I had a genius moment the other day when I realised I could use Lightroom to help me manage my art website studio.aeryn.art.

I’ve just spent a few more hours tinkering and testing.

Main LR catalog → export photos to → Blot LR catalog (Dropbox+Blot) → Selectively rename files to create Blot Tags

I spent the afternoon writing a lengthy blog post about depression and trauma. Will I post it? I am going to return to it in a few hours and see what I think.

I have a new website (in progress). And the first project is published. Fingers crossed it serves me well.

Today was super-busy. But full of achievements.

One of which was learning to use a sewing machine.

studio (noun)

  1. the working place of a painter, sculptor, or photographer
  2. place for the study of an art (such as dancing, singing, or acting)

– merriam-webster.com

I’ve been tinkering in Blot again all evening. Love that service. I have a new project brewing…

I really need to wind down for bed as I have a busy day tomorrow. Chores first tho.

I first joined Micro.blog in 2018 and I didn’t do much with it until 2022 when I bought a 1 month subscription and blogged for a couple of weeks. But then I decided to go back to Blot.

I’ve been back on Micro.blog for about 6 weeks and I’m pretty sure I’m here to stay. (I’m keeping Blot for something else).

Two main things helped me decide:

  1. I like that’s it’s a hybrid of a blog and a social network. Although I have ‘left’ social media, maybe forever, I do need that social interaction. And Micro.blog allows me to tailor that quite well. I like that the blog doesn’t have traditional comments, but is connected to a platform feed.
  2. I need that input box. A quick box I can type a few words and tap Publish. Whether it’s in an app, or on the website. I can upload images quite easily too. The simplicity! Other ‘micro’ services lack this (and is their strength in some cases, like Blot).

I really want to paint again. I’ve been playing with markers recently and it’s got the arty juices flowing.

It’s been a very satisfying day. It’s only 6 pm. I’m very tired and I feel like I’ve been very productive but in a slow and gentle way.

I’ve been tending to my home and gathering my art materials all into one place. I’ve been tidying my work areas and making my home cosy again. It feels good.

I livestreamed some art earlier. It was to my son over FaceTime and it was a lot of fun.

And of course, I am still shooting and creating new projects to all the time. So they are being edited and processed alongside the Lightroom Odyssey that’s happening in my archives.

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  1. StorylineLightroomOdyssey ↩︎

Reply about my Lightroom Odyssey: Long story but I have 20 years of 170K files mixed in with other non-image files, many dupes, some with non-obvious file names/folder names, and/or no metadata. I need to eyeball the files and leave folder structures intact as I move them into my new folder structure on an adhoc basis. Some of this I have to do outside Lightroom so I don’t orphan files that belong together. I’m doing it piecemeal so I can find old projects and collate before I maybe publish them. I have done Years so far. Months will be done as I go along, as a way of finding projects and a bit more care needs to be taken. I expect this process to take many months or maybe years. 12

  1. reply to @jtr micro.blog/jtr/28975… ↩︎

  2. also posted as a post because I’m not sure about Micro.blog reply length, and I’d quite like to this to be its own post too, so thanks for the question ↩︎

✱ I have booked on a community pottery course starting next month. So excited! I did it last year and it was awesome. I’m so happy I’m doing it again. It helped me get back into community again after being on “Lockdown” for so long.

✱ I’m happy to be off social media. I left Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others one to three years ago.

But I found myself in a bit of a social void, online and offline.

I still need to express myself, and moving my online efforts to Micro.blog seems to have helped with that.

And in Lightroom, I’ve just been continuing the years-long project of trying to gather all my work. My first digital photos were made in 2003. And I also started digitising my film negs and slides back then too.

One thing I am appreciating is 2005, 2006 were perhaps my best ever years of photography.

Unfortunately I have the best part of 200K files to go through. Many, many, many of them are dupes (backups of backups of backups). It’s taking a lot of time and patience to get through them.

But it will be worth it because I have so many precious memories in there. Of my children, my family. And of course, my precious art.

MY PRECIOUS ARRRRRRT 😇