Life is somewhat dreary at the moment. Not half as dreary as for those poor souls who've lost their homes or businesses or jobs because of the riots in England (which appear to be over... let's hope) but somewhat less than splendid all the same. Also it has been raining in Edinburgh for what feels like the past forty days and nights. Though, miraculously, not actually today (yet). And it can't have been raining the other day either when I went on the above short walk, which is all I really have to tell you about today.
Edinburgh is surrounded by hills, even though it's in the Central Lowlands. You can imagine what the rest of Scotland is like - the other bits are the Southern Uplands and the Northern Highlands.
In the photo above, you see the Pentland Hills, which are slightly further away than they look, but not much.
And on my return towards home, here is Corstorphine Hill.
I may have blogged about this before but here is the garden of a chap in the next street. He likes to clip his plants into neat shapes, which he trims with small clippers every few days. Wonderfully appropriately, he's a retired hairdresser.
Here's his hedge. The photos are a bit sideyways because you can't really stand directly in front of the houses of people you vaguely know, taking photos of them.
Nearing home, there's the hill inside the city, Arthur's Seat, in the distance.
The Pentlands again - we would have this view from our house if we just lived up the hill a little bit. But we don't.According to my son-in-law, who knows about these things, I have nearly used up my Blogger photo allowance. I didn't know there was such a thing. I wonder if this will publish.
Ah well. Off to change the bed, do a bit of dusting and then go to the supermarket. Have a good weekend, one and all.
I have heard about this photo allowance, but always assumed it was well over several thousands of photos.
ReplyDeleteYou were questioning my job re: the newspapers - ours are delivered overnight (by 6AM) and I have just over 300 of them. So I am up at 2AM and driving around the neighbourhood delivering to houses and apartment buildings. It allows me to have my daytime hours free, which makes me feel like I am semi-retired.
That's what you get for not shrinking your pics, Isabelle! I'm always lecturing people about it but do they listen? Call me Cassandra...
ReplyDeleteIn fact you have 1GB of free storage with Blogger/Picasa, which isn't all that much if you are regularly uploading full-sized photos.
Best way to do it is to export them using Picasa's export function, as I know you use Picasa. You get a box up when you press the 'export' button, on the bottom row of your Picasa library display, which will ask you what size you want to export at and give you various choices; I reduce to 800 px because I post extra-large, but 640, the next one down is fine for most blogging.
You then get a reduced exported version of the photo, which also automatically keeps any editing changes you've made - cropping, I'm feeling lucky, whatever. You can keep this in the same folder or create a new one using the field at the top of the export box. I like to do this because it makes neat little separate folders of the photos I've blogged for the record, but you don't have to.
This is then the version of the photo you upload to the blog, and it will be just a couple of hundred KB rather than the several MB that most cameras automatically shoot at these days. It will also upload much faster and be less likely to fail in the attempt. What's not to like about that?
(You will still have the full size photofile on the computer lest you should want to make a 10 times life-size poster of your adorable grandson with which to paper your living room wall, which is about the only reason to have a file that big, except perhaps to crop a very small detail out of it or to zoom in and identify a criminal suspect...)
There are other ways, like photoshop if you have it but it's more complicated, or you can e-mail them to yourself and let Windows do it for you but then they're a bit too small, or you can upload them to a Picasa web album, which also gives you choices of size, and blog them from there, which is quite effective and reliable, but this is the one I'd recommend.
I got lazy for a while and didn't do it and quickly used up a big chunk of my allowance, so I was up to 50%, but now they seem to have increased it and I'm only up to 22%. It's not very helpful that they no longer tell you on the post editor what you've got left, they used to, I recall. I think they tell you on the Picasa web albums, which you automatically have because you blog with Blogger.
What can you do about having no more room on your blog for photos? I guess you can go back and delete a load, or you can buy more storage from Picasa/Google (yeah, me neither), or you can do what some I know have done and open a new blog, and redirect your readers there from here. You might have to open a new Google a/c to do that. Others might have better advice as to just how to do that.
Anyway, having taken it upon myself to be this bossy, I hope you heed my advice my girl!
And I simply love the idea of the retired hairdresser turned topiarist!
Coo. Thank you so much, Lucy. I shall have to digest this....
ReplyDeleteSee, I told you there would be a way to do it using Picasa, but I definitely didn't know all that!
ReplyDeleteI often heard my grandparents and parents talk about Corstorphine when I was a child. I was all grown up before I ever saw it written down, and I recall being quite shocked at the difference between the actual spelling and how I had imagined it!
ReplyDeleteWhat a fabulous place you live in...and that photo info is valuable...who knew? thanks for that.
ReplyDeleteI love towns/cities that are surrounded by hills or mountains, and your photos here make my heart sing! My favourite city in the USA is Salt Lake City, because wherever you are, you can see the mountains beyond the city...beautiful scenery.
ReplyDeleteThe area where I live in suburban Melbourne is also very hilly, and we love it. Not so keen on the walking (Ken gets out of breath very quickly!) but it is very picturesque.
I feel like those could be my vacation pictures Isabelle -- if only I could get time for that vacation! And Oh No! What happens when you are out of photo space??? I know you can't be blogless, 'cause we won't be able to live without you! Good Luck on finding your solution!
ReplyDeleteYou really made me smile with your comment and photos of the chap who was a hair dresser and now trims his hedges so nicely.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of a photo allowance. I will have to check this out.
You live in a beautiful part of the world.