Pictures and Disk Usage

I got a new digital camera for my birthday.  After asking friends for recommendations and reading DP Review, I settled on a Canon PowerShot SD 790 IS.  It's a cute little camera and seems to take good pictures.  Of course, after using the same super-simple Kodak EasyShare since 2002, I was used to those images; the images from the new camera look so much better. (Be warned, I've linked the original size images for these examples, so they're huge.)

I was mostly interested in taking close-ups of things: flowers, sewing, baking, etc. Since this new camera has actual zoom settings (macro-focus mode, I think it's called), I can actually focus on things close up and the pictures come out well. Here are some closeups for examples.

This camera also has a bunch of fun image modes you can shoot in. Willie and I had fun with the color filter mode, as seen below.

Along with the new camera, I got a few more toys, one of which was iLife '09. When I was installing iLife, it showed me my disks and how much space was left on them. I have a 250GB drive and I only had about 8GB free. That's really dismal, especially since I knew I had backups of backups inside of other backups. After spending a while sorting through those files, which was strangely cathartic, I still had only freed up about 5GB. WTF? Where was all my space going?

Willie pointed me to Disk Inventory X. This is a great program for someone who's as visually oriented as I am. It was way easier for me to scan the big picture of squares and look for big blocks of color than it would be to look at a list showing size in GB or MB.

It turned out most of the space was taken up by .aiff files I'd made when I ripped some audio tapes years ago (yes, I know that sounds like crap, and no, I can't really tell the difference). Once I got rid of those, the next big culprits were .tiff files from my scanner. I compressed those and did a bunch more cleanup. All in all, I freed up close to 100GB. Woo hoo! Free disk space!

Now I'm looking forward to taking lots of pictures of my creations!