"the power of presentation can make impossible dreams come true" -- ian crystal, 2018
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I. readily available capabilities
II. what i want
III. why i want it
IV. how i arrange my photos in an iphone
V. #meetoo
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I. readily available capabilities
- you cannot re-arrange photos in a standard iphone album like "camera roll". you also cannot re-arrange photos in an album that was synced from a laptop.
- you can only re-arrange photos in an album you created using the add album feature in the iphone (+). and you can only re-arrange the photos that you transferred from another album in the same iphone.
- to re-arrange photos you are allowed to re-arrange, tap "select" then hold down the thumbnail of the photo you want to move until it floats up then drag and drop it to the new location (for a more details, there are many articles and videos in the internet about this)
II. what i want
as usual, the capabilities, apps or tools that are currently available will not work for my rare and weird geeky requirements. i want to put aboutt 1,500 photos and about 70 videos in 4 different albums from my laptop to my iphone. and i want the photos WITHIN each album arranged in a particular order example my travel album contains around 500 photos and a golf album about 100 photos - it will take forever to move around these many photos between albums within an iphone using the readily available capabilities. and imagine how cumbersome and time consuming it would be to re-arrange that many photos in a particular order..
example i just want 1 album containing all my golf pictures (my other albums are snowboarding, travels, family and friends and music videos of my hobbies and sports. imagine there are about 10 golf tournament photos and about 15 golf outings or golf travel photos that i want to include. it would suck to put each of these photos in a different album, especially that some tournaments just has 1 to 3 photos. i would end up with 25 albums in my iphone just for golf. the photo albums in my iphone are like bullet points in a power point slide and the cardinal rule in making a presentation is that you should only have 3-5 bullets points per slide.
i don't want the pictures within an album randomly scattered. i want to group them according to tournaments or outings and i want to order these groups. example i want to put my PGA player's ability test tournament photos first. then, for each tournament group of photos i also want to put the trophy presentation in the beginning of that group. so someone else browsing the photos will know i won that tournament as they are looking at the rest of the photos for that tournament.
i also want to easily and quickly re-arrange these photos. example if i decide later on i want my pebble beach photos to come before my wente vineyards photos, i want to be able to do this quickly and easily.
i want to do all these updates just once in a central location and update all my other iphones with just a few click of a mouse button. i want this central location of iphone albums to be part of my golden data tree so it is part of my efficient backup and recovery protocol which i showed in my blog article "i smile when my iphone or laptop gets stolen, damaged, or paralyzed by a virus" - https://ian-crystal.blogspot.com/2014/07/i-smile-when-my-iphone-or-laptop-is-gone.html)
III. why i want it
(facebook was originally created by mark z so he can date hot harvard chics and now facebook is used by dear friends and families to keep in touch. same with the internet it was originally developed for america's war efforts. similarly, just because my purpose to arrange vast amounts of iphone photos seems unpleasant, does not mean you cant use it for wholesome purposes)
as a single guy it's efficient for me to just eat at canteens or karinderias around off campus dormitories where the food is pretty good, healthy and cheap. there are always those born with insufficient self preservation genes that would voluntarily talk to strangers so i end up making friends and when the conversation segways to me saying i snowboard or golf they violently clamor for more information about it. so i show them the photos and videos in my iphone. they become riveted and blown away and intrigued so they naturally venture into the other albums and in just a few minutes i transform from a creepy old guy to a cool old guy. my albums and photos are efficiently arranged such that after just a few minutes of browsing, they would feel it is safer and fun to sleep with me in my bed in my house than sleeping in their dormitory.
usually i keep around 3 extra iphones which i buy in ebay for $50 (nowadays iphone 5c as of this writing). my "scholars" usually can't afford a smart phone so when they "borrow" one of my phones because they need it to do research in the internet for a school assignment or project, they bring it to their dormitory or their school where their other dorm mates or classmates borrow the phone and look at my photos and videos. next thing i know i'm accepting friend requests in facebook from beautiful college girls i never met and i become super busy chatting with them and finding all kinds of reasons to politely turn down their requests to go swimming or hang out at mountain views with me because i already have a full schedule of scholars needing "assistance".
i really don't expect them to return my iphone but when they do, sometimes they leave me a gift in the camera roll of my iphone. most of the time it's just small gifts of them wearing nighties or lingerie but once in a blue moon it's the "OMG these girls are crazy" videos or photos. thank you miley cirus and kim kardashian (that is why hollywood's attacks on trump always turns out to be a dud) for making it cool and acceptable and thank you steve jobs and all the other geniuses that gave me the tools to make my dreams come true. but of course these tools are like a hammers and saws - you still need special skills to build a house, which is why i'm writing this blog article.
why not just put the photos and videos in internet? icloud photos even has a feature where you can export your selected albums into a nice looking website with just a click of a button. first of all why in the world would anyone deliberately go to my facebook page or website to browse through my photos and videos unless i'm james reid or a member of one direction? it would also be awkward giving a URL address. that would be a turn off because it would seem i want them to see my albums. it has to be accidental that they happen to browse my albums while borrowing my iphone. second of all, even if i'm a celebrity whose photos they want to browse in the internet, it is very very very dangerous especially if their classroom is located in the upper floors because they might end up jumping out of the window if they forget that in the philippines, it's only late at night when everyone is sleeping and you have all the internet bandwidth to yourself when you won't end up pulling out all your hair from rage and anger from the super slow internet.
