It's getting cold here, rather suddenly - yesterday evening the weather forecast said something about lowest temperature down to 2°C. Which meant that we did a little bit of an evening "save the tomato plants" action, taking the potted tomatoes from their summer place in the garden outside into the wintergarden. Well, at least most of them - the ones with still a lot of fruits on them, and those tasting best. Some of the plants are still flowering, and I usually try to get a few of them over the winter. That does not always work, but if it does, it means very early tomatoes, and that is something not to be sniffed at.

In other news (which is probably more interesting for me than for you), I've made inroads on my email backlog, much to my satisfaction; import of data into the new photo database is still ongoing (it takes quite a lot of time to read each file). In addition to that, I did get a stack of things done today - mostly prep work and planning work for oncoming events that I'm totally excited about. One of them is, of course, the Textile Forum. Another one is an inventory project of a stack of museum textiles that I will do together with a colleague. Third in line is the Spinntreffen of the Handspinngilde in Rehe, time-wise coming up next, on the first weekend of October.

I still feel like I'm behind on a lot of things, though. Including getting this month's newsletter out, which is what I will be working on now... until it's time for a nice hot after-work tea, and a bit of chocolate, or something like that.

Oh, and if someone finds a spare week for me to use for catching up, I'd totally take it!

I'm delighted to travel to the North again, for a presentation in Lübeck. The Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte der Hanse und des Ostseeraums are hosting a series of talks each year, and I have the pleasure and honour of starting off this year's series with a talk about the production of textiles and clothing in the era of the Hanse. That will be on October 11 - which means I've started working on the presentation. Writing and preparing these always takes a good chunk of time, and I like to have a few days to let ideas mature and settle in my brain inbetween; I find that this helps immensely.

You can find the full programme here; the talks are all in German. They are free to attend in-person in Lübeck, but you need to register for them due to restrictions on the number of people.

I'm very much looking forward to this already. There will be inside stories about making textiles - and probably a lot of moaning about what we don't know anymore. (The German term for inside stories is much funnier, by the way, especially in this context: it's "aus dem Nähkästchen plaudern". The literal translation for that is "to talk from inside the (sewing) workbasket".) I'm also planning to bring a distaff along, because, well, you can always use a distaff! 

There's been a bit more testing, and I think I now have found the best solution for my photo database problem... some more testing will follow, but so far, it does look promising. 

After a bit of mucking around, I now have found out how to import the keywords (proper delimiters are important), and - most important - how and where to import the picture dates so I can sort things by time again. There may have to be some little bit of changing file encodings (there are problems, potentially, with the German Umlaute otherwise), but it does look like I will be able to port everything. Still have to find out where best to shove the comments from the old database, but as I've only ever used those for temporary marking of pics to export, if I lose those, it's no big deal at all.

Just in case you're curious, or are looking for an image database/digital assets management programme yourself, the three in the running were Photo Supreme (the current top dog in my list), iMatch, and Photo Mechanic Plus. They all require a bit of a learning curve.

All three of them also present you, as default, with the "dark" colour scheme. I really don't understand this hype for the dark scheme; it's the same on my phone, about every app wants to go and do the dark thing, and it's hard to convince them (and sometimes impossible) that I want my stuff to be light, light, light. I find it really exhausting to look at a dark screen with light text on it as opposed to a light screen with dark text. I know that some people find the dark background easier on the eyes, but for me, it just doesn't work that well. So it's another point in favour for Supreme that I was able to find a "light colour scheme" pre-selector rather easily, and could switch to a nice grey background that way. (The other two also allow you to change background colours, but it's not as quickly and easily done.)

So. All three are pretty "mighty tools" (which, in geek speak, means "you can do a huge lot of cool things with that programme, but you have to know what you are doing, and learning curves may be steep"). All three will manage large amounts of photos, and all three are mainly geared towards photographers uploading, tagging, culling and sorting their collections and not to weird archaeologists sorting their medieval illustrations with it. With my specific requirements profile (importing data from FotoTime, having weird dates on images, and Umlaute in the keywords and descriptions) all three will need a bit of prodding.

