Perhaps some people here post pictures which have millions of pixels which take a lot of time to download. Perhaps there should be a note that pictures should have less than 500k pixels.

GW automatically resizes all pics to about 150 Kb. If you download any picture and then look at its data that's the size you get. It's just that there are a lot of pictures.

Steve

This post was edited by steve_mass on Mon, Dec 30, 13 at 17:15

Josephine, you are so right. The alphabet is truly amazing. Love the pics. Already started my wish list just thru A.B, & C. Just got a new camera and learning how to use it. Hope by spring I can learn to post pics too. Though most will be of starters except Guacamole, and So Sweet which I think are close to 3-4 yrs old. Also have 3 Dream Queens, 2 June , 3 Fire & Ice, 2 Patriots in the ground. Looking fwd. to the rest of the letters.

Thank you Jo I feel honored. I have a good time doing it. I may warn you though that you will not be able to slow down. The Alphabet will enable you. I am glad everyone is having a good time. I know I am!

I agree with berndnyz5 on keeping the photo size smaller. Many people are using their phones at work, hint me, and only a part of some show up.

Enjoy every one Paula

This post was edited by ilovetogrow on Mon, Dec 30, 13 at 18:35

hey jo

the trick.. is to label your pix in alpha ... so that when this time of year comes... you go to the hosta folder... and there they all are.. in aplha order ...

go figure ...

ken

'SLOW DOWN ACCUMULATING...' Heh heh heh...I love your sense of humor, Jo...Heh heh heh...

Heh heh heh..Don B...Heh heh heh...

If we can just persuade Paul to do some hosta leaf bingo, we have it made for the winter lull. Spring starts here in March, so we (at least Paula, Mocc and I) start posting pips by then. Phil is not usually far behind.

Hosta leaf bingo is a great game, too. As I understand it, Paul is also the originator of the alphabet game as well.

bk

I am right there with you, Jo. This is my first hosta alphabet and, well, be still my heart! I have perused previous years ad nauseum (well, to some, like my hubby, maybe but not to me!) but actually doing it real time is just a whole other animal! My list is growing, growing. Not sure I'll be able to dig up good sources for them, though. The hunt begins!

An iPhone materialized at Christmas! so I will have another gizmo with which to take pictures...will my cameras ever come out of the closet? Hmmm. I have taken mental notes of what NOT to do so hopefully my pictures will appear be as they should.

Bernd and Steve - right on...

Jane - Patriot is the only one I don't have from your in-ground list..looking forward to your pics :-)...I'm curious about the 30 or so others...care to list them too? I like looking up hosta I don't have.

Paula - I hear a lot raving about the quality of pics from some phones....I've been practicing on grand kids and the pics are so clear and just great! Yours obviously are always very good - are most of your hosta pix taken with phone or camera?

Ken - hey, great minds think alike LOL ...that is exactly what I have done for the next letter!!! I copied and plunked them into their own folder. I am determined to get good pic this year too to use on the next Alphabet. Don't know if you recall me mentioning it earlier but my CPU crashed and I lost at least 7 years of pics! :-( the only ones I didn't lose were some taken of my first granddaughter that I was smart enough to place on a CD....never got around to doing that with the rest...back-up will now be on a thumb drive! Since last Christmas I have taken a few thousand pix on this iPad, deleted a few redundancies, and have been organizing. Most of my 90+ hosta now have a progression format within their own folder but I am far from finished with that task....so many hosta pix...hard to choose which ones to delete and keep only good ones. Another great way to pass time waiting for spring :-)

Don - your comment had me laughing and chuckling this entire time while I was responding ... like....who am I kidding! right? Well, I gotta try, at least a little bit, not to exceed the 30+ this year like last year! You're saying "PFFTT" right now, aren't you...at my only 30. What did you accumulate last year? I didn't count but wouldn't be surprised if you reached at least 60???70??? LOLLOLLOLLOL come on, 'fess up! How many new hosta did you get in 2013? I groan each time you post a new order because I KNOW I am going to bite, cave in, lose my resolve...whichever way I slice it, something you buy will lead me to a nursery!!!!! BUT....DONT STOP because I can always blame you and say, " Don made me do it" ! HA

Bkay - I really love seeing pic of hosta pips...my way of memorizing the identity without tags...I have to say that the most memorable pip was my 'Revolution' this year - it had gorgeous lilac/pink/purple colour in it with green and cream...wow. 'Krossa Regal' also has beautiful pips...did we ever have just a pip thread? Is Hosta Leaf Bingo like identifying a leaf-only game?
I didn't know Paul originated the Alphabet but how wonderful that he did as it is a brilliant idea!!!!