although i do put some of my photos and videos on the internet:
http://www.youtube.com/user/scratchrider260/videos
https://web.facebook.com/ian.crystal.90/photos_albums?sk=wall&lst=100021755921365%3A867825320%3A1533193434
with my diverse audience, my iphones don't have to be a mirror image of each other. i can load different themes for each iphone. and i can also switch an iphone to a different theme easily and quickly to suit a particular audience. example, if i meet an italian backpacker who is crazy about pet dogs, then i can include the album of all my adorable pet dogs since i was a kid, arranged in chronological order. i can even switch the order to "adorable order" or put the most adorable dogs in the beginning of the album. i don't want to include the album of my pet dogs if the girl is not crazy about dogs because it would just be a distraction to the "presentation", considering millennials are usually are easily distracted and have short attention spans.
so basically my iphone becomes my portable mansion or 100 foot yacht except there is a saying "the 2 happiest days in a yacht owners life is the day he bought the yacht and the day he sold it". especially in today's experience and non ownership economy where society is beginning to realize non material things like freedom, experiences, parenting a child, travel, working for charity, musical and athletic skills are more fulfilling than material wealth. so when a college girl sees in my iphone video that i have the freedom to have fun anytime playing street basketball schooling folks with my steph curry moves, which i can play almost anywhere in the world, even in paris eifel tower, or i can just grab a guitar and have fun learning the latest song. then it's another way she can be impressed.
IV. how i arrange my photos in an iphone
my technique requires unix and perl. you can install free unix/perl called cygwin in your mac or windows pc. just google and learn to have fun figuring out things yourself. i only want to write about stuff you can't find anywhere else.
here are the most important things you need to know when syncing from computer to iphone using itunes. i don't know anything about the mac so i will just include here the instructions for windows explorer:
1) you have to turn off icloud sharing and photo streaming in your iphone. you can't use my technique in conjunction with any of the icloud photo features. note when switching between the 2 modes, the current pictures in your iphone are all deleted. so make sure all your precious photos are saved to your computer before you do anything. this is a good thing because if my mom borrows my phone i don't want her to get a heart attack when a naked picture of my scholar suddenly appears on her phone. this is a also a warning to married guys - the default of iphone is icloud photo streaming so if you share the same itunes accounts with your wife and you go out on a date with your mistress and she borrows your phone while you are sleeping and takes selfies in the motel room PATAY KANG BATA KA !!! those pictures will appear on your wife's phone. i recently learned that this sort of thing does not only happen to photos but also to messages because my elementary school classmate's messages from her girlfriend appeared on her wife's iphone.
2) each directory in your computer will be synced as a separate album in your iphone. the album name in your iphone will be the same as the directory name on your computer.
3) there are 2 modes of views in windows explorer: details and thumbnails. you can switch between the 2 views with the "view" menu. clicking a column header in details view will sort the files according to that column. the thumb nails view of your photos always follows the same order as the last "details" view before you switched to thumb nails view. example, if you are in detailed view and click on the "name" column, the files will be sorted in alphabetical order. then when you switch to thumbnails view, the thumbnails will also be sorted in alphabetical order.
4) in windows explorer the "date created" column does not appear by default. you have to add it by right clicking any of the headings and then choosing the "date created" menu item
5) after syncing from laptop to the iphone using itunes, the photos within an album in the iphone are arranged according to the date the FILE was CREATED in the computer before it was synced. not the date the file was last modified (which means you can't just use the touch unix command you have to move the file to another location then copy it back to change the "date created" property). NOT EVEN THE DATE THE PICTURE WAS TAKEN.
however this is only true the first time you sync. when you sync, itunes creates a cache directory "ipod cache" that is suppose to make the next sync faster because it skips files that have already been copied before. the problem with this caching technique is it also tries to optimize storage space by re-arranging the photos in your iphone so your photos won't be arranged according to "date created". therefore you need to delete this cache directory beforehand every time you sync.
another thing that can cause the order or arrangement to be screwed up is when there already are existing personal albums and photos in your iphone before you sync. you have to delete all albums and photos in your iphone before you do a sync. this is one of the downsides. even if you are just adding 1 picture, you need to always start with a completely clean slate every time you sync. the transfer could take around 10 minutes to copy around 1.5gb total size of around a thousand photos and around 70 music videos averaging 3 minutes in length. but hey, 10 minutes is still a huge bargain compared to hours and hours of headache using the readily available capabilities. also i only update the albums once every 6 months with the new photos. meanwhile, i just keep the new photos in camera roll which they can still easily view.
here is a rough overview of my technique.
