You didn't ask, but...: too many tips and tricks: scanning and COMC

Having now run this blog for something like a year and a half (much less than the vast majority of you) I've picked up a few tricks that I wanted to share with all of you, even if you didn't ask, because not only do I think a few of you will find them helpful, but I hope doing this will inspire you guys to either leave comments with extremely useful stuff you've found or even write up your own posts.  I'm 100% positive many of us who haven't been doing this for very long can benefit from your experience and personal skill sets.

The last time I did something like this, I dug into my IT skills toolbox to explain a few different methods of backing up files because of a couple bloggers who had some issues with lost files.  Lots of us keep invaluable stuff like PC scans and inventory or wantlists on our computers, so I thought that might be relevant to some of you, and thanks to my day job it was something I could bring to you.

Today I'm going to be more card specific and discuss a few items relating to two main topics with which I have a large amount of experience:  scanning/posting images of your collections, and getting the most out of CheckOutMyCards.  Before I get to those, I'd like to reiterate that I'd love to get your comments on the tips I'm posting here (because I'm sure I'll only scratch the surface) and anything else you might suggest, though I also encourage you to share your wisdom in your own posts as well.  Now then, on with the knowledge:

Scanning and posting cards:
Since I'm big into posting all of my various PCs, I do a lot of scanning/cropping/optimizing/uploading, and here's a couple of tips I've noticed:

1.  Crop your photos:

This is something I see a lot more when it comes to forums and eBay, but no matter where I see it, it annoys me:  if you're going to post an image of a single card or even a few, crop it!  Tell me, what looks better?:

This?

Or this?

It takes a little longer, but it really is worth it.  For my own use, I generally go with Microsoft Office's Photo Manager, which lets me crop, rotate and "optimize" scans reasonably quickly, but if you don't want to throw down the cash for Office, MSPaint can handle basic cropping, or you can upgrade to something like Paint.net or the GIMP, which are totally free.

2.  Running out of space in your Picasa Web Album/Photobucket, or just sick of your scans taking up so much space?Depending on the quality at which you scan or take pictures, the files can get fairly large.  Also, there are times when you might just want to quickly resize a bunch of files for some other reason.  This leads to one of my absolute favorite Windows add-ons, the Windows Image Resizer tool.  With it, you can browse to your folder of photos, select whichever ones you want, right click them and choose to resize them:

...and then select from a few different presets or choose a custom resolution:

The biggest caveat is that you might accidentally resize the original version of that image (by checking that last box) and not mean to.  You also don't want to be resizing the same image multiple times as the quality will degrade.  I recommend this as a speedy way to get image files set to a resolution that will fit within Blogger's confines (I use the 1920x1080 most of the time) while also lowering the overall file size of each picture in the event that a high scan quality gives it an enormous resolution.  Try it and see what you think!

Getting the most out of COMC:

I'll spare you the common sense items like bundling up cards into offers to get better prices, but I have discovered a few cool features:

1.  Ads:
I'll be honest--I'd been using COMC for quite a while before I realized what the classified ads are all about, but now I've learned to check them every day!  I've found two main reasons to be interested:  port sales and promotions/auto-accepts.

A port sale, if you didn't know, is where a seller puts his entire COMC portfolio up for sale to whomever makes the best offer.  The minimum bid is either 10% of the book value or 20% of the seller's total asking price for the individual cards, though you'll generally need to offer a bit more; fortunately, some sellers think to throw out an "OBO" price to get you started.  This is a potentially good way to build up a nice sized port to try to flip some stuff, or if you're really lucky, buy up a bunch of stuff for your PC.

