Thursday, April 14, 2022

Update on My Travelogue Project (Stealing Posts from Facebook, Google Photos, and Youtube Videos)

The last couple posts on this blog have been rescuing old travelogues from my archives (Kirirom National Park, Cambodia and Mekong Delta Tour: Spring 2013).  This got me thinking, once again, about all the travel videos photos I have trapped on Facebook which I never posted on this blog.

Long time readers of this blog will know that from 2010 to 2018, I didn't post any travelogues on my public blog under the logic that I was going to keep my public blog and my personal life separate.  I reversed this decision in 2018 under the logic that a photo of a landscape isn't revealing too much about my personal life.  But between 2010 and 2018, I took a lot of photos of travel destinations that ended up on Facebook, and not on my blog.
I think some of those travel photos might be of general interest, so I've been thinking about ways to transfer them to this blog.
A couple years ago, I transferred my photos from My Lai from Facebook over to this blog.  It involved a lot of time.  (Downloading the photos from Facebook, reuploading them all to the blog, etc).  Plus, I'm not particularly happy with the quality of the photo resolution.  (I think they may have lost some clarity in the transfer.)
And also My Lai was one of my smaller Facebook albums.  My Facebook album for my trip to Central Vietnam contained 727 photos.  I think that includes some photos which accidentally got uploaded twice, but still... I don't have time to sort through all that.

And one more thing. In June of last year, Google Photos changed its storage policy
As of June 1, 2021, any new photos or videos you back up in High quality (now named Storage saver) or Express quality will count toward your 15 GB of Google Account storage or any additional storage you may have purchased as a Google One member. 
Photos on blogger are stored via the Google Account (Blogger is part of Google), so this means that as of June 2021, any photos I upload onto this blog will count against my 15 GB limit. And with all the stuff I post on this blog, it probably will not surprise you to learn that I am fast approaching that limit.  So I don't think I have the storage space on my Google Account to upload those photos anyway.

But, it has occurred to me that even if I can't move those photos over to this blog, I can make my old Facebook albums public, and then link to them from this blog.
So that's what I'm going to do.  I've got several Facebook albums from 2012 to 2017.  I'll be making them public and linking to them from this blog over the next several days.

As for future travelogues going forward--you may have noticed that I've - been - publishing - several - videos - of  - Ho Chi Minh City lately.  This is because photos count against my Google Account storage, but I can upload as many Youtube videos as I want.  (There is no Youtube account storage limit.)
It's strange that Google is limiting photos, but not videos, but I guess they must have calculated that it's in their interest to get as many eyeballs on Youtube as possible.
So anyway, going forward I think all of my travelogues will be videos.  
And, apologies, I know I'm not the best cinematographer.  I know my videos are often shaky, and jerky, and difficult to watch.  But it is what it is.  Google is currently letting me do as many videos as I want, but photos are limited, so videos it will be from here on out.

And, as regular readers of this blog will have no doubt realized, I'm currently on a project to document the various parts of Ho Chi Minh City.
I don't know why this idea didn't occur to me years ago.  I've been living here since 2015, and in 2015 I had a lot more free time, and was also centrally located.  It's a pity the idea didn't occur to me then!
Now, I'm much busier, and live out in the outskirts of the city.  So it's not quite so easy to make videos nowadays, but I'll do my best.  Whenever I find myself going to a point of interest, I'll try to just pull out my phone and do a quick video, and then post it as a travelogue.
Stay tuned for more travelogue posts to come.

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