You can skip the words and go straight to the pictures. Click on 2011 – A Year in pictures by Chris Dale for the Google+ display

I begin to think that I will not be able to sort out my photographs until I retire, not least because I have years’ worth which must be scanned from film. If digital photography makes the results easier to manage, it also encourages the taking of many more than one did in the days when every click cost money. My hobby is therefore like my professional subject, the management of electronic documents – the means of production has become so easy that we need effective governance policies to control it.

I took nearly 2300 photographs in 2011 or, rather, that is the quantity which survives my first-pass cull. They are big RAW files, 52 GB in overall volume, posing a data archiving issue of their own. They are the one inanimate thing which I would mourn if the house caught fire, and Google Docs is becoming my backup of last resort – a long-term exercise this, since Virgin Media’s upload speed is nearly as poor as its customer service.

The big improvement of 2011 is the photograph-sharing tools within Google Plus – not the only benefit of that significant new player in the business and personal cloud. The process which I adopt  (and there has to be a process, of course) has multiple stages, some of them automated. The Google+ collection is read from Google’s Picasa, giving the user a choice between a Picasa slide show and the Google+ endless roll. The latter has the significant advantage that you can scan down the collection very quickly in place of the linear review imposed by the slideshow format.

I am, of course, very lucky in the destinations to which my work takes me, quite apart from the good fortune of living on the edge of Port Meadow in Oxford and in having a mother who lives in one of the most beautiful parts of Suffolk.

This year’s collection is, as usual, a mixture of work and play – conference photographs mixed chronologically with ones taken for pleasure. The first few cover New York, Oxford, Suffolk, Macau, Hong Kong and Frankfurt. Our children make a couple of appearances, at a gig and at graduation ceremonies. Those who work in international eDiscovery will recognise some of the judges and others seen on platforms or holding microphones. Some of these scenes are of the productions of my judicial play in New York and London which, as I said in my more formal review of the year, were my personal high-points of the conference year.

Mary Ann and I went north and south along the coast from San Francisco, spending a few nights in wooden cabins, including the eccentric Russian-themed St Orres hotel at Gualala, an antidote to the “beige hotels” (as Mary Ann calls them) of the conference cities.

Hong Kong was grey and wet and barely features here. I did not see much of Dublin, Orlando, Nashville or Washington, and my camera had gone missing, with the rest of my luggage, when I reached Berlin and Paris (see Supper in Singapore, breakfast in Berlin, luggage in Limbo.

The high point, in photographic terms as in much else, was our trip to Australia to take part in the Nuix Exchange. Dawn at the Sydney Opera House, a boat trip round Sydney Harbour and a few days on the Great Ocean Road ended with a night in a Sydney hotel room which overlooked Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Even Mary Ann had to concede that this particular beige hotel had its advantages.

We came back through Singapore, a city which is at its best at night. This sequence includes three photographs from the underground Battle Box, where moving, talking figures recreate the decision to surrender to the Japanese.

Orford and its Suffolk surroundings provide most of the last few pictures of the year. There are reminders that HHJ Simon Brown QC, Senior Master Whitaker and Professor Dominic Regan do so much for the cause of UK eDisclosure.

Click here to see the opening page. Click on the blue words 2011 – a Year in Pictures by Chris Dale to see the Google+ format. Click on the first (or any) photograph to see them in linear fashion. Google being Google, it cannot give you a benefit without screwing up something else. You used to be able to show the Picasa slide show format which ran to a timer, but any attempt to do this  since the G+ upgrade is redirected to the G+ format – which appears to have no rolling slide show format. I want to show what I want to show, not what some Californian nerd, all brain and no life, thinks I should want to show. In addition, the geo-tagging (which I did laboriously by hand) no longer appears on either of the published formats. Complaints were made to Google about this by others months ago, but nothing has been done to fix it – or, if it has, it is not working for me. While I am at it, how is it that raw Google Maps can find anywhere on Earth with almost unerring accuracy whilst the version built into Picasa is almost always wrong?

Henceforth, I will be using the personal Google+ page almost solely for photographs and will start using Circles in my Google+ business page to share professional information.

Home