Even more useful in my opinion is the promotion/auto-accept ad.  In this type of classified, the seller states that some or all of their port's cards can be had for up to 50% off, usually with a specific percentage.  Certain members with upgraded memberships can automatically have COMC accept offers for them, but regular users must monitor all incoming offers and manually approve them, so keep that in mind.  This is simply an outstanding way to pick up some great PC cards.  Often I have quite a few cards I'm eyeballing, and once I find a seller I really like who has a bunch of stuff, I scan through their whole port for all of my PC players and then patiently wait to see if they offer a port sale.  That tends to be the case with many of the larger sellers, such as SwagCards, one of my favorites.  Seriously, what's better than picking up a ton of awesome cards for 1/2 off already fairly low prices (usually)?  You suckers can throw down your $20 on a blaster of 2012 Topps SameOldCrap--I'll take $80-$100 worth of PC hits any day!

Besides buying, keep in mind you can use these ads yourself, and for a fairly cheap cost at that:  $2 for the approval fee, then $1 per day you want your ad(s) listed.  You need to make sure to get them in before the weekend as they're only approved at the beginning and end of each business day, but can schedule them however you'd like.  If you've got a ton of stuff on COMC just sitting there unsold and want to cash out or not have to worry about paying storage fees, consider an auto-accept or port sale.

2.  Amazon:
Here's another feature everyone might not be aware of:  you can allow your COMC cards to be sold through Amazon.  You do take a 20% ding on the price to cover fees, so it's not for everyone, but it at least potentially gets more eyes on your items.  To activate the feature, go to your COMC dashboard, then "My Profile and Options."

Now click the radio button next to "Yes..." under the "Synch with Amazon" option, keeping in mind the notices below the option.

I enabled this a few days ago and haven't had any bites yet, but it's a free and easy way to try to bring in a few more sales.

3.  Watch list:You may notice a trend here, but I definitely wasn't aware of this until recently:  you can "watch" any cards you like on COMC in an easy-to-access list.  It's not quite as robust as, say, eBay's, but it can still be pretty useful.  At a glance you can see if a card's asking price fits within your budget or even if it's been sold.

To add any card to your list, search for it, then hover your mouse over it, like you would if you wanted to get the html code to borrow the image for your blog.

Then just click the "Watch this item" link.  Once you've added some cards, you can get to the list through your dashboard:

 and then see exactly what you're watching, 10 cards at a time:

This is much more useful than my previous method for myself:  using my Singles and players wantlist image links to open each card up one at a time.  Unfortunately this watch list currently doesn't display the seller's ID so you could sort by that, but I still consider it immensely useful.

That's all I have for this time, but I feel like I covered a lot.  Please shoot me some comments telling me what you thought, if any of this was useful, if you have any scanning or COMC tips of your own, or if there's anything you'd like me to cover in the future.

You didn't ask, but...: backing up your stuff

Has the above ever happened to you?  Probably not, unless you're prone to staging videos where you blow up your computer on purpose.  But you've probably had a computer take a dump on you (or know someone who has) and know how harrowing it is, worrying about recovering all your important stuff.  If you haven't, you're either extremely lucky or don't need to be reading this post, which somewhat relates to cards.

Because of a couple incidents I've heard about this year, most recently Dimwit's unfortunate power surge (which may or may not have looked like the above, as pieces of any potential witness are still making their way back to the ground), which fortunately had a fairly happy ending, I wanted to take a minute to make use of my experiences from my day job to try to help other bloggers prevent this kind of thing from happening to them (hopefully in the least condescending, least douchey way possible).  So, to begin:  you probably have a lot of stuff on your computer--pictures, music, videos, important documents, that kind of thing.  Please stop reading this post for a moment and

BACK YOUR STUFF UP!  FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY BACK IT UP OR YOU WILL LOSE IT AND ROBOTS WILL COME TO STEAL YOUR PRESCRIPTIONS!

With that humorous bit out of the way, I want to stress that it's extremely easy to lose your files, and it can be very, very costly trying to recover them.  I'm talking of thousands of times the cost of keeping them backed up.

IT'S MY MONEY AND I NEED IT FOR CARDS!

