This weekend started off strong with a long photowalk in San Pedro with the Soul Street Visuals group. I’d never been, but Sunken City is beautiful and also getting the sunsets at the Korean Friendship Bell was a great way to start the weekend.

On Sunday, I made some addtional updates to this site; mainly fixing the photography section so I can make a seemless update from Lightroom directly to a portfolio page. This reduces any dependenies on additonal plugins or 3rd party services.

Now when I finish a post for Instagram, I can add the gallery to the protfolio website and it will automatically sync. This saves some time on my end and doesn’t cost anything as the files are already hosted by Adobe with my subscription.

While this was going on, I started looking back at the NAS I somewhat impulsivly purchased months ago. I was getting fed up with the lack of space on my Macbook (It turns out CapCut was hiding a large number of files and I should have cleared them out).

I had bought a UGREEN 4 Bay NAS to use as a backup storage, something to time machine to, and a place to run a docker setup to experiment with some web storage. I’ll need to dedicate another weekend to playing around more with that and figuring out what cloud services I can build out to replace my current apps. But in the meantime, I got my time machine setup and wokred on setting it up to be able to be remotely accessed through a VPN.

Hopefully these fixes can help me find a good workflow for uploading photos. I attempted to take my SD card and copy files directly to the hard drive, then to upload them to Lightroom. However I found the speed was increaibly slow. Instead, I copied the files direclty through Lightroom on my iPad Mini which ran a sync in the background.

My first pass is always to remove the photos that I can’t use, blurry or nonsense shots I take. Lately i’ve been shooting in burst just to make sure I capture whatever is happening, but it creates additonal work on the backend to clear out any extras. It took about 2 hours to whittle down 600 photos, but I think the results are good.

This week will be busy, spending a few days in the office with the dev team planning for Q4 and then a trip to Arizona to photograph around the Grand Canyon and see the Dodgers play during Spring Training.