It's a good thing you can't hear me singing
(off key)...because I am singing the Blues about my computer and Webshots.
I'll start with
Webshots.com closing their site. Webshots is owned by American Greetings. Right the "greetings card" company. American Greetings decided to sell the rights to the original team that built this site, but apparently they cannot keep the same format or don't want to keep it. The new owners have opened
Smile By Webshots and they have embraced the Cloud system. From Wikipedia:
Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation. Which means you can access our photos from your iPhone, iPad, etc. We can connect our Desktop and Facebook to Smile. Connecting Facebook has been a disaster so far. Dan loves to share political cartoons with his FB friends...well, they are showing up in our new Smile account! Great.
So, our 97 albums with 10 years of photos (4626 to be exact) have been moved to Smile. BUT! there are
no albums/folders and
none of our information transferred to the new site. Not even the dates. I don't know about you, but my memory is not that good. I often used the photos to remind me of when we were in a certain location or visiting friends and family.
Sometimes we did more than one album in a short time frame like our travels with remodeling the motorhome. Now those photos are meshed together. I can't work if my area is disorganized and I find this website a real fiasco!
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| Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta 2007 |
Smile suggested that everyone should download all their photos to their PC. Which I did to both of my external hard-drives. Dan and I want to keep sharing our experiences through an online photo site, so I am uploading them into my
Flickr account. Uploading is slow and I often have to refer back to Webshots for information. I'm scrambling to get this done before they close Webshots on 1 December.
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| San Carlos, Mexico 2008 |
I will not be adding more photos to Smile and since I don't plan to pay for a scrambled mess, they will probably close our account before the end of the year. If you have any photos with them, you better retrieve them now.
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| 2009 Custer State Park on Flickr |
My computer decided this was not enough stress for me....it keeps crapping out. One minute everything is moving along real smoothly and then !POP!...it has shut itself off. Dan did research on this make of Toshiba and found they have a tendency to overheat and shutdown.
This has been going on for over a year. As long as our motorhome was cool, my laptop worked just fine. My fingers were stiff from the cold, but the computer was alive and well. Now we are in a warmer climate of 70+ degrees and it is shutting off several times during the day.
Very frustrating when I am multi-tasking at high speed of a Super Woman on a Mission - uploading photos, edit photos, trying to write my next blog, answer emails...!POP!....
ARGGGGGHHHH! bang head several times..
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| White Sulphur Springs, MT 2009 |
Okay, deep breath....Dan also did research on how to fix this problem. He plans to start working on my computer Sunday evening. He has done great in the past with our computers, but just in case - I might be skipping my next blog and not answering emails for a few days.
One more quick note: The Mountain Lion seems to have moved on so the preserve will be open for business starting today - Saturday. At least, I got a week off from work to take care of my personal business.
Happy Trails!
Sorry to hear about your computer/internet woes! I once had a friend who would use those gel freezer packs (the kind you put in your lunch box to keep it cold) wrapped in towels under and around his electronics to stop them from overheating. It's worth a try :)
ReplyDeleteI'm so sorry both about your computer issues and the site issues. How awful!! As we speak I am literally organizing my scrapbooking and quilting supplies. Before digital, I had tons of copies made of photos. I have six photo boxes but they are all organized. And I just came across a bunch in packages, but all labeled. Too bad, Tylar just looked through fiv of them. At least it was only five. I'm getting the rest up and out of the way as we speak!
ReplyDeleteThis too will pass.... I know it is a PIA. I hope you get things organized soon. Change effects all of us. You seem to have a good handle on it. So go do some stitching and sew away the stress. Hugs.
ReplyDeleteOh no! My mom had that same problem with her Toshiba. She ended up buying a laptop tray that has a built in fan from Wal-mart, I believe it was. That cut down the shut-offs quite a bit. They still happened if she used it to long, but it fixed well over half of them for her.
ReplyDeleteGood luck getting all your pictures transfered, it sounds like a "hot mess" and that the new platform is going to be losing quite a bit of business soon.
Mal
oh yes, we have a lapbook tray also. It has the fan that whenever the computer is on, the fan is on and its helps with the heat of the computer. Hope your issues are resolved soon!
ReplyDeleteOh no! They say that "change is good" right? Well, sometimes change is a big pain in the butt! I can't believe that the photos transferred over but none of the information. Dates and all that are important! Plus, it takes a lot of time! I'm so sorry that the new service is not being friendly.
ReplyDeleteAbout the laptop...I don't have a laptop, but my old computer (which was a real dinosaur) used to do that "I shut off when I want to" thing, and it was always when I was in the middle of something. But yes, computers do not like extra heat. I wonder if you get one of those laptop tables, would it help? Might be worth trying.
Until next time, my friend...
~Kim
2justByou.blogspot.com