1) it's best to resize the photos to around 100kb. i use https://bulkresizephotos.com/. if the usual size of the originals are around 1mb to 2mb i enter 20% of original (i don't know why 20% of 2mb becomes 100kb maybe something to do with compression)
2) rename your photos in such a way that they will be arranged the way you want it if arranged in alphabetical order. luckily in windows explorer you can easily bulk rename a bunch of photos by selecting it using group selection techniques (ctrl and shift mouse selection techniques (google this for more details)). then rename just one of the photos. the other photos will have the same name but numbers appended to it. example in my snowboading album, i could select the files big-bear1 big-bear2 .... big-bear22 by selecting all 22 file and then renaming one of the files (right click, choose rename) to aabig-bear. all the other files will be renamed to aabig-bear (1), aabig-bear (2) .... aabig-bear (22). note that this will cause all of your big bear photos to appear first in the album unless you rename another group of photos to begin with aaa. and if you want another group of photos to appear after big-bear, you simply prepend it with bb. if there are already photos with bb prefix, then prepend it with aaaa instead.
what if i want my perfect areal photo in the half pipe to appear first in the big-bear group of photos? then i rename it to big-beaa (just change r to a). and if i want another photo to appear right after that photo, i rename it to big-beab (changed the r t b).
3) you can test the arrangement by clicking on the "name" column in explorer to arrange the files in alphabetical order, but with 1 important warning: when it comes to non alphabetic characters like spaces and hyphens, windows and unix have different ordering rules. example, in windows, big-bear.jpg comes before big-bear (1).jpg. but in unix, big-bear.jpg comes after big-bear (1).jpg because in unix alphabetical ordering rule, a space comes before a dot. therefore just be safe and use only alphabets to force a certain ordering.
you can get a preview of the unix ordering by opening a dos prompt and running "ls" in the directory.
4) run a script that would copy the files to a different directory in alphabetical order.
here's the script:
--------------
use File::Copy;
mkdir "../arranged";
while ($f = <>) {
chomp $f;
print "copying $f to ../arranged ...\n";
copy ($f, "../arranged");
}
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you can save this script as arrange.pl in the parent directory of the album and then cd to the album and run "ls | perl ../arrange.pl". the arranged files will be in the "arrange" directory in the parent directory of the album. go and inspect the "arrange" directory. if everything is good, you can trash the original directory to recycle bin and rename arrange to the original album name. the album is now ready to be synced to iphone.
5) make sure all important photos in your iphone have been saved to laptop because the next steps will delete photos in your iphone.
6) turn off the icloud sharing and photo streaming settings in iphone, then connect the iphone to the computer and open itunes. click the iphone icon in the upper left corner then click the settings/photos menu item in the left pane to open the sync photos view.
7) delete all your personal albums in the iphone by creating a dummy empty directory in your computer and syncing to it. example "mkdir c:\tmp\empty". then check "sync photos", click the "copy photos from" box and browse to c:\tmp\empty. then click "apply"
8) delete the ipod cache directory in the parent directory of your albums (rm -rf ipod*cache*).
9) change back the "copy photos from" to the parent directory of your albums (example mine it's c:\my\pictures\for-iphone). select the "selected folders" and "include videos" options then select the albums you want to include. then click apply. it should take 10 minutes to sync around 1.5gb total file size.
here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/DqxgkcTo6a4
V. #metoo
i know what i'm doing is bad but it's not harvey weinstein bad. all my relationships never end up in a bad way. i always see to it that i do whatever i can do to help them succeed in life. we continue to be good friends long after they move on to career and even marriage. sometimes they make me a ninong or godfather to their children. just a week ago, the mother of one of my scholars came to my house because she won't allow the party celebration of the baptismal of the baby of my scholar to proceed without me even if i was dead tired and exhausted from a golf tournament that day so i forced myself to go to the party and i ended up getting sick and burnt out. but then again, this could be the same case of seeing pictures in the internet of oprah and harvey weinstein very close friends with each other. that does not mean harvey weinstein is a good person. it just means maybe oprah should not run for president.
i see to it that all my scholars know each other and most of the time they have good relationships (but maybe so did harvey weinstein). when they fight it always has nothing to do with me it's always when someone borrows clothes they don't return or one of them flirts with their boyfriend or girlfriend (some are lesbians). even their boyfriends or girlfriends come to me crying for help when my scholar dumps them. hahahaha.
i know for those living in a more mainstream world it still sounds sickening but by now you should be aware we live in different worlds with different standards. i admire you that you live in that world. i wish all my family and love ones will continue to live in your world and not in trump/duterte's world.
there is a famous saying that psychopaths don't know what they are doing is wrong and even believe what they are doing is right. maybe i'm a psychopath. and if you are interested, i invite you to find out and judge for yourself. my scholars are my facebook friends and sometimes i post our photos. if you are active with the #metoo movement, i praise you for your good work considering many of my love ones are women and girls (my mom, sister, and neices). you can always interview my scholars or chat with them via messenger. example, search "amber tan" in my facebook friends (but don't impeach trump and duterte because it's POSSIBLE they are doing the greater good).
(for more of my knowledge bombs, click the "ian's knowledge bombs" banner at the top of this article and choose any article in the table of contents that piques your interest)
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