Prairie Light: 2020 in a Kinder, Gentler Light on YouTube
New Years Greetings, all. Goodness, it's been a while since I posted an article here! This new post marks a return to Geekdom and Nerdiness, in the area of developing significant personal photo and media slideshows on your phone and tablet, with an occasional assist from your desktop or laptop. You can take the geek away from geekdom, but you can never take geekdom away from the geek, I guess.
This is the time of year for things like retrospection and introspection and resolutions and Christmas cards and letters. Among other things. So this year when I was considering what to put in my Christmas letter about the infamous 2020, I turned off onto a side path after Thanksgiving and wound up on a long journey of exploration and discovery of the past 12 years and earlier as well as new ways to tell their stories.
With the purchase of my iPhone X and iPad in 2018 and eventual capitulation to Apple’s demands that I have an iCloud subscription, I have slowly come to realize that I no longer needed to delete photos off my devices to save space. Apple seemed to be managing my space for me by swapping apps and media back and forth from iCloud for both devices. I realized that nowadays when young people buy a new phone they don’t have to lose all their photos and that they can accumulate quite a pocket pictorial history on their devices. Perhaps the first generation to experience such continuity! Lately Apple has gone to all the trouble to curate and organize our photo libraries on our devices by years, months, and days so that we can easily go back to a period of time and look through a beautiful display. Heck Apple will even do a slide show for us at the press of a button, especially nice when used with Apple’s Album feature. Gone are the days of looking for a printed date-stamp on the back of an old film photo, or, if like me, you have eventually abandoned all other cameras in favor of the one on your phone, the days of keeping an accurate date setting on your standalone digital camera. Our phone cameras automatically keep track of time right down to the day and hour the photo was taken! How convenient!
Anyway, as I was mulling all of this, it occurred to me, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go back to the time that I started regularly using my phone camera (around 2012 when I had to spend several months on the east coast helping family) and get all of those photos on or back on my iCloud photo library? Then I could take advantage of Apple’s great tools to curate my own slide show productions of each year. (Only I would probably have to move to a higher storage plan on iCloud, especially if I threw in an occasional favorite from a standalone digital camera as well.)
In 2019 a bolt of lightning struck a tree close to our house and did considerable damage, including killing our tv. We replaced it with a tv of similar price, only now tv’s were “Smart.” I knew the new tv had two USB ports (and could browse the internet), and I wondered what would happen if I loaded my slide shows onto a thumb drive and simply plugged it in to the tv. Would it work like a dvd player only hopefully with the original resolution?
The iPhone and iPad have some pretty quick and easy slide-show and movie apps, except that through the years they have moved to subscription-based fees for use. Having intermittently toyed for years with video and slide-show editors, from PowerPoint on, I had in mind the tools I wanted an app to have for such a large project (year-in-review slide shows from 2012 to 2020). I didn’t want limits on the number of slides per show and I did want to be able to include video. Furthermore, while the ability to “touch” every slide would be nice (the ability to specify captions, styles and effects, duration, and transitions at the individual slide level), I mostly wanted the ability to specify these types of things globally (for all the slides) and be able to run with it. Background music would be nice, including the ability to import free music from other sources like YouTube’s free music library. Adequate resolution was important and ended up being one of the “hitches” I had to troubleshoot along the way. I ended up using an app called Slideshow Maker Video & Photo by Alan Cushway with a very doable annual subscription fee of 7.99 per year. iMovie complemented Alan’s App, by letting me add a running title so we could see which year we were watching as the slide show played. So I ended up rendering the movie twice – once in Alan’s app to build the slide show, and again in iMovie, as a single movie slide, so I could add the running title. I worried about how the resolution would be affected by rendering the slideshow twice, but in the end the quality was quite acceptable, at least from the distance we watch our TV.
In theory my plan to use iPhone and iPad devices to do this project (years-in-review slide shows from 2012 to 2020) seemed like it should work pretty seamlessly. But in actuality, I regularly hit roadblocks in the execution. Two major challenges were internet bandwidth and my laptop’s cpu power/hard drive space. The bandwidth problem is related to where I live which is out in the country where high speed internet is nonexistent. Actually our rural electric cooperative has been working to bring high speed internet to our area for a couple of years now and if things go according to plan, our area should have high-speed internet by 2024. Yay, but I needed it now.
