Cardboard History Gallery Update: Launching one of my favorite features

There was no update on the new Cardboard History Gallery last week, because I didn't do anything on it...I was busy laying the groundwork for the feature I'm launching today, December 14th- one of the more labor intensive bits of work for me. I'm happy to say that, now that it's complete, I can go back to scanning and writing, because all the "heavy lifting" of moving scans, labeling scans, and then copy & pasting it and doing it again...is finally done*! This project began in August, a project I've wanted to do for years, and I've worked on it almost non-stop since then. I missed two weeks when my last computer died, and I took about 2 weeks away from it doing other things, both card and non-card related, but it has taken up all my time otherwise. (my health gives me a lot of free time, obviously!)

All told, during the course of this project, I've moved, created, labeled, etc, almost 200,000 images. Every single card scan I've made over the last 9 and a half years has played a role in this project. I won't know the exact number of images involved until I get everything uploaded, and that's not likely to be this year. As I currently have it, I don't have enough space to upload everything I want to post, hopefully I can afford that in January. Even if I did, there's so much, it's going to take a while anyway. I'll just have to maintain it going forward. The cool thing is, due to the way I have it set up, each new upload will automatically slot into it's proper place.

Now, this part of the project I launched today...the Alphabetical Directory. This is perhaps the most visually interesting part of the new website...and it's the only part where all subject matter is going to be mixed together. I've spoken before about my "Names Project"...attempting to get at least one card of every person in the NBA, NASCAR and NHL. Well, now you can see it! I have spent the last two plus weeks of the project copy and pasting a sample image of each person into a new folder, and then relabeling them with the person's name. Now each letter is going to get it's own album.

But it also has way more than NBA, NASCAR and NHL. It has EVERYBODY in my collection. Joining the three above, you also have everyone from Baseball, Football, literally every other sport, and non-sports, all mixed together in alphabetical order...so you will have Walter Payton next to Gary Payton, Wayne Gretzky next to Matt Groening, Hakeem Olajuwon next to John Olerud, and about a million Williams next to each other. (I did keep the naked people out into their own, locked album, though)

Eventually, each and every person, if I have 1000 cards of them or just one, from every sport and non-sports, will get their own album, which will have all their cards in it. That's what I don't have the storage space for yet. But it's coming. It won't be as visually interesting as this though, because each sport will be in it's own folder, along with the previously uploaded section of each sport by team.

Now, as you'll see when you read the caption, I have more than 13,000 different people in my collection. Not all of them are represented yet. Only the NBA is really well-done, every other topic needs more scanned than is scanned, I believe. So the number of people will be well below 13,000. Now. Eventually, as I scan more of my non-NBA collection, more people will show up in the Alphabetical Directory and in their own albums. (I was originally going to call it Visual Dictionary but titling it Alphabetical Directory means it is as the very top of the new website...I still refer to it as the Visual Dictionary from time to time, though)

I don't normally post the same link three times in a post...but...CLICK ME.

I actually don't know exactly which letter has the most different people...I will find out, by just seeing how many files are in each album. I expect it to be M. I know X is the lightest letter with only two people. I'm still uploading the letter E as I type this- I may not finish today. There's a lot of people to upload!

Here's the screencap of the current stats:

Now, this is a lot of work, I am still getting used to this new keyboard, and I labeled every single person over the last three days. So, you may see some mistakes. I've already caught a handful before they got uploaded- and had to fix several more that I didn't catch. If you see a spelling error, please, let me know, so I can correct it.

* = I have not done NASCAR teams yet. I will, some day. But it will be easier to do it person-by-person, instead of chronologically like I did for the stick and ball sports. So it will be in the future, but probably not 2019. Beyond that.