This past week has been… uh… quite an adventure.

First of all, I’ve had a sore throat for most of the week. This is unfortunate. If it doesn’t go away next week, I should probably go see a doctor.

Second of all, work has been rather… interesting this week. I have no comment other than that.

Third of all, I apparently ran into the free version of Adobe Photoshop Album’s upper limit on photos. After importing some 168,000 photos into Photoshop Album 3, everything seemed to be fine. Then, last night, I was importing and tagging photos from the day when it randomly crashed (with no error message or anything). I restarted and continued tagging only to have the same thing happen. Today, I went to try and debug the issue… so I reverted to the catalog from the previous day. No issues there. Then I imported yesterday’s photos again, only to have it crash after some clicking around the thumbnail view. Another revert was followed by an import of photos from high school. Same crash after some clicking around. As far as I can tell, it seems to have a limit of around 169,000 photos (and/or 500+ tags), after which point the program grows unstable.

Fortunately for me, I own a copy of Photoshop Elements 5, which comes with the newer version of Album. After a lengthy conversion process (at one point the progress bar stated it would take 1050 minutes to complete, but it managed to finish in slightly under 5 hours), I was looking at my catalog in the new album, and it appeared to be working without issue. Additionally, Elements 5’s album has the ability to write the tags to the photos’ IPTC data. It is currently working on doing that so I can migrate to Picasa or something in the future if Elements decides it can’t handle my 200,000 photos.

Fourth of all, this laptop appears to be randomly blue screening again. It also has started to freeze while playing DVDs (requiring a hard reboot). I swear, all the technology in my life is dying on me this week.

There’s probably more but I should head to bed (again) soon.