So, here’s where bandwidth became an issue in my project. I had been diligently keeping backups of my digital photos over the years. However many of those years I did not have an iCloud account (if such a thing even existed in 2012) and so I had to find a way to get those older photos from my pc over to iCloud. Not hard in theory. You can mount iCloud on your desktop or laptop computer essentially as another hard drive and then use File Explorer (or Finder) to copy files over. However, through the years as cell phone camera usage increased, I had accumulated literally thousands of pictures. =:o I didn’t want to have to go through them on my pc. I wanted to dump them over to iCloud, and use Apple’s more intuitive sorting and viewing tools to cull and curate them. However I soon found that trying to copy over thousands of photos at a time from my pc to my iCloud drive was a slow, treacherous, and torturous process which often sent my internet bandwidth and my pc’s cpu power to Never-Never Land. And I feared that my pc hard drive storage would be used up as well because I was essentially duplicating files already on my hard drive by placing them in the iCloud folder. I wondered if iCloud would manage its space on my pc hard drive as it did on my phone and iPad. The other thing about iCloud is that (unlike me) Apple stores all those photos through the years in ONE folder. We are talking about a folder with 30,000 to 60,000 photo and video files in it mounted as a hard drive on my pc. Enough to bring any consumer operating system to its knees, I guess! I wondered if those photos I tried to copy over would eventually show up in my iPhone and iPad photo libraries. Some did. I discovered them in my Recents folder first mixed in among my current photos. Eventually Apple would curate some by month and year. I usually had to wait a day or two with large transfers. Some photos went to Never-Never Land. Eventually I resigned to curating on the PC and copying over the photos I wanted to include in the slide shows in small batches. Probably the wisest approach. Oh, but wait. There was yet another complication, perhaps the biggest headache of all. Apple’s camera roll tends to restart its file naming from zero after a while and especially when one gets a new phone. So I had to make sure in this huge iCloud file folder that I wasn’t overwriting different photos that happened to have the same name. Microsoft File Explorer handles this by allowing you to specify which file you want to keep – the one already in the destination folder or the one you want to copy over to it. If you decide to keep both (because you have two different photos with the same name), then File Explorer simply adds a number to one of them. With the slowness of the huge iCloud folder to update and display (as in NEVER), managing the process of not overwriting files was perhaps the worst task of all. Often it was like flying blind. In the process of trying and re-trying, I fear I have ended up with many duplicate photos with a unique number after their name which I will have to eventually figure out how to remove from iCloud. =:o
When all the photos I wanted for a given year were finally in my iPhone and iPad libraries, I was ready to start production of the slide shows. I will say that choosing the music to go with any given slide show was a challenging process for me both artistically and technically, particularly if I wanted to use a piece that was not included in my slide-show app’s soundtracks. Soundtracks were the best choice because they would automatically replicate and run to the end of the video and end at a good ending point. But they were limited in choice. So sometimes I went to the YouTube free audio library for pieces of background music which I then had to fade out "by hand."
Often times the documentation for the app isn’t detailed enough if you need to trouble-shoot. I think I ended up downloading many YouTube library pieces to my OneDrive App and from there to Apple’s File App. Apple conceptualized its operating system differently from Microsoft. Any given photo file has to “belong” to an App on the iPhone, iPad, or Mac before the App is able to see it and work with it. I’m not sure why I couldn’t download directly from YouTube free music library to the iPad's File App or to the Slideshow App itself but in many cases, it seemed to work better if I used OneDrive and the File App as intermediaries. On the artistic side, I wanted music to be a subtle background enhancement (usually). I tried to pick music that reflected the mood of the picture or of our experiences at the time. But I also felt like the music should make room for a little of the poignancy that sometimes comes when a person looks back on and remembers life gone by. I was mostly drawn to acoustic music for its intimacy and with my husband Ben’s musical preferences in mind.
I did run into some limitations with the iPad and the movie/slideshow apps that required trouble shooting. Sometimes I got fuzzy quality when I rendered the slideshow in Alan Cushway's App. Revisiting all the photos I was using in the library and making sure they finished downloading from iCloud seemed to help that. iMovie seemed to know when a photo or video needed to finish downloading. Sadly I wasn’t able to save all my projects so I wouldn’t have to recreate all the steps. Alan Cushway App's does not save project steps, so there nothing that could be done about that. iMovie and the iPad kept running out of space to render. I recalled the days when I provided support for office Macintoshes. Back then Macintosh applications had a memory setting that could be increased if the application ran out of memory (the pc’s memory allocations were all somehow negotiated by the Microsoft operating system). Anyway on the iPad and the iPhone Apps there appeared to be no such setting as was had by their old Macintosh counterparts. So it was out with the old iMovie project to make way for the new. At least I had the final products if not all the steps that created them.
For the final year, 2020, I did the whole show with iMovie. After all I was down to the last production and I didn’t mind so much having to touch each slide. It was iMovie that showed me the power of the Ken Burns' feature in story-telling with still photos. In Cushway’s app, I could size the whole photo down to fit the screen, so that’s what I mostly did with years 2012 through 2019. iMovie didn’t seem to want to let me do that. So I started working with the Ken Burns' feature and discovered that you could make a still photo more like a movie by revealing it gradually and intentionally. Also you could zoom in and out to direct attention to what you wanted the viewer to notice (or not to miss).
In the end, I plugged the thumb drive into the Smart TV with each new video and it was the first thing Ben noticed when he got up on cold December mornings. He seemed to really enjoy them. On Christmas Day we binge-watched 2012 through 2019 and on New Year’s we watched 2020, as I had held out to the last day of 2020 to finish that one.
It was interesting in this whole process to trace my increasing use of the cell phone camera and abandonment of the standalone digital camera and also to see the increasing quality of the photos I took, as both the phone cameras and the photographer got better. When I think back to the tools I had in my childhood – little box cameras with disposable flash cubes and rolls of film and developing houses – and compare them to the tools people of all ages have today, I am simply amazed. The film cameras of yesteryear required a lot of artistic and scientific skill from the photographer. They produced spectacular images, especially the 35 mm cameras, which are still the envy and the standard today. But today’s digital cameras, including cell phone cameras, put some of those skills and knowledge within the reach of the rest of us and today’s young people are among the first to have such continuity in vividly revisiting their lives and their memories.
Prairie Light: 2020 in a Kinder, Gentler Light on YouTube
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