Michael Slater: About Me

The First Two Years: Conception

It was 10 years ago last week that the idea for PhotoTablet came to me—an Internet tablet that takes care of your pictures. The day that name came to mind, I bought the domain and started writing a business plan.

Four months later, I had quit my job, had $2 million in venture funding, and was building a team.

Another four months later, we realized that the tablet idea was not going to work (as a business), and we transformed into Fotiva—a PC software company.

Within a year, we were in discussions with Adobe about selling the business to them. We had the product nearly ready to take to market in the fall of 2001, but with venture funding in a serious drought, we didn’t have a lot of options.

Two years after conception of the idea, we completed the sale of the company to Adobe. In retrospect, it seems an incredibly short period, though it didn’t feel that way at the time.

Last month, Adobe laid off the last of the original Fotiva engineering team, marking the end of an era.

My Stint at Adobe

A year after the acquisition, the software we built at Fotiva debuted as Photoshop Album. After two more years, it was rolled into Photoshop Elements as the Organizer, where it lives on today in version 8.

In my first year at Adobe, I was focused on getting Fotiva’s software turned into a shipping product. After a year in product management, I moved into engineering, managing a small research team and doing technology acquisitions.

For five years, I tried to find or create a role at Adobe that I enjoyed, and I can’t say I ever really succeeded. Although there were some great times and lots of good people, my entrepreneurial spirit and Adobe’s big-company culture did not mesh well. In the fall of 2006, I left Adobe to focus on the Web—something that I found almost impossible to do at Adobe.

Adobe and the Web

From the start, the PhotoTablet/Fotiva vision was for software and an Internet service working in conjunction to deliver the complete product. After the acquisition, however, Adobe senior management was totally disinterested in the online aspect. After pushing on this issue on and off for a few years, I eventually got support for building an online photo service. A dozen people worked on it for nine months—and then Adobe decided not to fund its rollout.

Another year later, I tried again, and once again saw projects started and then canceled before shipping anything. About the time I left three years ago, yet another online effort was underway; I left because I had no confidence in the way it was being approached. This project too ended without shipping anything.

Finally, in 2008, Adobe delivered Photoshop.com. Aside from the “third time’s a charm” aspect, I think the reason Adobe was finally able to launch a photo service was that the driving force was the creation of a Flex showcase. Unfortunately, it was too late to make much of an impact.

Adobe had plenty of engineering folks with a passion for building web services for photography, and a few products have made it to market. But the heavy-weight process and infrastructure, combined with top management that is often unsupportive of web initiatives, has kept Adobe from being a significant player in the online photo world.

Team Shifts

As part of this web initiative that began in 2006, the Organizer code base that had its roots in Fotiva’s code was transferred to a team in India for future development. What remained of the engineering team that I had built, and which Adobe acquired, was redirected to work on Photoshop.com.

In some ways, this was a great opportunity for the team, but it also meant a loss of continuity in the Organizer development. The people who conceived and built multiple versions of the product were no longer responsible for it. The results have been predictably uninspiring, though whether this is due to the transfer to India or to an overall reduction in resources is hard to tell.

I no longer use Photoshop Elements Organizer, after leading its creation and importing more than 70,000 pictures. I just doesn’t perform well enough, and Lightroom is closer to my interests. (I use iPhoto for video clips, since Lightroom frustratingly doesn’t support them, but that’s another story.)

The Annual Purge

More years than not (since 2000), Adobe has conducted an annual purge of employees toward the end of the year. The past two years, this purge has been especially deep, driven no doubt by the sagging worldwide economy.

I understand the need to realign resources when strategies change. But the frequency and vigor with which Adobe rearranges and lays off people leaves a lot of casualties. Having worked there for five or ten years, produced consistently good work, and supported the company through previous transitions is not enough to keep your job when management shuffles priorities again.

I don’t want to get into the debate about the merits of offshore development, but it is a fact that almost all of the Fotiva engineers were eventually laid off, and their work moved to India.

The Power of a Small Company

Aside from my five years at Adobe, I’ve mostly run small companies. After leaving Adobe three years ago and starting Webvanta a year later, I’ve been struck again by the incredible efficiency advantage small companies have.

