The Bagpipe Society

The Bagpipe Society video archive

For a little while The Society has had this idea of collating all the member videos that are made at the Blowout, and other events, into one big resource for posterity’s sake. As part of that I rather assumed that no doubt individual members take the time to ensure their hard work travelling to and recording events, and they take an equal amount of care in ensuring they have multiples copies in the event of a computer failure? No, I didn’t either until I had a catastrophic failure in what, at the time, passed for technology…

Its reasonably easy these days to set up some sort of online backup provided you have no worries about the amount of data your internet connection allows. If you do have concerns over internet data and costs, even an external hard drive is better than nothing – keep your media on your computer, and copy over to you external drive ‘periodically’(where ‘periodically’ depends on how much uncopied stuff you are prepared to lose just supposing something goes wrong…!). Ask your local computer store about external drives.

Online storage is provided by big organisations who either charge for it, charge for it if you want a lot, or bundle it up with some other service like your internet connection. I have a number of online storage areas (if you want to be trendy, you can refer to this as ‘in the cloud’ or ‘cloud storage’. In fact, I think I will). Look up these cloud providers online:-

Dropbox, a fairly straightforward file storage;
Amazon, if you subscribe to Amazon prime you already have this;
Microsoft OneDrive, if you have a Hotmail account you have this;
GoogleDrive, a Gmail account will get you some storage here;
Snapfish, a photo and video storage area run by HP provided primarily to sell you photo prints and merchandise;
Flickr, photos and videos sharing.

I’m sure there are others, have a look and see what you think.

The Bagpipe Society has storage on GoogleDrive free with their email account bagpipesociety@gmail.com. I have also set up a DropBox account in the name of the Bagpipe Society, taking advantage of the smaller size for free. The Bagpipe Society website resides on storage provided by Amazon, though this is Amazon’s professional offering without the simple interface of the above list of cloud providers.

So, all your photos, videos, and sound recordings are safe in the cloud, or at least duplicated onto an external hard drive beside your computer. What about the Society Archive? The Archive needs to, as a minimum, store stuff safely for a long time. As a nice-to-have it should be easy to manage, cost effective, and easily accessible by members. In these embryonic days of the Archive, without any dedicated system to hold it, I have decided to make use of commercial offerings. They are cheap, available, and reliable. Although the Society’s YouTube and Facebook accounts are available for members to post freely and easily to, their social networking aspects make them unsuitable to fulfil the ‘permanent’ requirement.

At the Blowout 2015, several members recommended Vimeo as a video resource. So the Bagpipe Society has a presence there now. For those who are reluctant to sign up for yet another online thing, look away now - I’ll come back to you in a bit! Hop onto http://www.vimeo.com and register yourself an account. This is quite painless and should you need help, the good folks at Vimeo will be more than happy to give you a hand.

Once you have access to your account, email bagpipesociety@gmail.com so I can invite you to join the private Bagpipe Society group. The group is not viewable by the public because some artists who appear giving, workshops for example, do not want these videos appearing in the public domain. We are using Vimeo purely for a members’ archive, sharing videos can be done elsewhere.

The email invitation will look something like:

Just click on the link in the email and you’re in! You can return to the Group at any time from your Vimeo homepage, by clicking on your profile and selecting Collections:-

So now all you have to do is upload your videos (the free account has a limitation of 500Mb / week), and join the party! There’s a big Upload button in the top right of your screen. Click on that, follow the instructions, and when the video is in Vimeo, go to Video Settings (the little cogwheel on the video) select Collection and check Bagpipe Society.

And that’s all there is to it!

Now, for those of you who’d rather not sign up to Vimeo (just think what you’re missing!), I think the best idea is to email BagpipeSociety@gmail.com with a description of the videos you have, and we can arrange a way (e.g. posting a cd, copying to some online storage, sending me the memory card, etc.) for me to get the video and can upload it for you. I’m looking forward to receiving all your videos!