What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Two things:

I watched the Easy Album video - it is a GREAT way to teach how to use the program - I succeeded in creating a page and hope to use it more in the future. It is a very useful tutorial.

Second, I have tried to use the "tutorial" for uploading photos. By contrast, it is not very useful (or I am just stupid about how these things work). I have seemingly done everything the tutorial advises on at least five (or more) occasions. But I have never been able to figure out where the optimizer is saving my uploads. So it hasn't helped.

If there is someone (there are obviously many on here with all the great photos and scans I see) who really understands how to upload photos, I recommend a tutorial similar to the Easy Album one with clear narration and examples of how the upload works.

I love this site, want to continue to use it, but am always asked to show examples of the material to which I have been referring. I can't because I am stuck on how to get the images under KB. I have tried, as I mentioned, to use the tutorial provided here, but for me it hasn't helped. Thanks for listening to me.

Bobby - as Mr Technostupid, I just open my scan in Microsoft Office, crop it and resize it to around 700 x 600, save it and then upload.

Click the following

Reply to topic
Upload Image
Choose file
Open
"Image too large"
Free Image Optimiser
Click to open file picker
Click on your scan /image
Open
Adjust "width" or 'Image quality" until image Kb is GREEN
save image
Image will have Green/white DOWN ARROW
click that
Your image will be saved in your default folder with "scf,opt" suffix
Upload that image !

Sounds involved, but takes seconds when you practice.

I use a shareware program called Irfanview, which allows you to set the file size before saving.

I'm processing recent purchases from an APS sales circuit for classic-era British Commonwealth stamps. Filling some holes in my album for quite a few countries.

Some highlights:
Ceylon Queen Victoria surcharged stamps (Scott 143, 145, 150, 151)
Cook Islands mint 1937 Coronation issue (Scott 109-111)
Gibraltar Queen Victoria definitive with Tangier postmark (Scott 29)
Great Britain Downey Heads (Scott 151, 152, 157)
Great Britain mint KGVI definitives (Scott 258-263)
G.B. Offices in China with readable postmarks from Shanghai and Swatow (Scott 6, 8)
G.B. Offices in the Turkish Empire with readable postmarks from Constantinople and Salonica (Scott 39, 10)
Hong Kong Queen Victoria definitive with Shanghai postmark (Scott 37)
Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika used 1937 Coronation issue (Scott 60-62)
New South Wales Queen Victoria definitives with inverted watermarks (Scott 57, 65b)
North Borneo definitives with remainder cancels (Scott 66, 67, 111, 123)

I'm in the process of incorporating these and others not mentioned into my albums.

Robert

Just finished scanning 1,094 First day, event, inauguration and trip covers. Renamed, resized and filed away. It took the better part of a week but I gott'em done. I'd say I feel like I gave birth to an elephant. Speaking of which, I might just treat myself to a trip to Dairy Queen.

I finished up mounting all my Fujeira issues. Steiner has spaces for all I had that go out to 1972. Steiner follows Michel after 1967 where Scott stops.

I did have to create 2 pages since Steiner only had a space for sheets of 20.

What !!
My goodness, I had no idea Steiner had Fujeira
I have 531 Fujeira
Time to get mounting

How does Steiner do that ! Amazing.

This morning I finally started reading Fundamentals of Philately, which I bought a couple years ago but never got around to starting because the 800 pages intimidated me I guess. But I know it's full of stuff that I should know, but don't, so now that I've recently retired and have the time, I'm diving in.

Last week I had continued with Hungary and have almost 500 mounted now, but I ran out of mounts! I ordered another 20 packs of mounts and they arrived yesterday! In the meantime, I started looking at the new additions to my U.S. collection and started mounting a subset of plate blocks for the Presidential Issue of 1938 and I created special pages for blocks of 4, vertical and horizontal pairs, and singles of other series, e.g. the 1922 Issue and the Washington Bicentennial Issue of 1932. For these I created my own pages where I can mount between 2 and 4 sets of stamps per page (I'll post a scan at some point). I figure it is better to mount them than store in glassines. They are used and not worth much, but the pages are nice to look at. I had done the same some time ago for dozens of German stamps. I also created pages for coil line pairs from several different series. It was nice to see that I have a decent #723 line pair and a complete set from the Presidential Issue of 1938. I have some older pairs, triples, and blocks (4 or more) of the Washington and Franklin stamps, but I haven't finished identifying them yet.

I like your approach Rod. I will work at it, but my point is that someone did an excellent tutorial on Album Easy that finally got me able to understand that and a wonderful program that is.

If I ever figure out how to scan and upload images for this site, I may try to record a similar tutorial.

Bobby T

Printed out some album pages for Australia and slapped some stamps into it. Spent the rest of the day fighting with my wife's color printer. I was trying to print some catchets for the upcoming Espresso drink USPS is releasing in April (I normally only make Maxi cards, so this was an expensive experiment). I also mailed some postcards for postcrossing and postcardunited

Cut and mounted 976 U.S. stamps since my last post here. Created 25 or so more pages for my blocks, pairs, and singles. Took me longer than expected because I made a typo (senior moment) and propagated that to a couple other pages. I also decided to redesign the pages after printing them out the first time. Much happier with how they look. Will be getting back to working on Hungary tomorrow.

Add: And I picked up 12 more 1.5 inch binders since I was running out of room. Each binder holds ~100 new pages. These should last me a while.

I have been going through my Straits Settlement collection to check watermarks with my Sherlock watermark detector. Overall, it has helped increased confidence on identification given it provides unlimited dwell time. The one aspect I see is that hinge remnants prevent the tool from getting the entire stamp flat so the press works properly.

I did find several misidentified ones plus stamps in the wrong place (not related to watermarks).

I want one of those, but I must be a grinch,
I cannot seem to open my wallet at those prices.