Photos Photos Photos - Part 1

Well, sooner or later we were going to have to do it.

We took in excess of 25,000 photos during the course of our trip, and now we have to sort through them.

Yes, you read that correctly. I mean, come on, it was five months! And, well, you know what happens when you give David a camera, especially a heavy-duty fun camera like our trusty Canon 40D.

Every day or two, we would offload the most recent photos to our netbook, and then back them up to an external hard drive. During downtime on trains or before bed, we'd sort them into folders, and even occasionally weed out the ones we didn't intend to keep.

Then, we'd store them in hidden folders on our Flickr account, uploading them whenever we had a stable internet connection so that should anything happen to our physical storage, we'd have all our photos. And Flickr is kind enough to keep track of how many photos you have in your account. Including some photos that were there from before, and a bit of duplication when we re-uploaded stuff we'd forgotten we'd already uploaded, our most recent count is 28,722 items. And we haven't finished uploading all our photos from Israel yet. They're chugging along through Paul and Rachel's wireless connection as I type this.

Obviously it will be impossible to share all of these photos with even the most maniacally interested people. And there are tons of photos that aren't worth sharing: photos that didn't turn out or multiple shots of the same thing that we didn't take or have time to edit and delete; photos of things we personally found funny but just won't translate if you weren't there with us; photos that we took only for the benefit of this or that friend.

And it's impossible to narrow down to a "best of" hitlist, because, honestly, when you take that many shots, you get more than the usual quotient of really cool photos, and even those are too many to share. Also, likely David and I have different opinions of what constitutes the "best" photos from our collection.

So I'm trying to create a series of slide shows that will represent the various chunks of our journey -- 5 in all -- and that each contain fewer than 200 shots. Even then, that's still almost 1000 photos. But I think by breaking them up a bit, it'll be less overwhelming.

The first chunk comprises Ireland and the UK. We arrived in London on September 21 and left for the Continent exactly a month later. In between our two stays in London, we visited Ireland (Dublin, Galway, the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher, a farm in Sligo County, Belfast, the Giant's Causeway) and Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Highlands, Fort William, and our friends' little town of Carstairs).

I haven't really given the photos any kind of narrative, except to label each one's location. If you're curious about something or want more of the story of a photo, leave a comment here on the blog or on the photo itself, and we'll give more details.

USEFUL VIEWING TIPS (read before starting the slide show):

You can wiggle and/or click your mouse over the slideshow for options at the bottom like pausing and restarting the slides (left-hand side), making the slideshow fullscreen (right-hand side), or selecting to view a specific image.

In full-screen mode (recommended), wiggling your mouse over the top right-hand corner gives you Show info (which allows you to see the captions for each photo - strongly recommended) and Options (like choosing the slideshow speed -- recommended: slow). Unfortunately, I can't set those options on my end -- you have to do it.

Now click on the slideshow picture below and enjoy! More to come when I get around to it.