This Much Memory Should be Illegal

It’s an interesting day here at the Armed Northern Florida Compound.

I think I have solved my photo-editing problem. I bought Photoshop Elements 2024 because I got very bad advice. It turned out to be a horror for editing raw files. Useless. Then I tried Affinity, a free program which works very well. It turned out not to be the answer, because I bought a Canon Powershot V1 for shooting while out and about, and I learned that Affinity would never, ever be set up to take this camera’s raw files and produce photos without black (black) corners. I had to download Canon’s free program, and it works, but I don’t want it. I want to use one good program well, not 53 programs badly.

Adobe Lightroom appears to be a perfect solution, except that it costs a fortune. Adobe has adopted the lamprey business model. They went to subscription-only, so stupid people who can’t multiply by 12 will think it costs $20. Of course, it’s really $240 per year. Every year.

Enter DXO Photolab9. I’m not sure, but based on video reviews and tutorials, it looks like it will do everything Adobe does, considerably better, and while it is expensive, you don’t have to pay for it over and over and over. It is particularly good at fixing noisy photos, which is a huge plus for me. Low light is always an issue. It also updates lens profiles fast. Adobe can’t deal with my lens, but Photolab can.

I have a trial version, and I am going to go through tutorials before I make sure I should pay. It costs $240, just like Lightroom, but you only pay once. Until you upgrade, yes, but the upgrades are cheaper than a Lightroom subscription.

It looks great so far. Extremely intuitive by editing-software standards, which means not all that intuitive, but usable. And it has sorting features that should make dealing with thousands of old photos easier.

In addition to all that, I decided to mirror my phone photos and videos to Google’s cloud. I don’t like clouds or Google, but I don’t think this will allow Google to spy on me for the feds or basically turn me over to Big Bro. Not that there is any point in spying on me, because it would be unbelievably dull, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Finally, I received my new hard drives today. I have a new editing PC, and I’m going to keep all my media on backup drives, not C. It’s hard to find deals on hard drives now. Apparently the AI revolution is somehow drying up the supply. Inexplicably, however, I found two pro-grade 14TB drives on sale from the manufacturer, cheaper than their consumer drives. I saved a hundred bucks moving from consumer to pro, and I also got 14TB per drive instead of 10. I wasn’t looking for 14TB, but if it’s cheaper, why not?

I formatted one drive and installed it in my old PC so I can move all my media files to it, and I formatted the other and put it in my new PC. When the files are moved, I’ll install the second drive in my new PC, and then I’ll set them up so my stuff is synched. I’ll put stuff on the first drive, I’ll save edited files there, and I’ll have my PC set up to sync everything to the second drive.

What if my house burns down? Well, that would be bad. Maybe I should eventually find a big cloud I trust.

I got my first real PC in about 1993, and it had a 340 MB drive. I told somebody about it, and he rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, that MIGHT be enough.” It seemed outrageous. Huge. As of today, on one PC, not counting C, I have 41,000 times as much space.

That figure comes from AI, so feel free to double-check. “AI” often means “Artificial Idiot.”

AI claims the best Apollo spacecraft computer had about 72KB.

It says my toaster has more memory than that.

I think I should put a big external USB drive on my PC for additional peace of mind. I could put it in the workshop and bring it indoors for synching once a month. I can’t do much better than that without an annoying subscription that will go way up in price once I’m comfortable with it. You know it will.

I will now buckle down, clean my glasses, and watch the rest of a Photolab tutorial. I hope this program turns out to be what I need, because Adobe is just too annoying to live with.