Every three months, I sort through all our digital photos and prepare them for publishing on our family website. The job is enormous and takes me several days. First, of 200 or so pictures and digital videos, I decide which ones are worth keeping, and which can be deleted. Then each is given an index number and a meaningful name. A program Sir Monkeypants wrote for me automatically resizes the photos for the website, but each video must be opened manually in Microsoft Video Maker and saved using a lower resolution, otherwise my poor mother with her dial-up connection would have to wait through three days of downloading just to see a 30-second video of Gal Smiley scraping the icing off her birthday cake. Then, I manually code HTML pages that group the photos/videos into meaningful sets, providing a caption for each. Whew!
I just finished the set from July, August, and September. Every time I finish a new set, and I spend countless hours looking at the finished product. We’ll especially watch the little videos over and over — we can use our XBox to watch them on our big TV, even.
Just now, as I was rewatching videos of our kids for like, the 100th time, I figured I better come and make a post. A post of advice for my future self. My advice is this:
When your kids bring home boyfriends or girlfriends, or get married, or heaven forbid, have a child themselves, you will be well tempted to pull out the zillions of photos and videos you have worked so hard on. But remember: Only you can stomach to watch endless videos of your own children for hours at a time. Eventually the poor boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife’s mind will wander. Their eyes will glaze over. And when you say, “Oooh, you just HAVE to see this one of The Captain running in circles around a mop and broom!!” and they say, “Um, I just have to run to the bathroom for a moment and POKE MY EYES OUT,” that will be your cue to TURN THE VIDEOS OFF. Just put the remote down and back away slowly. It will be for the good of all involved.
TurtleHead 
Whoa. That is an impressive ongoing project to have!
I think that’s another great advantage a webpage has over a photo album. Everyone can scan at their own pace on their own time, and look at as much or as little as they want to.
Of course there’s something about getting the live narrative and interactive host when you share them with someone else live. But like you say, that way your victims, er audience, can’t decide when enough is enough.
The website is a lot of work (we have one too of course), but it’s one project that I think is really worthwhile, especially when relatives live a long way away. Long live the (free) web!
I just checked out the updates — the kids are very cute. I think they totally look like siblings, but I think I can see some of you in GS (if no one else has told you this, then I’m wrong, cuz I usually suck at finding family resemblances). Oh, and way cool play structure. That is a handy guy!
I like the photo of you playing ultimate — that’s some serious attitude you play with. Do you trash talk on the field, too? 🙂
You do a great job with photos. We don’t put up too many pictures and I’ve no time to figure out how to do video. Couple of questions: i) Do you have a lot of storage available on your website? How much space does the video take up? ii) I always forget to not take video in portrait mode because I don’t know how to rotate it on the computer, or even if that’s possible. Do you know about this? Do you like your video software?
I watched the videos of CJB when he was the same age as MAD (not that I was comparing them, or anything, because I’m totally above that). But unfortunately I can’t watch much more, because watching your kids means I have to neglect my own! Must go now …
I just checked and I think we have 1G storage space (1000 MB) on our site. The last set I posted (July-Sept 2006) was total around 40MB — 20 MB of photos, and 20MB of videos. That’s probably about typical, sometimes the videos take up a little more space.
Our new camera takes such awesome high-quality videos that I have to shrink them for the web, or else it would take like, three days to upload a month’s worth of video. To shrink them, I use Windows Movie Maker, which I believe comes free with Windows NT and probably all Windows operating systems. It’s not a bad little tool. On top of being able to shrink my videos to any size/quality I want, it can also rotate videos that you accidentally took the wrong way pretty easily. Plus, you can do stuff like add credits and wipes, and you can cut and edit videos together. I’ve done that a couple of times with totally hilarious results but I keep them for days when I need to get a laugh out of sirmonkeypants — they aren’t on the site! In general for free software, I can’t complain. The only real problem is that it likes to save things in Microsoft proprietary format (of course), which will play everywhere but isn’t the best quality, but ah well.
As for the kids…when Gal Smiley was born I thought she looked just like me, and fame_throwa says she still does — she certainly has my patented look (Furrowed Brows Of Discontent) downpat. But if you look at baby photos of sirmonkeypants, she looks exactly like that too. It’s weird! I guess she’s a mix :).