A Note on Travel Posts

The previous post was our trip to Spain from March 30 until Easter, which was over a month ago. Now, it may seem like I am just being lazy about posting to my blog (that’s only partly true :P), but here is why it can take a while to get one of these up:

Steps to creating a travel post

1. Trip summary
   Make quick list of all places visited (photos usually help remind me of everything we did, but it is best to write it down).
2. Sort photos
   Now, you may think this isn’t a terribly time consuming step, but if you have two photo-snapping-happy people and one digital camera, it can be a nightmare. After downloading them to the computer, we go through all the photos together to find the best ones. We are usually good at determining who took what (we have a good technique of taking a photo of one another when we swap), but whittling this list down is time consuming. To give you an idea, we took 1300 photos in Spain. After a couple hours, we had them narrowed down to 80 for Herr, and 78 pour moi.
3. Photo clean up
   Here I copy my selected photos to a separate folder and go through every photo for touch ups. Most of my photos are fairly straight, but I still haven’t mastered the “exposure” levels on the camera. One day I WILL take a photography class. 😛
4. Determine blog-useful photos
   Now I have to choose from those I made prettier, what ones highlight the trip and look good doing it.
5. Upload photos
   This is a very painful step because I upload archival quality (well, the highest I can produce at least). Of those I chose for the blog, I then determine what ones have artistic merit and go into my gallery or if they go to my scrapbook (means they are online but not featured in my collection). Then I tag, upload, wait, and submit (20 times in the case of Spain, plus 2 failed uploads). Uploading a 7-9MB file can take 3 or 4 minutes, so I usually multi-task at this point.
6. Write!
   Ha ha, it had to happen eventually. While those files upload, I start writing. For every attraction, I try to relocate the Web site. Sadly, this is also not terribly easy when the Web site is foreign (notice the .es for Spain and .cat for Catalanya); how the heck did I find them when I was researching our itinerary before the trip? 😛
7. Finalize
   Once the photos are done I now code them into my writing and preview (veeeeeery important). Any broken graphic links or typos are fixed. Hopefully I find any grammatical or nonsensical sentences (I am so very fond of them). Once all is well, I hit “Publish” and hope I caught everything (I usually look over the published version for any missed mistakes).

All said and done, I think I spent about 7-8 hours on the last post. I was hoping to get our trip to Amsterdam done today as well, but well, we’ll see. 😛 I was really slowed down by the two conferences (one down in Garmisch) and the immediate Amsterdam trip that followed; for about a week I was playing catch-up with e-mail and projects, purchases and planning our upcoming trip. While trips are great fun, daily life does not stop for them. *sigh* Anyhow, hope you found this enlightening! Enjoy! 😀

PS Happy Mother’s Day!