So here I am in October 2023 still running up against obstacles and frustrations.

I now have a new bigger database of images to work with after the 2022 – 2023 facial eczema season here in N.Z. It was a wet summer and autumn which tested our dairy farmers. Resiliency is a word that politicians throw around to describe the economy or our farmers. They have no idea what it means. Imagine weeks of persistent rain interfering with planting crops. They replant and it starts raining heavily again. So poor yields of maize silage to take the cows through the autumn and winter.

Anyhoo. I was thinking my latest project would be easier and go faster given that I’ve gone through the process of building an image classification model using Tensor Flow in a Google Colab Notebook before. Well it hasn’t. But I have learnt new things and found easier ways to do stuff.

Like a free bit of software called “Bulk Rename Utility”. It’s a brilliant thing you can download for free. I renamed all the Snapshot images my microscope created and renamed them. So a “Snapshot_20230427_7.JPG” image can be transformed into “202304277.jpg” in one easy step! Brilliant!!

The other tip I would tell my younger self is to upload the big zip file with all the images using “drive.google.com” not try and do it in my Colab Notebook. All I did was drag and drop the file while I was in my drive.google.com P Chartarum Vision Folder. Easy peasy and it only took 5 minutes.

I thought that I was on a roll until I came to comparing how many actual images I have and the filenames I created from my label.csv file. I have one too many AGAIN. Tried a few things that I discovered last time. An no luck.

So here I am again. I hear Marie Forleo whisper in my ear. EVERYTHING IS FIGUREOUTABLE. I’ll leave it for a day or so and see what bubbles up..