Unfortunately, I already had pretty much everything I needed on the base installation; I had originally installed it purely to have a system I could hook up my parallel printer to. It already supports remote desktop to systems within your local network, as well as remote access to files on the server via secured login. Heck, it even provides dynamic DNS service, complete with chained certificates for secured access. Nice, huh?

I figure most people out there do NOT have WHS installed. Probably have no need for it. So, why don’t you let me know what would make you want a Windows Home Server? If you have one, what feature do you wish it had? If you could have your own personal secured web server, what do you really wish you could do on it?

If you want a good offline story, you’re pretty much stuck with DAM. There are a variety, and I randomly started with Expression Media — I got an excellent deal on it, so it made sense. I imported my pictures in version 1, and was frustrated when all the tags I had so painfully created in Windows Photo Gallery on XP, and then Vista, and then later Windows Live Photo Gallery, weren’t imported. SO I WROTE A SCRIPT. Expression Media, while not having the nicest developer experience, still provides a script-friendly API.
Set app = CreateObject("ExpressionMedia.Application")
Set tagx = CreateObject("XMPTagExtractor.TagExtractor")
For Each mediaItem In app.ActiveCatalog.Selection
tags = tagx.GetTags(mediaItem.Path)
mediaItem.Annotations.Keywords = Left(tags, Len(tags) - 1)
Next
Admittedly, I had to write a COM wrapper for the Vista-provided XMP library, but still. I was able to extract my information, and get it into Expression Media.

In the last week, while at work, I’ve gone through and added hierarchical keywords to almost all of my 25,000 files. The depth varies — in some pictures, I have every person tagged appropriately. In others, well, I identify where the picture was taken. Take what you can get. For the first time, however, I feel like I’m catching up with my four-year-old backlog. I still have to back everything up, but I have most of the pictures adequately keyworded such that I can find them again.

There are elements I really like about what I’ve figured out in Expression Media 2. I do appreciate that I filed a bug on my keywords not being imported, and it turned out that they didn’t handle one of Windows XP Photo Gallery’s tag mechanisms — and should be fixed in the next service pack. I can now round trip all my keywords in and out of the target files. I’ll be moving my pictures off my hard drive shortly, and look forward to using the fast sorting mechanisms to identify pictures I want to spend more time on.

However, there are a couple of items that I wish were just a bit more accessible — any photo editing needs to be done elsewhere. There are tools present, but it’s not worth my time to try to figure out how to use them, so I just load the pictures externally. The most painful place where this is necessary is in rotating photos. I still need to find a good workflow to correct pictures I didn’t take in a default landscape orientation.

Adobe Lightroom handles that portion of the task far better than Expression Media 2 does — all the editing tools are immediately available. Unfortunately, it’s slow as hell and a memory hog, but I’ll go into that on another occasion.

I went to the Windows Update in Control Panel, and saw I had two updates to install. There was one update for my ATI graphics card, and one for my LCD monitor. I chose to install them, figuring I could restart after finishing the install. So I updated both my LCD driver, and my graphics drivers.

My screen defaulted back to an old color and resolution, then switched back to my normal configuration. All of this happened automatically. WITHOUT RESTARTING.

Read that again people: my video card drivers were replaced while the system was still running.

I’m installing Vista as soon as I can.