With today's Facebook Wall posting we will have reached a major milestone... 100 images posted in 100 days to our Facebook fan page wall (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Duane-Keeling-Photography/384647728246437).  The project is to run for a year so only 265 more images to go!

As you might imagine, there have been a few problems and a few surprises along the way. Not the least of which has been the inordinate amount of time it takes to actually publish images on a daily basis.  The mechanics are pretty straightforward: find images from my library, edit as needed, push them to a staging area online (a hidden directory on my website) and then publish one image each day from the staging site to my FB Fan Page. The whole "staging" thing works pretty well since I can actually publish from anywhere I can get an internet connection and I still have over 170 images queued so I'm really less than 100 short to make the whole year.  Not to worry though - I still have thousands of images yet to be digitized and, as you've noticed, I slip a brand new image into the mix pretty regularly.

As easy as it may seem, I could not leave well enough alone so I decided that every published image had to meet certain criteria: each had to have a title and caption along with when and where it was taken (if known).  It also needed to have other basic metadata set such as copyright, my name and my website URL embedded.  So that set up an extra bit of work for each image; but I wasn't done yet. I deided that I needed to track certain data points after each image was published: how many FB likes and comments, number of FB Ad clicks, number of website visits, etc..  That meant extra time for hitting multiple pages on a couple of other websites to collect the data.  But I still needed somewhere to store the information.  So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to build a book where each photo published was displayed on a page with all of the analytics for that day - add more time for updating the book with both image and data points!

All told, I seem to average an hour and a half each day just re-editing, updating metadata, looking up data points, capturing the data in my "book" and managing the online libraries moving images around.  Of course that doesn't count any time I might spend shooting new photos or even the initial editing of those images.

It can be tough to fit that extra time into my day when it's already full from my day job, a weekend job and building iPad apps in my spare time.  But, lest you think I am complaining; I am not.  The truth is that photography has always been the "Yin" to the "Yang" of my other life.  It lends balance and perspective and, though I may become obsessive about certain aspects of my life at one time or another, I am always pulled back by the "creative" side of each because, no matter what I do, I am "building" something - and that has always given me the greatest sense of satisifaction.

I hope you've enjoyed the first 100 images and that you find the next 100 to be even better!