You not only need to take the pictures, you need to keep the pictures.
I am very bothered with myself that I only have 1 picture of SGRR 1, and none of the Dream House layout. SGRR 3 can be seen in the background of many family snapshots, but I have no pictures that just show the layout. SGRR 4 has a couple of bad pictures in the old house, but none after it was moved and expanded. All the pictures taken of layout 5 were digital, and they were lost in a hard drive failure.
HOLD ON TO YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS!
-Kevin
Kevin,
Yes that is true that you need to hold onto the photos. On the flip, I have about half a terabyte of photos of the current layout (I don’t delete the bad ones - creating a bit of a filing nightmare at times).
Guy
Sheldon,
I am always torn between building something and documenting building it. I find that sometimes its better to plow ahead and get it done rather than stopping to take pictures. Having said that, I do take lots of pictures (see above). Looking forward to seeing some pics of your progress.
Guy
AH, a wide open empty basement. I have utilities at one corner, laundry at the diagonally opposite corner, and a garage sucking up another 500 sq ft of potential basement. No way I can do what I want in a snigle deck.
As for all the digital pictures, this is why before a decent backup, I kept them on my own computer PLUS copied them to a server. Which back in those days was backed up on tape - I have no tape drive but I have a few of the old tapes still. These days, I copy them to my server which stores them on at least 2 different physical drives inside, plus the whole server is backed up to a cloud backup. Layout and construction pictures from the past couple of layouts also happen to live on the server with my web host, but that’s only because I haven’t come close to using all my storage space yet. Eventually I’ll have to prune stuff there, but the originals are still on my server and in the cloud backup.
I’m more annoyed at the old photos that got lost in one of many moves, long before it was practical to scan them into digital form, so I no longer have any pictures of the layouts we used to put up in the family room over the holidays each year.
–Randy
Yes, wide open basement. The limited utilities are all in one corner, boiler, water heater, well pump. And I can easily fit my workbench and a seperate waterfront ISL in that area.
Oops, I had not even mentioned the waterfront ISL until now.
The old layout had a branch to a waterfront scene, the new layout geography is a little father west, barely crossing one navigable river.
So to do the waterfront thing, I decided on a seperate ISL about 2’ x 12’.
Sheldon
I have over 800 pictures of the experimental layout segment I built. More than 100 times what I have of my actual layouts.
So sad.
-Kevin