Photography

Best Nine Redux

Its that time of year again – time to show off your most liked Instagram pictures. I posted about this two years ago when I used an app called Best Nine, but for some reason I didn’t do it last year. Maybe because that particular app is no longer available…

There is an app called Top Nine, but that is iPhone only. Searching the Google Play Store for “top nine” or “best nine” lands you on an app called Nine Grid Photo – Grid Maker which does basically the same thing. The app has a stunningly low rating of 1.2 out of 5 with reviews complaining about everything from not working at all to returning bogus results to too many ads.

I agree with the ad thing, but it worked flawlessly for me. It also let me go back all the way to 2018, so below are the last five years of my most like Instagram posts:

Update: I just tried the Nine Grid Photo – Grid Maker again and it wouldn’t do anything but show me the two images I have posted so far this year with a heading of 2022. Maybe it warrants those low ratings. I’ve deleted the app and we’ll see what happens next year.

Best Nine

As sort of an Instagram tradition, everyone posts a collage of their nine highest liked posts from the previous year. Anyone who is anyone on IG seems to use the same app, Best Nine. I know this, because this year, unlike last, you had to wait for the results to be emailed to you.

When they did send it to me, it had the amount of likes each photo received superimposed in the image and I didn’t really care for that. Not because my largest like total was a paltry 117, which is good for me, but I wanted the images clean like 2019’s.

I went looking for a different, less popular, and lower rates app to use that might let me those clean images I so desired. I found one called Best 91 that let me get close to what I wanted. The grid was fine, but I needed to edit the total stats off the bottom to make the image square. As a bonus, this app let me also create my best Nine for the previous two other years as well. Below, from left to right, 2018, 2019 &2020.

Below are those statistics that were chopped off to make nice neat squares. In 2018 I made a total of 287 posts, the total likes on all those posts were 1.1k or an average of 3 per post. In 2019 total posts were 312, total likes were 2.2k making for an average of 7 per post. In 2020 total posts were 378 with total likes of 4.8k creating an average of 12 per post.

Galleries of Peektures

For about a dozen or so years I’ve been uploading groups of my photographs to this blog and organizing them in galleries using plugins. I first used something called NextGEN Gallery. It was everything one needed for the job. Thousands agreed and it became the most downloaded and used WordPress plugin. The developers continue to update, improve and add features to it still.

Sometime about 3 or 4 years ago it became unwieldy on a couple of fronts and people, me included, started looking for something similar, but not so advanced. The seekers were joined a programmer and a soon there was a plugin called NextCellant Gallery available. It basically froze the NextGEN gallery at the version that was just before it became something BIGGER! BETTER!

This worked for me like a charm until just recently. I’m not sure if it was a WordPress update or the plugin itself, but the galleries, while still view-able, they couldn’t be edited. The admin panel would quit displaying after a few lines and then show: Warning: Illegal string offset ‘taxonomy’ in …/wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 1874, etc.

Since just after Christmas I’ve been experimenting with other gallery plug-ins. Most were either paying apps or offered no NextGEN import function, making them unattractive or unappealing. But I think I have found something that will work, FooGallery. I’ve got it sort of where I want it, but things will probably still change randomly for while longer in my picture galleries.

Two Months To Go

Sunday is the first day of November which means that we will only have 61 days left to finish taking photos the 2015 Motoring Challenge. Right now our point total meets the goal of 150 that I set for us this year back in January, but we will probably get a bunch more.

We have all available 15 counties and all the states we are going to get at 22. But we have 5 city letters left (A, J, K, M & R) that we will more than likely get. We need two more Car Shows and a “Famous Work of Architecture” for 4 more points. These four are problematic because the only famous architecture we can come up with that is close by is Rainbow Row in Charleston and with all the leftover flooding from the big rains of a couple weeks ago it is hard to travel in the SC Lowcountry. Our easy Go-To car show is the Augusta Cars & Coffee and there are only two left and we’ll be out of town for one of them.

There are still 15 points left up for grabs in the Destination category and we’ll probably get at least 8 of them. The biggest loss is “Above 8,000 Feet” which is worth 4 points and there is nothing close to that east of the Rockies. I wonder if I could get partial credit (3.3) for getting the highest point available over on this side of the country, Mount Mitchell at 6,683 ft?

We’ll be very pleased with anywhere over 160 points for sure.

I’ve participated in several different Photo Memes on the Internet (Mirror Project, Photo Friday, Enchanted Ceiling, etc.), but here is one I don’t think I’m going to try: Nutscapes. Yikes! I wonder if I submitted one as a Sneak Peek for the Motoring Challenge would I get points or lose some…

The Emperor got a quick bath tonight to wash off any orange over-spray from when I painted the Halloween Pumpkin Mask in the corner of the garage last night.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 102