I have a lot of the aforementioned stuff on my main desktop, and I'm most interested in preserving my buttload of music and my Kardashian-assload of pictures.  Where that relates to you with respect to this here blog is that you probably have a lot of scans sitting on your hard drive, just waiting to get lost because a squirrel decided to dine on some grade A power line.  However, my advice applies to anything you need to keep.  I mainly want to boil this down to a few key points (and keep in mind, this is by no means a comprehensive guide):

1.  Back stuff up in multiple places whenever possible.  Yes, it means more work for you and sometimes you have to worry about having differing copies of the same stuff, but it's a good way of covering your ass.  I've seen a good number of external hard drives die, USB keys go missing, and laptops get stolen, so having only one backup is not really good enough.

2.  Backing up stuff is probably cheaper than you think.  Granted, if you're using physical media like internal/external hard drives or USB keys or paying for premium online services, there are some costs involved, but generally you have some very cheap, and often free, options:

	Pros	Cons
External hard drives:  This is the route to go with if your biggest concern is large capacity, so start here for your whole music and picture collections and videos.  If you don't go the retail route, first of all, congratulations for being smart, and second, go with Newegg or I'll shun you so fast you'll think I'm Dwight Schrute.	·         Fairly portable ·         Large capacity for the money ·         Should work on just about any computer you connect them to	·         Expensive compared to other options ·         Sometimes require carrying several cables (including power) ·         Only one copy ·         Physical media can break down over time
USB keys:  These guys are physically much smaller than hard drives, but of course they don’t hold as much either, plus they’re easier to lose because of that (you know you’ve put one through the laundry before, admit it).  Still, they’re fairly cheap and are good for backing up small collections of stuff and for use as a secondary backup.   Plus, you probably got one in your cereal box this morning—they’re all over the place.	·         Pretty cheap ·         Very portable ·         Should work on just about any computer you connect them to ·         Ubiquitous	·         Not as much capacity ·         Very easy to lose ·         Can still wear out over time (although they generally last for a very, very long time) ·         Did I mention they’re easy to lose?
Dropbox:  (I’m not going into SugarSync, which I’ve also heard good things about, because I haven’t personally used it, but it’s a reasonable option)  If you haven’t heard of DropBox, it’s basically your best online backup solution.  The way it works is that you install the program on each of your computers, and it creates a folder on your hard drive.  Anything you put in that folder gets synced over the internet to every other computer on which you’ve installed DropBox.  Also, you can get to your files from any computer through a web page (which isn’t as pretty but works well in a pinch).	·         Basic version is free ·         Free version gives you 2GB—plenty for saving your most important stuff, but you can buy more ·         Possible to share individual files/folders to anybody ·         Accessible from anywhere you can get internet, even if you’re not on your own machine, even works with your phone ·         Save whatever types of stuff you want ·         When used correctly, essentially automatically backs up your stuff ·         Nothing physical to blow up or lose	·         If you want more space you’ll have to pay ·         Requires internet access if you want everything synced ·         Your data is sitting somewhere else and could disappear if something happens to the company (robots tired of stealing prescriptions target cloud computing?)
Picasa Web Albums:  Picasa is a free Google program that manages your pictures.  You can sort them, tag them, edit them, that kind of thing.  You can also set it up to automatically upload your pictures to albums on the internet, which means they’re pretty much backed up.	·         Automatically back up pictures ·         Again, nothing physical to lose ·         Access pictures from anywhere ·         Helps manage large collections of pictures ·         Works very well with BlogSpot ·         If you need more space than the large amount Google gives you, you can buy more	·         Requires a network connection for syncing ·         Pictures only

