Making a big change in 2020.

I've decided I'm going to make a big change in 2020. Since I began scanning my card collection in 2009, I've put them on my main Fotki account, (Link here) originally in one album per sport, then, when I filled that, breaking it out by season, or topic, depending. I've been maintaining that since April 2009, but in October 2018 I launched the Cardboard History Gallery, where I have everything sorted nicely by set, team, and person, the latter of which I'm still working on uploading. But by season or topic, I have to switch over to my original Fotki.

I have made the decision to transfer the season/topic albums over to Cardboard History Gallery, giving it 4 aspects for each subject instead of 3. That comes from the fact that I have to keep toggling back and forth for one, but the more important reason is that I've significantly stepped up my picture taking. In 2019 I'm going to take around 40,000 photos. (I don't know the exact number because I'm writing this on December 2nd.). I have a dedicated card website, so why am I storing it in two places? My storage on both Fotkis is not unlimited- anymore, it used to be- but if I keep taking a large number of photos- which is my intent- eventually I will run out of room. That's years away, but it is something I'm cognizant of...so much so that I have not even uploaded all the photos I've taken.

Now, there are some drawbacks to this. One, I will be starting fresh with upload date and views. (Fotki keeps track of them for me). If you remember, in April, I posted on my exact 10 year anniversary of beginning to scan, which I determined by looking to see the upload date on the first card I scanned- luckily, I remembered which card it was. The second drawback is that by uploading every card a 4th or 5th time (see below), it will push me to have to pay for more storage space on the Cardboard History Gallery sooner. (My original Fotki costs me $96 a year, the Gallery costs me $48 currently)

There are some plusses, though. While it will make life easier for me to upload them all in one place, the biggest thing is probably the quality of the scans themselves. When I was first starting, I didn't have PhotoScape to correct the scans, and "good enough" was acceptable to me. It's not, anymore. So the scans being posted to the new albums would be higher quality...some of the scans I accepted originally were downright awful. Some of them were not even complete, in fact, I've been debating just rescanning the majority of the NASCAR and Non-Sports cards from scratch because they are so bad. (As it sits, I've been saving what I can, and rescanning what I can't). I've already sorted out the scans that need fixing, so I don't even have to take the time to root them out here.

I will also be expanding what and how I document them. As of right now, I've got each of the Non-Sports cards sorted by topic only. I plan to mirror that, and upload them by topic again on the Gallery- but I'm also going to create a section where I document the non-sports cards by year, something I have no other easy way to track. I'm really looking forward to this. I also plan to break out the baseball and football into albums by year; on the current format they are all in one big album.

I don't plan to delete the scans off my original Fotki...I plan to just stop uploading newly scanned cards, which I do on the first of every month. That will not change, only the location they get uploaded to. My plan, as of right now, is to begin uploading the 4th Phase of the Cardboard History Gallery on January 1st, 2020. I will probably take me quite a bit of time to get it caught up to where I want it to be; but on the other hand, the original Fotki took me 10 and a half years to create. This should take me a month or two. The hardest part is still the scanning....this will be helped in speed because I don't really have to do any sorting beforehand. The scans are sorted in my collection files in essentially the same way they will be presented in the seasonal file on the Cardboard History Gallery. I basically have to just create the album, kick off the upload, and let Fotki do all the actual work. I'm really looking forward to doing this so I hope I can wait until the 1st to start.