How I Blog: Image Management
"Images" and "Information" goes hand-in-hand, when it comes to being successfully published on this blog.
For sure, you can have a teasingly cryptic image uploaded on your own social medias with zero information, or even hashtags, and you'll have folks either LIKING the image, or asking about it. Likewise you can tweet or update your status with imageless words, and are still able to get folks hyped about what is to come/happen. That's how the social hype-machine works these days, isn't it?
Traditionally on this blog, I do prefer me some image(s) and info tho. It might not be as fully revealed as I hope it to be, but editorially I would be able to make a firmer decision on publishing a more fulfilling blogpost, hopefully worthy of your collective clicking and reading pleasures.
Admittedly sometimes the excitement gets to me too, and I'll use whatever images revealed, and offer up some hype and a lookback at past releases, but you folks instinctively recognise these are "filler posts", but most times it works for me, as I know I'll be referring back to these posts for when the item(s) is fully revealed.
In the past, where creators work directly with me/TOYSREVIL to do "reveals", the result is more fulfilling. But more often than not these days, if it means "discovering" toynews on socials, I might not necessarily be able to actively track said developments of the product, amidst the sea of toynews happening daily. Be that as it may, as much as I and fellow blog sites peddle toynews, sometimes the one-and-done-presentation woks more effectively, than actively having folks coming back for updates, IMHO. But of course all that is circumstantial, and is highly reactive to the creator/toys being reported on.
And quite simply because "images" alone, is not enough. I have tons of folder with images saved from the www - via multiple sources - pending either (A) More info, to substantiate a decent readable blogpost, or (b) Require much more research in being able to provide a decent readable blogpost - BOTH of whom are to be worth you clicking unto the links to read about, at least that's how I like to do it on TOYSREVIL...
But having said all that, it also means a fcukton of folders with images on my desktop, most times folders within folders within folders. Folders for specific shows. Folders for my own event coverage.
Featured below is just one folder of images for this Friday morning (since published) screen-grabbed and shared, before they get deleted. There is always a fear of deleting images where I might need to use them again, but the reality is that "space" has become a valuable commodity to be had, and I have quite literally a decade's plus worth of images stored that quite frankly needs to be exorcised LOL
Image hosting is a bitch. In the decades-plus worth of blogging, I have gone from free embeddable image hosts (Photobucket + Flickr), to paid image hosts (Also Flickr), and am currently paying Google to host all my images.
With the inevitable march of digital-time, hosts' status change, and I am left with older blogged images "lost" in commerce, or simply just "gone missing", as in the case of Flickr that one year when a technical glitch on their end left gapping blanks on my blog where images and slideshows used to be.
I am grateful Instagram images and videos can be embedded, these days. Not least it provides content, but especially since folks can actually click direct (back) to the source of said image+video, and that's something more fulfilling to be had, at least from my point of view. For me, clicking goes BOTH WAYS, as much as I provide out-clicks+links to sources, I certainly appreciate it when said links provide a share or link back, but that is (not so) surprisingly few and far in between!
But then again, too much embedded IG-images messes up the blog-layout as well.
Besides the blog itself, I currently host/upload an abundance of images on my dedicated Facebook too, to compliment my blogposts ... whereas in the past, multiple albums on "Multiply", and even "Yahoo Albums" has all ceased operations, and alas images lost.
But yes, "image hosting" and sourcing is my burden to bear, as are hard-drives filled with not so ironically images from "other folks", in addition to the ones I have taken of my own personal toy-hoard, completely oblivious to folks reading the blog, or submitting images for toynews.
I will perhaps touch on WHAT images the TOYSREVIL-blog requires in another "How I Blog"-feature (On "Submission Guidelines"), but will meanwhile focus on images I currently have on my desktop, and what else I do with them ...
So what happens when images are used in published blogposts? Technically, they are moved to the Trash folder, and subsequently deleted. Sometimes daily. Sometimes sitting for much longer than it should. But what about images that were NOT used nor published?
They languish in multiple folders on my desktop, awaiting further activation! LOL
Contained within this Facebook album are images for toynews that did not manage to get published on TOYSREVIL within the year of 2019 (well, some might have been, :p), with tons of singular images representing a collection of images - all of whom (A) lacked full information or detail that I did not have time to research further for, within my set timeline and daily tasks, while (B) were discovered basically past their specific time (ie "Sold Out"), similar rationale to what I had mentioned on the above paras of this blog-feature.
A whole lot of these decisions are tied in to what I had mentioned/shown in my previous post about "How I Blog".
All images had been culled from multiple albums and folders on my desktop, as I attempt to lighten my computer's load and spring-clean for the new year ahead.
And while the TOYSREVIL-blog is not necessarily all about "topicality", I am still grappling in terms of the relevance of this blog to collectors and practitioners in Toy Culture, as well as to myself, so I am trying to attempt a planned direction, moving forward, with as clean a slate as I possibly can.
Moving forward in 2020, I will attempt to share them on my social media (Facebook + Twitter), rather than just holding them "hostage" on my desktop folders LOL
Thank you for your understanding and patience.
Besides images to be used for publishing blogposts, I took have developed the habit of utilising images to do daily montage(s) - an example is in the video above - and more recently for uploading on my social medias, all of which links back to the blog. I've always enjoyed this aspect of the "job", even though it might not be asked of me, nor is it the "norm", but I've since used it to do posters and even promotional postcards, in the past!
Before the current 4-per-single-image for my daily blogs, I had been doing 9-grids, and even before that, much fancier images in photoshop! But recent images are treated through "Previews" on my Mac desktop, for which THIS video might show a little bit clear of my intentions/attempts :)
Thank you for reading thus far, and I'll share more with you folks real soon!
Cheers,
Andy TOYSREVIL
