on the lanyard and a sticky backed magnet), and two small rainbow colored paper pads.
4. A giant box of crayons and colored pencils, sticky-backed foam sheets, and a zipper pouch of cheap bracelets and necklaces.
5. Large laminated cutouts of Zach and Alex (to draw on with dry erase markers), "I Spy" answer keys, and a zippered pouch with The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse game.
6. The rest of the Kumon books, a Disney Jr coloring book, baggy of dry erase, window, bingo, and foam markers, dollar store clay, painter's tape, a stamp kit, two decks of cards, wedding bubbles, and a pouch with a foam puzzle.

Not pictured because I still need to make them are the wooden tokens for the memory cards.  I want to put magnets on the back so they stick to the pizza trays, but ran out of materials.  I also didn't show you all of the board books and toys I have for the baby.  I got him a couple of nice new ones, since he'll eat dollar store stuff.  There are also a ton of crackers, cookies, mini candy bars, and lollipops.

Two good places to find kids songs for the road are bussongs.com and kididdles.com.  Yeah, just putting that out there.

 

 On top of all of that, I'm going to have the boys color in some RV clipart I made.  I'll run a clothesline in the RV with the hours marked off on it.  Their RV's will ride from our house to grandma and pap's house via the line, to give a visual of how far we've gone and how much we need to go.  You can find more info about it here.

Before you think I'm all about the enriching activities, an iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, travel DVD players, AND the WiiU will be making the trip with us.  If things get bad, I'm willing to go full on video zombie if that's what it takes. 
 

Fear is a strong motivator.