JL, 13 August 2007
I'm working my way out of my morass here and trying to get back into something genealogical.  The new computer is beginning to feel like home.  All the parts have found a place to settle and I'm getting used to the new keyboard.  All keyboards are not created equal as you probably know.  This one has a dozen keys in unaccustomed places and is severely challenging the cow-paths of my mind. 

I did finally settle on a 19" screen at 1280 x 1024 resolution, which is quite nice really.  At first the great expanse of white light had me pushing my chair to the other side of the room to get away from it.  The text is just a teeny bit larger than on my laptop.  I don't know what I was expecting anyway, obviously something larger, hence all the fuss. The good part is I don't have to hunch over a laptop anymore to reach the keyboard which is probably much better for my bones.

1280 x 1024 is a 5:4 screen, not the more common 4:3.  Pretty close but not the same, which means if I optimize pages for 5:4 it may throw something off on the 4:3.  There's not enough space here to set up the two computers side by side (I wish) so I can't check and I may not be keeping all the people happy all the time.  Back to that.  Feel free to complain and send screenshots.

Now that I have my supersonic system with enough space, speed and power to get things done efficiently, I'm starting into a mammoth project of re-creating many GB's of photographs in larger size.  And rescanning any not large enough.  A few in each year's folder are smaller than I would like and I'm wondering who scanned them that way in the first place.  Surely not moi.  Makes me wish I still had box-loads of the originals but alas, they're spread out across the continent again.  There's a few paper ones living here that I can still salvage.

When I was doing this project originally I scanned most of the photos fairly large and made another copy for editing. I put the original scans and their edited copies on a double-set of about 100 CD's that got remade several times when I made changes, and at least once a year to stay ahead of CD-rot.  Way too much work and expense with insufficient equipment but that's what I had.

I then created a "viewable set" on my hard-drive from the edited copies in a nice standard size of 1024 x 768, being as that was the resolution of my screen until a week ago and it fit on my tiny hard-drive.  That was obviously a short-sighted plan as they look lost in space on this new higher-resolution screen.  I wonder about people who have the equipment to view photos on their TV's.  What resolution does that require to look good?  You might want to think ahead when you're scanning photos.

Now that I have space to spread out I have a different view of this, of course, i.e. do not make photos small or smaller.  Scan them large, edit them and leave them at that size.  Especially if you have sufficient hard-drive space, there's no reason not to.  You never know who down the road might want to print one or see them on a higher resolution screen.  Maybe in another 3 years a typical screen resolution will be 3,000 or 5,000 pixels wide and then where are our photos going to be?  Little dots in an ocean of back-lighting.   Maybe it won't be pixels anymore, maybe it'll be something else altogether.  Surely, they won't leave us stranded.  

Other plans include editing video files, and cleaning up my projects in Passage Express.  My main collaborator is 'off' til next year due to more pressing projects, and I'm waiting on truckloads of information from her.  In the meantime I'm going to try to catch up on my half.  I've been trying my darndest to get her to switch over to Legacy so we can use Intellishare.  It would make alot more sense as we're cousins 4 different ways so we're repeating alot of the same work.  If you're in a similar situation you might find this useful.  Intellishare is a lesser-known option in Legacy and you may not have come across it yet.  Here's a description straight from the Help Index.
 

Sharing Research Tasks in Legacy: Using IntelliShare

by David Berdan 

President, Millennia Corp. 

The popularity of the Internet and e-mail has simplified many aspects of genealogical research. Today it is easier than ever to search through hundreds of millions of records online and on numerous CD-ROMs in a matter of seconds to find your relatives. Many of these records include information from other people researching the same lines you are. You can quickly add hundreds or thousands of new ancestors to your family file. Files can be e-mailed back and forth in minutes. But with this great boon to research comes the challenge of coordinating your efforts with others. Many people have formed family organizations and have assigned different lines to various members of the groups. How does everyone stay in sync?

Legacy has a feature called IntelliShare that makes it easy for groups of two or more people to coordinate their works and stay caught up on each other's changes.

Here is how IntelliShare works:

Form a research group of two or more people. (Each must be using Legacy.) One person in the group is designated as the "Keeper of the Records" (Keeper for short). This person keeps the master Family File. Legacy automatically marks all the records in the Master Family File with a serial number that uniquely identifies each individual. The Keeper now sends a copy of the Family File to all the other people participating in the group.

Any or all members of the group can make changes to existing records, delete or unlink records, or add new records to the family file. The Keeper can also make changes and additions to the master file.

After an agreed upon interval of time, all members of the group return a copy of the family file to the Keeper for merging and reconciliation.

The Keeper then follows this procedure: 

Import all copies of the family file into the master copy (after making a backup of course). 

Press the Merge button and choose Find Duplicates. 

From the Merge Options window, click on the Special Searches tab and choose the IntelliShare option. 

Press the Continue button in the upper right corner of the Merge Options window. Legacy searches for all records with matching IntelliShare values and automatically merges those that have exactly the same information. At the end of this process Legacy displays the records where one or more persons have made changes. Legacy also looks at all surrounding links when deciding to merge. If the parents, spouses or children are different in any way, the two individuals are displayed along with a message describing the situation. All these messages are also saved in a file called MERGE.LOG. Legacy offers to display this file at the end of the merge process. 

The only records the Keeper has to look at and merge together are the ones that have been changed by someone in the group. 

At the end of the merge process, a list of any newly added individuals is displayed. 

After the merge is complete, the Keeper sends a new copy of the family file back to the other group members for more changes and additions. 

Legacy's IntelliShare greatly reduces the drudgery involved when going through the typical match-merge process needed to combine two or more files.

 

So, basically, I'm in clean-up/sort-out mode, but if I learn anything worthwhile as I go along I'll be sure to write about it here.