Two or three people, juggling half-a-dozen roles, can get more done than a team of ten at a big company like Adobe. The absence of the innovation antibodies that are an epidemic at Adobe is a huge boost, not to mention the elimination of most meetings.

But the most important difference of all is having the people with the ideas and passion be the same people making strategic decisions.

I was not an early adopter of social media, being of twice the optimum age. But in the past few months, I’ve become much more involved with it, and I now believe it is going to be central to the growth of my business.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for many years, and found it moderately useful as a sort of distributed address book and business contact list. But its role in my life was very small, and entirely limited to business contacts.

Three years ago, I started getting invitations from friends on Facebook, which I accepted but rarely did anything with it.

About a year ago, the pace of invitations I was getting climbed, and I put some work into my profile. I connected with a bunch of high-school friends I haven’t seen in 35 years. It has been fun, but odd, to get little glimpses into the life of these folks—some of them were a big part of my growing up. The odd part is that, for the most part, these are people I never would have had any contact with if it were not for an online social network, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever see them in person.

A few months ago, I started paying more attention to Facebook, motivated more by business than personal desires. I went through my address book and invited people to connect; and I scanned the contacts of my contact to find other people I knew. In the past 20 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of people, and Facebook has proven to be an easy way to reconnect, however tenuously, to many people who I would like to stay connected with but realistically I wasn’t likely to, out in the “real world”.

With a few days of effort, I increased my Facebook friends from 25 to 250. (If only I had started 10 years ago, I would have thousands of “friends”.)

And then, of course, there’s Twitter. I’ve had an account for a couple of years, but only used it occasionally, usually at conferences. Recently I’ve gotten more involved, though I’m still not a prolific twitterer. (More on Twitter in an upcoming past.)

I’m of the wrong generation for all of this to come naturally, despite being something of an early adopter. I’m just starting to get real value, both personal and business, out of social networks, and I still have more questions than answers. Among them:

• Do I maintain separate networks of personal friends and business friends?
• Can I get myself to post frequent thoughts and updates?
• Do I use Twitter, Facebook status, and LinkedIn updates in concert, or do different things with each?
• How do I filter out the stuff I really care about?

Separating Business and Personal Networks

One thing I’m still coming to grips with is the blending of my personal and business contacts. LinkedIn is almost all business, but Facebook and Twitter are a mix (especially Facebook).

The easiest thing to do was to give up on separating my personal and business networks. That’s what I’ve done so far, though I doubt that it’s the best strategy.

The question is, do both groups of people have the same interests? For the most part, I think not. There’s also an interesting twist added by mixing the two groups up, but ultimately I think I’ll separate out my family and close friends network, in one way or another.

Dealing with the Flood

One I had hundreds of contacts, and the social network news feeds became prominent, the next challenge has been dealing with the flood of status updates, tweets, and so forth. To read all of it, even without responding to anything, seems like it would take hours every day.

My solution, so far, has been to simply dip in an out when the mood strikes me. I’m sure I’m missing all sorts of interesting stuff, but I haven’t wanted to devote the time to sorting through all the cruft to get to the nuggets. Some kind of filtering seems like the only real solution.

The Instinct to Communicate

It takes a lot of time and energy to make effective (or even ineffective!) use of all these social networks, and in the early days of using them the energy in is a lot higher than the value coming out. I have no doubt about the long-term value, but it’s still hard to spend the time it takes to keep up with even one of my online social networks.

I’ve been blogging for three years and have never sustained anything like the frequency of posting that I aspire to. I have all sorts of articles running around in my head—the legacy, perhaps of a dozen years writing newsletters and magazine columns. But they take time to commit to bits. What you’re reading now is one that’s been rolling around inside for a couple of months and finally made it out, sitting in a cafe in Santa Rosa while I wait to pick up my daughter from ice skating.

I’d like to get up to at least one blog post a week. And to several tweets a day. It takes a big shift in mindset, though, to communicate this frequently and proactively—it’s an opportunity that didn’t exit prior to online social networks. We’ll see if I get there.

My Success Story

The biggest chunk of business value that I’ve ever gotten from these networks occurred a few weeks ago, when I was looking for a couple dozen web designers who I could interview and get feedback on our new product. I’d exhausted my direct network, and the step to cold calling is a big one.

