It was a busy day and I made a lot of progress on bringing all my photos into Lightroom.

In the process, I realized that I needed a bigger SSD for the photo library, so we went to Best Buy at The Plant to pick one up; I chose that location because I thought traffic would be light and parking easy (unlike, say, Santana Row) – and I was right. It was lunchtime, so we had lunch at The Halal Guys – I wasn’t terribly impressed, especially given the amount of hype that accompanied their move into the Bay Area.

Somehow, a few hundred of the files I’d exported from Photos didn’t have a creation date embedded in them, even though the information was in the .XMP sidecar file that the export created. I found a way to use Phil Harvey’s invaluable exiftool to fix the problem so that Lightroom would put the photos in the proper folder when it imported them; it’s a simple script:

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
    target="$PWD"
elif [[ $# -eq 1 ]] ; then
    target="$1"
else
    echo 'Too many arguments!' >&2
    exit 1
fi
echo processing $target
exiftool -q --ext xmp \
    -if '-e "$directory/$filename.xmp"'\
    -if 'not $CreateDate' \
    -tagsfromfile %d%f.%e.xmp \
    -@ ${SCRIPT_DIR}/xmp2exif.args \
    -GPSLatitudeRef -GPSLongitudeRef -overwrite_original -r "$target"
if [[ $? ]] ; then
    exiftool '-filecreatedate<createdate' -r "$target"
fi

So now I have the new SSD and have copied my old Lightroom library and catalog to it. I’ve imported all the photos from Photos for those days where I didn’t already have anything in Lightroom (progress!). I will have to go through the days where there’s overlap to avoid bringing photos into Lightroom that I’d already imported and didn’t want to keep (I never went back to Photos to remove those pictures), but I’m retired and have plenty of time!

I haven’t mentioned the success for today, have I? Diane finished creating a digital scrapbook from our Iceland trip last year and sent it off to be printed. I’m looking forward to seeing the physical book!

Today’s USPS Informed Delivery email included an image of the above envelope. I was, of course, curious; a quick search took me to the FTB’s California Middle Class Tax Refund page, which explained that it was NOT a scam and that there’d be a debit card in the envelope to pay us a one-time payment to help compensate Californians for the high price of gasoline this summer (and to make sure the state budget surplus stayed below the Gann Limit.

I also found out that, unlike many rebates-by-debit-card, we could actually withdraw the cash or transfer it to a bank or credit union. Transferring the money required me to set up a login at the issuing bank’s website, including answers for two secret questions – but the whole process only took a few minutes, and now the money is on its way, and I should be able to throw away the debit card in a day or so. I guess I don’t even have to cut it up, since there will never be any money in the account again!

ETA: Most people’s payments were direct-deposited; only those of us who didn’t get a 2021 refund via direct deposit got debit cards.