Ooooh, I am so tired, bleary eyed, fed up. I have spent hours and hours and tens of hours, maybe hundreds, enhancing photos and re-doing my Croft History volume 1 book. I need a break.

First, although the photo enhancement process is simple (no choices to be made), and fairly fast, it’s still a one-image-at-a-time process. With nearly 3,000 to be done (I found more), my fingers are just about worn down with mouse clicks. I want batch processing!

Once each image has been enhanced and downloaded, the file name is changed, by them, to Enhanced_photo(1).jpg and so on, and when you download it, it goes into the Downloads folder, not the original folder. That means I have to transfer them to the original folder.

Then I have to visually match the new files with their originals and change the new file name to match the original, but with one letter or number changed so they don’t clash. This can be needed for as many as 90 files in a folder.

OK, so I did this. Then I started to update the images in the photo book with the new enhanced images. But their file names are different, so the book thinks all the original images are missing. Gaaah!

So then I had to go back to the folders and rename all the files so that the new coloured image file names are the same as the b/w images were, and rename the b/w images to be different, so they don’t clash again. I also keep finding duplicates and I’m not sure which one is used in the book.

Ugh! I am exhausted. I’ll get there, but it’s in a mess at the moment. I need a beer.

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There are some funny aberrations coming up in this image enhancement software (it’s in Israel, via the web, not on my PC).

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However, the quality is just remarkable:

Dad’s camera was a Voigtlander 6x6cm twin lens reflex with scale focusing. You had to measure or estimate the distance to the subject and set it on a scale around the lens for each shot. You couldn’t see focus on the screen and so many photos were out of focus, or more correctly, focused on the background (infinity). This software finally gives me sharp photos.

I’ve also found that it works on scenes without faces too, something I thought it wouldn’t. And it’ll spice up my more recent (e.g. 1960s onwards) film images too, although if they’re in colour, it’s a waste of time to ask it to enhance the colour. It just turns it to mush pastels.

I’m inspired now, to do more volumes of the history books.

I’m still in touch with all those people above, although one lives in Tasmania now. The others are all still in Perth.

But my bum is sore and my legs are weak from too much sitting!

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Brrr, it’s August and just normally cold and I’m tired of it. Only ten days to Spring. Yippee.

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People are talking a lot about the effects of this pandemic on our mood. Personally, there’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t tank my lucky stars that I’m living the life I am in the place I am. I almost feel survivor’s guilt about how well I have come through life and how well I’m travelling in this terrible time.

• I have a government pension, so no money worries;
• I don’t have a job to lose;
• I don’t have kids to worry about;
• I don’t have a mortgage, so no mortgage stress or fear of homelessness;
• I live in a great location in a beautiful house;
• I live in WA, where our movements are virtually unrestricted;
• I have just about everything I want;
• I always know where my next meal is coming from.

The only thing I’m a little fractious about is that I don’t know when I’m going to see my partner again. She’s in Vienna and who knows when international travel will be allowed again or our borders opened to foreigners? We can talk on the phone (for no cost on WhatsApp!) and talk by email, but it’s not the same, is it? I’m used to the solitary life so nothing much changed at all for me. Even so…