This will be a quick post (I hope).

Here’s the deal . . . I’m nearing my storage limit for my WordPress plan. Mind you, I still have enough for probably more than a year of posts (depending on how nuts I go with photos), but at some point, I’d be forced to either delete some stuff or upgrade to the more expensive plan (for which I currently have no use).

But, I found an advantage with blocks. I’m still playing with them, but here’s the thing . . . my workflow goes something like this: after inserting resized photos here, I upload the full-size photos in SmugMug. I then link the SmugMug gallery back here, and maybe two people visit it. The same two people are also the only ones who might click on the photos in the blog post to see the larger size.

Now, I can kill . . . er . . . show two birds with one photo. Well, it’s the same bird, but work with me here.

The above photo is embedded from a gallery on SmugMug, and it’s not using up any of my WordPress storage. Furthermore . . .

If you click on it, will open (in a new tab) filling the entire tab window . . . and, you’ll be in SmugMug!

The only downside is that, once you click on a photo, if you wanted to ignore the blog post (if, for instance, you don’t like my clever writing), you can just scroll through the SmugMug gallery. But, since I give people that choice at the beginning of most posts, it’s not a big deal.

I’d appreciate it if regular readers do what they usually do and then comment on what they like or don’t like about this new format. Really, it should be transparent to the majority of readers.

I tested this on the PC, but I don’t know how it works on a tablet or phone … but if you’re using one of those, maybe you don’t care much about the photos (unless it’s a big-ass tablet).

Anyway, continuing . . .

This actually saves me a couple of clicks because I don’t have to choose the file size here in WP; the embedded file will adjust like if I would have uploaded the file to my Media Library.

I’m about to test the process for galleries . . . NOPE!

They have the choice to link images from my Google Photos account, but not SmugMug (or Flickr, or any other photo-sharing sites).

That means that I’ll probably go back to doing what I used to do, and share the photos individually and sequentially . . . like this.

I currently have three squirrels who come and raid the peanuts I throw out for them. As long as I throw some out there, they come by in a procession of grab, run off, bury the peanut, run back, repeat.

Having gone through about twelve pounds of peanuts, I’m looking to open up a peanut farm from all the plants that will be growing in my (and the neighbor’s) yard.

OK, one more thing . . . this photo.

It looks pretty good (not great) . . . but, I wanted to show what the actual photo looks like as it came out of the camera.

You see, it’s been cloudy and gray, but I want to shoot action shots, so I have a high shutter speed, high f/stop, and I let the camera work out the ISO . . . for that photo, the ISO was only 4,000 because the speed and f/stop weren’t too high.

For some photos, the ISO goes up to 32,000. But even at 4,000, there’s a fair amount of noise, which you can see in this crop of the original . . .

Here’s that same crop after running noise reduction on it …

In this case, I used DxO’s PureRAW, but I get about the same results (and often better) using Topaz DeNoise AI.

I should probably do a comparison one of these days . . . but, really, often the quality of each depends on the photos. Sometimes one is better than the other, and sometimes it’s the other way around.

By the way, I have a lot of bird and squirrel photos to share … when I find the time.

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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Note 2: it’s perfectly OK to share a link that points back here.

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