Whoops, missed posting in November completely. Welcome to Winter. The Holidays are almost here already. Ya know, the older you get, the faster time seems to go. Anyway…

Something I’ve always struggled with is the massive accumulation of the thousands of photos and videos we have accumulated over the past many years as or technology has evolved and grown, is the question “What do I do with this huge pile of media?” How can I utilize, sort out, and make use of them all?

Well, my new Android phone has provided me with some nice new options (Samsung Galaxy Note 9). First of all, it has 1TB of storage. That’s a TON of space, and by far the most I’ve ever seen or had on a cell phone. It’s enough to hold my entire Spotify library, ALL of our thousands of personal photos and videos we’ve taken over the years, a bunch of my favorite movies, and a ton more. Not ALL of my movie collection though, that’s obviously way beyond 1TB, but hopefully you get the idea…1 terabyte is a LOT of storage space.

It took a few days of transferring, but I managed to get all of this data on my phone pretty easily. So all of this is on my phone, now what do I do? I searched the Play Store and tried out several different photo apps and photo album widgets, eventually stumbling upon one called “Animated Photo Widget”. It’s free, but a bit limited, as usual, until you purchase the “PLUS” version to unlock the “nice” features. That was expected, so I thoroughly tested the free version and eventually sprung for the “+” version. It gives you two nice home screen widgets that are photo slideshows. One is a single photo window, then other is a 2×2 4-paned window that shows 4 photos at once. Add whichever widget you want to your home screen, size it any size you want (I’m using Nova Launcher Prime, which makes resizing a piece of cake) and then you can choose the photo change interval, frame style, and which photo folder you want to get your photos from… or even just choose “All Photos”, which randomly or sequentially displays all photos on your phone in the frame. Since I can have unlimited widgets and unlimited home screens in Nova Prime, I can create as many small or large photo frames I want on as many different home screens I want, each showing different folders of photos or each showing ALL of my photos, or any combination of options I want.

So now I’m all setup with a specific home screen I like to display alongside my work monitors all the time while I’m working. It contains a large photo frame rotating through all of my photos as well as a 5-day weather forecast, a Google Keep widget so I can start a new note each time the help desk phone rings to write down my notes from the call, a Spotify widget that randomly plays my Spotify library of songs between phone calls, my Uptime monitor, a memory and storage monitor widget, and my current network status widget. This is everything I usually like to keep updated on at-a-glance while working, so it’s perfect for me. I get to see all of our photos from over the years, randomly, giving me nice flashbacks, while playing my favorite music and letting me know the current weather outside, since we’re in the basement of the hospital with no windows to see the outside world.

Having my entire library downloaded is a also a big thing because I can play my music freely without disrupting the network by constantly streaming. Sure, I’m only on our Guest network on my phone, but I still don’t want to eat up any amount of what precious little bandwidth that chunk of our network is provided when a hospital patient might want to use it for something important to them.

I must say though, this is the best experience I’ve ever had with a smartphone overall. With the previous two phones I had (Google Pixel and Pixel 2XL) I had a lot of freeze-up and slow-down issues almost daily, usually requiring a reboot of the phone before things improved. I have had none of those issues with the Note 9. I haven’t been forced to reboot it at all, though I have rebooted, knowing a once-a-week restart, at my convenience, is probably for the best with any smartphone, and I have had two system updates install already, which also required a reboot. But all that is normal, so I must say, I am very happy with this phone, although it does have a high price tag. At this point though, I think it’s worth it. In this case, I think the phrase “you get what you pay for” is pretty on-point.