Photo Mechanic does not allow for the import of dates directly, which means that I have a real problem here. iMatch does allow import, and it looked a while like it would win the race, but I keep having issues with actually writing the metadata to the files (that is not done straight away as default, and I've had it write metadata only to find, a few minutes later, that the image still has remaining metadata to be written). So. A bit more testing, probably doing a new larger test import with the parameters and tweaks that I found already, then a bit of working with the candidate... and I'll keep you updated.

I'm still on the hunt for a replacement for my photo database programme. If I had ten Euros for every programme I installed for testing... ah well.

So far, there's three prospective candidates; the first of them is almost out, as there's considerable trouble still to import the metadata from the text file; the second seems to be a bit more promising, but jury's still out on how feasible the import will actually be; and the third one has only just entered the testing phase (import seems possible, but a bit tricky, as it involves several steps and a first quick try did not result in anything helpful).

All three are pay-for-a-license types, which suits me well - one programme was right out of the list as it's a per-month thing, and I'm really not into that. At all.

Well, the testing and installing and trying, that ate a few evenings, while other stuff - like Textile Forum prep - was going on during the daytime. More Forum-related emailing now, and then some writing work to be done. Some day I'll be caught up! (Probably that Some Day is, as the Germans say, Sankt-Nimmerleins-Tag...)

Autumn is coming, and with it the Textile Forum is drawing nearer, and that always marks my own personal Season of Madness - as things are getting sorted out and planned and organised. 

There's long lists of stuff to check, or pack, or look into - and since this year's focus topic is "making threads" which includes splicing technique, there was a little bit of nettle harvesting today:

These grew on public ground, and quite obviously on a piece of public ground that they found pretty nice, as some of the stalks are more than my height in length. Now I'll have to figure out what best to do with them until we need them in November. Ret them? Let them dry? Freeze them? Hm... 

A chunk of it was eaten by some more research into the photo database problem; then there was a bit of writing; there was a bit of textile work; some organising; there was lunch at some point inbetween, and woosh, the day was gone.

Speaking of time, just a few days ago I was chatting with a friend about wages, and pay, and freelance employment. A few years ago, I had found an online calculating tool that helped in calculating a sensible rate for freelance work, with a list covering expenses and taxes and all these things, but that has long since gone the way of the Dodo Website.

A quick search, though, found a page called, very fittingly: The Freelance Rate Calculator.  Clicking the link there sends you to a google spreadsheet that you can download and fill in, to find out what you will need per hour to earn the money you need. It does, very handily, remind you that you might want to have some savings too... so a very smart thing.

In case you consider going freelance: Check out this sheet, or something similar. You definitely want to find out if you can turn whatever you are planning to make your main job into a business that will sustain you... before you take the plunge.

Things going on behind the scenes, here? The search for a new database programme for my images.

As you may guess, I've accumulated a lot of images over the years - photos, drawings, scans from books, videos, you name it. There's a few private and personal ones, but most of them are work-related. They've been handled by a wonderful programme called FotoTime ever since I discovered that, ages ago.

Unfortunately, the company lost their servers in an accident back in March 2021, and has ceased operation due to that. Some of their users lost all their pictures and data (never, never place something important in just one place, file-wise!). Fortunately, for me, that is not the case, but at some point in the future, the programme will probably be too old to work with the current version of Windows... so I thought it might be a smart thing to look into a replacement.

The really nice thing about FotoTime was that you could place your images in a folder structure on your computer that was unrelated to the "album" folder structure in the programme. You could set a date, and keywords, and a copyright notice, and an image description... and all those, of course, I'd like to have transferred to a new programme. Preferably also one that keeps my folder structure.

Some possible databases have already been ruled out, but the one I'm looking at currently is digiKam. It's free and open source, and my test installation seems to at least conserve all the things that were in the old database - and maybe I'll be able to migrate the old database into the new one once I've gotten an idea of how they are structured, and how they work.

If you have a good image database for organising your photos, do let me know what you are using!