Bkay - a question for you....what is the earliest that pips have emerged for you? What is your favourite 'pip'? Sorry, I guess two questions, lol

Funnthsun - Well said, I hear you! Maybe at the end of the alphabet we should post a thread about how many new hosta some of us are 'getting', never mind 'putting on wish list', LOL as a result of this game!!!

Jo

Last year was the earliest they have emerged for me. It was not a good year. They were up in early February. My first photos of pips were 2/13/13, but I'm not sure when the first ones appeared. We had a warm January and then a cold February. My hosta came up, but got frosted, frozen, re-frosted and re-frozen.

Between the weather and Cleo, my hosta were pretty damaged last year. I didn't even take formal photos, they were so bad. Between the weather and Cleo, I lost lots of eyes. Most were smaller than the previous year.

But of course, that didn't slow me down. I found some really nice, big multi-eyed hosta for sale last spring, so that helped.

But, still, many of my hosta should have been on their leap year and they were back to small plants again. For instance, my Dark Star was really coming on. It should have been a 16" plant last year. Cleo decided to dump it and chew the pot, so it's was back to a 10". (It was my best "D", too.) It was that kind of year.

I'm hoping this year will be better.

bk

Jo, I wouldn't be participating in that thread, LOL, it would be way too telling! :)

Jo, I have about 4 Patriots. 2 at the front of my house planted about 2 yrs ago, and 1 new one in a ceramic pot planted last summer. I got a bonanza at Lowe's at the end of the season. They had them on their reduced shelf for $1. I got 2 then went back the next day for more. Someone was already there and took about a dozen. leaving 2 poor ones on the shelf. Told her I wanted them to plant at the SPCA and she gave me one more from her bunch I still have one in a pot in the garage and gave away about 6 potted up to friends and family. Our HD sometimes has a good buy on Hosta's. I'll send my list of plants on another post.

Jo, I have about 4 Patriots. 2 at the front of my house planted about 2 yrs ago, and 1 new one in a ceramic pot planted last summer. I got a bonanza at Lowe's at the end of the season. They had them on their reduced shelf for $1. I got 2 then went back the next day for more. Someone was already there and took about a dozen. leaving 2 poor ones on the shelf. Told her I wanted them to plant at the SPCA and she gave me one more from her bunch I still have one in a pot in the garage and gave away about 6 potted up to friends and family. Our HD sometimes has a good buy on Hosta's. I'll send my list of plants on another post.

Do a search on "hosta bingo". I'm not very good at it. (Merle or Steve usually wins.) It's fun to guess, though.

bk

Hosta Alphabet was started before I started posting here, so I get no credit for that. I organized it for a couple of cycles, like others before me.

Thanks for asking, I will see if I can get a couple of rounds of Hosta Leaf Bingo going before the southern gardeners are ready to post their spring photos.

Paul

Bkay...thanks, I looked it up and BINGO! It was there at the top....now that is one game that is challenging! I'm only fairly good at guessing at hosta I have myself, because it is easy to identify what you already have, isn't it? Since I have under 100, my guessing would be very limited. :-(

I have visions of your little doggie going crazy with a hosta pot...it may be funny to me, but how disheartening for you! She will grow out of it I hope. Like I said before, since you rescued your latest dog and adopted it, perhaps Cleo will be too busy with her new companion in the spring to bother with your hosta! Fingers crossed...

I was visiting relatives in Florida years ago, during our March Break when kids are out of school, and recall how frozen my aunt's garden looked at that time of year. She said it was a bad spring...that was back in 1989. It was actually beautiful in a way...nothing was disfigured, everything just had a coating of clear ice and the forms of the plants were perfect. But I would hate to have hosta suffer, or have them die on me.

I have a beautiful Dark Star in its 3rd year coming 2014...let me find a pic to show you...not to add insult to injury but simply to share with you. The way it grows for me reminds me always of your famous So Sweet.

I hope this year will be much better for you - weather and Cleo! :-). One can hope.

Jane...opened your list thread...:-) now searching online for some interesting named ones you have listed..oh boy, fun! Will comment when I am done on that thread.