3.  My recommendations:  I take a three-pronged approach.

• Hard drives:  My main backups include all my major media and documents.  This includes about 20 GB worth of MP3s, tons of pictures, some DVD rips (of my own movies that I legally bought, MPAA) and a good accumulation of years of documents.  I use Microsoft's SyncToy (free) to schedule backups from my desktop's hard drive to another internal hard drive that's connected via a SATA hard drive dock (like-a so, which is cheap as hell) so it's easy to pop other drives in and out, which is exactly what I do.  Remember how I said one backup wasn't enough?
  I do frequent backups to one drive, then maybe once or twice a month do a backup to another drive that I store outside of my house, so it's safe in case the MPAA comes to burn down my house while taking a break from stealing children's candy and kicking puppies (because I said the words "Steelers" and "movie" in the same sentence and it came out to "I steal movies on a regular basis for fun and profit" when they tapped my phone).
  With SyncToy all you do is create pairs of folders (one on each drive) and then tell it how you want them to be synced, which is something that can be scheduled (or you can manually do it by clicking one button).
  This is a lot of data and I think this is a great way of backing it up, however, should you prefer the USB hard drive route, that's fine, but I still recommend two of them.
• DropBox:  I've stuck with the free version because I'm cheap, so I don't have space to put every single thing on here.  Still, I store all of my important documents and some pictures, and I still have space leftover to use for sharing pictures, music and movies out to my other computers (such as at work) or my friends.  That's my recommendation:  configure DropBox to store its folder on your local hard drive in a place you know you'll use, then work directly from that folder so you don't have to manually back stuff up.  The next time you log in to one of your other computers where you've installed DropBox, it'll grab all your changes until its in sync too.  
• Picasa/Picasa Web Albums:  I wasn't using these when I first started my blog and now I'm kind of kicking myself for not knowing about the latter.  Here's my process when I throw scans up on my blog, which sounds kind of complicated but isn't too difficult and makes backups brainless:
• Scan/edit/save pictures onto hard drive
• Open Picasa, which is already monitoring all my picture folders so they get imported whenever I open it
• Title and tag all pictures, which means they're easier to search for in Picasa and online
• Once they're in Picasa, they automatically upload to my Web Albums (which I configured in the application; they don't do this by default, so don't worry about other people seeing...you know...THOSE pictures).  You can then make them public or private, which is nice
• Whenever I need to throw any of those pictures into a post, I use the picture button, then choose "From Picasa Web Albums" and grab whatever I need
• If I want to use a picture that's not in one of my albums but that I previously used in a different post, I can use the "From this blog" option
• I can also link directly to a picture in one of my albums instead of inserting it in the post

          So here you can see how all of my blog-related pictures are always accessible and backed-up.  That,  plus it's really easy to throw pics onto a blog post at a moment's notice.

I hope that was informative (and non-douchey) for at least some of you and that y'all start backing up your stuff if you weren't before; while your blog stuff isn't life or death (and your other personal data and media aren't either) it can be really stressful and costly trying to get it back, if it's even possible at all, and if it isn't, you'll lose a ton of time trying to recreate or reacquire everything you can even remotely remember you had.  Please feel free to send questions about this (or other computer troubleshooting-type things) my way and I'll be happy to try to help.

Update:  I'm bumping this up from Ryan's comment because it has some great additional information relevant to the above stuff:

You mention Picasa for photos. I do a similar thing, uploading them as I scan them and then drawing from the scans as I write the posts. I just don't do the label thing, and I just use the web interface. I used to use the software and will probably go back to it whenever I finally start tagging all my photos.

Google allows 1GB for photos with Picasa, and due to my high-quality scan-intensive posts, I'm 75% full already. But an additional 20GB is something like $5 per year.

I use Google Docs for my card lists, partly for backup purposes, and partly because of ease-of-access. But Google Docs also accepts photos and videos. You get an additional 1GB for Google Docs, but you can purchase more space (at the same rates as above, and it can be shared between services) at the same rate. I'm very happy with Google Docs for my card files, and I did a quick video test - Google owns YouTube and the format is exactly the same. It's certainly a viable option for online storage.

I keep a small army of external hard drives to manage my files at home, and I fully agree it's very important to back up often to at least two locations, hopefully one of them not at your home. What if your house burns down or floods or someone steals your laptop? Especially if you keep track of your collection and/or belongings in digital format, having an up-to-date copy for insurance reasons is crucial.