Pixels Schmixels

It all started out on a cold winter afternoon...

...when my USB drive (aka thumb drive) stopped working. Oh $#!T!! Forget about any work-related documents I had on the drive, I instantly started freaking about the tummy-related stuff I had on it! Who knows how many tummy pictures could be lost for good?*

Michael tried to calm me down by saying he always does the right thing by copying them onto our computer at home before deleting them from the camera. He's so sweet. He just assumed that I did the same. Nope. I could remember there being a time or two where I copied the pictures directly off of the camera and onto my thumb drive, only to delete them from the camera afterwards. Silly me.

When we finally got home, I wasted no time in seeing just what pictures I'm missing from our computer. It turns out that we were in better shape than I thought we were because I was only missing one set of "tummy growing" pictures and my "overalls" pictures.

Then I got a brilliant idea! Maybe I could download them from my blog! However, when I did this, I sadly discovered that the files on my blog were not very large, though luckily they may be large enough to suit my needs (I just need small printouts for a page in my scrapbook).

Well bummer. But wait... what's going on? I see that many of my other pictures are also small files! How can that be?! I know we take pictures with high resolution unless we think we're going to be taking a lot of pictures at one time.

Well it turns out that indeed, we have been taking larger pictures. Good. The bad part is that i tend to open them in Microsoft Photo and have the "viewer" set to 25% so that I can see the entire picture on the monitor. Sometimes I have to rotate the picture, and when I go to close the file I am asked "would you like to save the changes". I'm no idiot, of course I'd like to save them! That way I don't have to rotate the picture again, right?

Right. But it turns out that I'm still an idiot because since I was viewing the picture at 25%, I just saved the picture at 25% resolution. So now, many of my pictures are small pixel-ated pictures, but not all of them! Just the ones I like! UGH!

Well that just plain sucks.

* FYI, for most cases, when a thumb drive stops working, you can pay a $75 fee to get a company to recover the files for you. If they're not successful (though they claim to be 95% of the time), you're not charged anything. However, since I can not say exactly what work-related files are on the drive, I do not have that option. Silly government for trying to control the mass-distribution of FOUO (For Official Use Only) files.