Jo

folder.. schmolders..

get a stand alone EXTERNAL. hard drive ... and store them... INDEPENDENT OF YOUR COMPUTER ...

crikey ...

like one of those at the link ... USB .... store them on the puter.. and then drag/copy to the hard drive ..

when the house starts to burn.. grab the hard drive .... its smaller than most of your purses .. lol ...

my camera is set to make the files name something like 20131231_666 ... that would be the date taken and the sign of the devil ... lol ...

once on my computer... i add the name of the hosta in front such as: Liberty 20131231_666

when all the names are on .... then i have all my pix of LIBERTY ... IN DATE ORDER ....

i would then drag them over to the L file on the external ...

the 666 ... helps.. if i take more than one pic on a given date.. and the camera keeps increasing the sequential number ....

probably this should be in its own.. properly titled post ....

ken

Here is a link that might be useful: link

See.. I did my plant library all wrong. All these years I saved every tag, computerized it into neat little artistic pictures equipped with names, descriptions, sometimes Latin names, and awards. I categorized them. Offsite stored them, put them onto a mega Zip drive and even printed them out, slipped them into baseball card sleeves hole pinched them and have them hanging in my gardens shed. All pre ipad, and iPhone. I kept up, every new plant, same format. Did I label the plants in the garden itself?
No...duh.....
But I could use a good app for categorizing all this if anyone knows of one.

Jo, in 2013 I bought right around 100 plants. It was a good season. : ) OK, now that I see it typed out like that, I guess I'm addicted pretty hardcore.

I've found it to be a very acceptable substitute to binge drinking; much healthier as well.

Don B.

Much simpler than an external hard drive, just get Carbonite, Mozy or one of the other online backup services and you won't have to do anything at all to backup your pics, it does it for you... nothing to grab on the way out in case of fire, either! It backs up your whole computer, no limit on size-- couldn't be easier. Gives you remote access to your files/pics as well. That definitely comes in handy.

As for organizing pics, I don't have time until winter to sort them, so I just take a pic of the tag or rock that is labeled, then I take my pic of the hosta, that way I will remember which one it is later. I then go back and crop, then rename the file name to the hosta name (the date is already embedded into the file). Seems to work pretty well, once I figured out my process. Unfortunately, it was halfway through the season when I figured it out! Next year should be even better.

Yes, we had a hosta pip thread, not on the scale of the hosta leaf bingo, but "can you ID this pip?" kind of threads.

I tried not to go overboard on organizing my hosta photos (I can make a job out of anything.). I just made a simple folder named hosta, which contains a folder of each hosta by name, then "dead hosta", "not my hosta", arboretum, etc. Some of the folders have an excel file that tells when I acquired the hosta, the grower and the plant breeder. Then, I just sort my photos into the different folders. The camera puts a date on the file, which shows up when I cursor over it. When I find one in the wrong file, I just drag it to the correct one.

We did a thread a couple of years ago about how everyone organizes their photos. I got a great idea from Babka then. She takes a photo of each plant each May, when they are pristine. So she always has a progression of each plant. Personally, I found I only had photos of problems until that thread.

Maybe it's time to do another thread on that subject.

bk

hey don.. that used to be my line.. back in the day ...

instead of going out drinking th, fri.. sat mights.. i would buy plants.. and dig holes ... [i was single back then ... my drinking buds thought i was quite weird.. buying plants ].. plus.. no hangover .... and good exercise ....

funn reminds me ... yes... first pic .. ALWAYS... the label ... then the hosta pix ...

then when naming files and organizing .... name the file.. delete the tag pic.. gotta love digital ...

ken

Tons of beautiful pics appearing in the 2014 Hosta Alphabet posts. Doesn't take long for each post to fill up with inspiring pics.

I organize similarly to Ken and Bkay with a "hosta" folder within a "garden" folder located in "library pictures" on my computer.

Each hosta folder is titled with the hosta's name first (so it shows up alphabetically), where purchased and what year. The extra info idea was taken from Moccasinlanding's plant labels.

Then, within each named hosta folder, I create a new folder each year/season for pics of that hosta.

I really should be more diligent about updating my off computer stored pics on a thumb drive as Ken suggests...humm, that would be a good New Year's Day project for me at the beginning of each year.

I'm late, so better get on that ;-)

Deb

I don't organize. I lose my labels. I forget which is which (except for my Liberty that I planted for Papou and which must know it is growing for him because it is always marvelous!). My dogs are not helpful no matter how often I review the rules.

However, I do read each and every post here and aspire to match everyone else's greatness. I love the knowledge, humor, straight talk, advice, photos, and kindness that is always offered in such abundance. Happy, happy new year to you!

Cynthia