Trying to brand a company is not a easy thing.  I’m trying to get the name Butkowski Digital Imaging, and great food photography together.  You need a consistent look in all of your communications. Your website email, portfolio. Anything that some one will associate you and your company with. I recently received a thank you note from Rachel of Impressions. She is a wonderful food stylist, I just completed a project with. On the envelope she addressed it To Louder than Words. This is not the name of my Company, it’s the Tag-line I use. It got me thinking, Is my message and my brand getting confused.

I may need to rethink were and how I use the tag line.

I down loaded the Seefile software and in stalled it. When you install Seefile, there are some options. You can use the Mysql database.

Which you need to down load and install. It free, but it is a extra step. It does not come with Seefile. And you need to load it first. This is a very well known and use database. Or you can opted for the Posgress database software that come bundled with Seefile. Its up to you. I did the bundled Posgress database. Just to make the install easier. There is no performance difference in the two databases.

I just fallowed the instructions and opened the login page in Safari when the install was completed.

The next blog will be the login and set up.

I needed to get a way from the computer and the Seefile upgrade. So I went in to the studio and created this little morning muffin shot. It important  make time to just play. Play with the lights, the camera and the food.

The plate,cup, and and fabric, I just pick up at Linen and Things, they had a going out of business sale. The muffin was from Sam’s Club. This was not for a client. so I would work on it for a while, go do something else. come back to it. refine it a bit more until I created what I wanted.

The new/used 2.7 g5 arrived earlier this week. Now comes the fun of switching drives and getting it all hooked up. When the new computer arrived it had Os 10.4 on it. I bought a new copy of OS 10.5 from the local Best Buy. I the installation went well as you would expect.

I next removed the hard drive out of the 2.7 and placed it in the 2.3. I took the two drives from the 2.3 and put them in the 2.7. Turned on the 2.7 with the two new drives, and bingo! it worked great. When I started, what would be the 2.3ghz seefile computer with the new 10.5 OS,this is what happen. I got the screen of death, lines of code and the big restart button.

I check the computer and every thing looked great. I restarted again, the same thing. So I needed to re-install 10.5 again. so that’s what i did.

I also downloaded and installed all the OS updates.

Next load seefile 4

To clarify better what I am doing. I bought, off ebay a G5 2.7 GHz computer. This will replace the 2.3 GHz machine that I currently use for my image edditing. The 2.3 will be the new Seefile server. It has dual Ethernet conections in it. I’ll need them later when I hook  the computer to the net work. The older server, 1.4GHz will be sitting on a shelve, for now. I find some thing to do with it.  So you can see it’s not just replacing a computer but upgrading two. Moving hard drives and installing software.

But since the new computer is not here yet, I thought I would get started on the upgrade. I’m adding a G5 Jive unit and a SATA card to control the new hard drives. This G5 Jive product will let me add 3 more drives internally to my G5. So I my total will be 5 drives, most likely 500 gig drives. For a total of 2.5 Terabytes of storage. The Jive I bought off of craig’s list, and had for a while . The drives I’ll buy soon.

The parts, as you can see here, are the drive mount itself, the  power and data cabling, and the SATA card. This will control each of the drives. I’m not sure how I’ll configure the drives yet, but for now I just get everything in the computer.

As many of you may know, I am the number one evangelist for Seefile software. It’s this software’s job to deliver an maintain a image archive for me and my clients. My Digital Asset Management link on my site talks about what it can do. I’ve been to many trade shows all over the U.S. for them. Trying to spread the word of this software. Now more than ever with the consolidation and the closing of many on line storage and images delivery companies. Seefile is ready to explode. The next couple of blogs will pertain to the upgrade. So I apologize to those who don’t want to here all the tech stuff.

Why the up grade?. Due to the slower computer speed, and the way I have the 3.0 software configured, My clients are having a hard time logging in, retrieving the files and downloading images. This is causing some headaches for them and me. So before it gets worse I going to make the change. I believe in being proactive.

I’m currently running a Mac G4 Dual 1.4 MHz, 2 gigs ram, OS 10.3 and Seefile Version 3.0. Its about 1/2 full of image files.

I have 4- 250 gig drives in it. drive one is the OS drive, the Seefile software, and what I call a temp folder. More on that later. I will be up grading to a Mac G 2.3 dual 6 mags ram and OS 10.5, Seefile Version 4.2.

You may think, why is he using a 4 year old computer? Well first of all, Seefile does not need a new Intel machine to run well. The speed improvements in the new 4.0 software have seen to that. And I can get a use G5 off Ebay for $800 bucks,verses a new Intel for $3000.

Here is a shot of what I am running now. It look a bit messy. This is a sever cabinet that I also use to store my additional hard drives and my net work gear. As part of the up grade I’ll all so be up grading the sever cabinet shelf arrangement.

Current Seefile Set up Dual g4 1.4 Ghz