So I used a LinkedIn question, in addition to a Facebook status update and a Tweet, and with a few days I had introductions to a few dozen people. Because these were introductions, and not cold calls, even though I had no prior direct contact with these people more than half of them have spent an hour with me in a web-based demo and phone discussion.

These networks were a fantastic resource for me. They allowed me to make a casual request of hundreds of people to whom I would have hesitated to email, and I got responses from a good scattering of them—and often not from the people I would have predicted, if I had to select a smaller number to contact.

Coming up in my next post: Twitter stories.

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After an amazing year of effort, I’m thrilled to report that the Webvanta beta is now live! Sign up for a free trial on the site and let me know what you think.

Webvanta is a hosted platform that enables anyone to build content-rich, database-backed web sites with all the cool Web 2.0 features, without programming. We think of it as content management system + KnowledgeBase + community.

If you want to build a site that communicates your knowledge about a particular topic and fosters a community of interest, we believe Webvanta is the best solution available.

We’ve found our initial traction with information portal sites, but you can build nearly any type of site using the platform. In the coming months, we’ll be expanding the features to enable more drag-and-drop design, as well as even richer KnowledgeBase features, e-commerce capabilities, and more.

Looking for Custom Projects

Webvanta is self-service, and you can do everything yourself, within the limits of the platform. But we’re also looking for custom site creation work that builds upon the platform.

We’ve found that with our experience in building sites, we can greatly accelerate a company’s time-to-market by helping them think through the structure of their KnowledgeBase. And because we are intimately familiar with the platform and have lots of experience building sites with it, we can implement custom designs very quickly. We can also develop custom extensions to provide features that aren’t available to self-service customers.

If you have a project for which our custom services may be a fit, send me an email or call me at 888.670.6793 ext. 2.

One of the fun things about startups is how quickly things can evolve. Startups can make strategic decisions in 24 hours that a company like Adobe would debate for a year. They might not always be right, but they sure can try a lot more things and adapt more quickly to changing markets and new insights.

At Webvanta, we’ve recently made a major shift in our customer focus and go-to-market strategy. We had been focusing on small businesses as our customers. We’re keeping that strategy in our back pocket for later use as the business evolves, but we’ve decided to focus on web designers as our customers.

Our product is still much the same: it’s a hosted platform for quickly building and deploying powerful web sites. What’s different is that we’re now focused on providing this platform to web designers, to enable them to deliver better solutions to their clients.

This has a huge benefit for us: the web designers get to find, and interact with, the small businesses. That’s something that we came to realize was going to be hard for us to do at scale. It gives us a lot more leverage, since the folks we’ll be setting up to use the platform will be building sites on an ongoing basis, not just once.

The new strategy also enables us to target a wider range of sites, still including small business sites but no longer limited to that. Our platform is also great for information portals, membership sites, and more.

We’ve been meeting with a wide range of designers to get feedback on our offering, and the feedback has been great. We think there’s a real opportunity here to tune the platform to their needs. The way designers have been building sites involves a lot of unnecessary pain that we can take away.

If you’re a web designer and are interested in being a beta tester, send me a note at michael at webvanta dot com.

More news soon…

We’ve been making great progress at my startup, Webvanta. We recently renamed the company from Collective Knowledge Works, in part because that name was just too long, and in part because it no longer matched our target market. We started out with a broad horizontal focus on knowledge sites, and we’ve evolved to a vertical-market focus on small businesses.

We’re now hosted on a top-quality infrastructure at Engine Yard, and we’ve moved to a largely new codebase with a multi-tenant architecture. BuildingWebApps is now just one tenant, running on exactly the same application that will, in time, host thousands of sites. We’ll be launching the first additional sites within a few weeks, and by the end of September we expect to be in a private beta phase in which invitees can create their own sites.

We’re also ramping up our financing efforts, with the goal of raising a mid-size angel round this fall. Exciting times!

One year ago today I embarked on my current adventure, leaving Adobe after five years there and two years creating the startup they acquired, Fotiva. At the time I left Adobe, I had only the fuzziest idea of what I was going to do, but I knew it would be related to the web, and I was pretty sure it would be connected to Ruby on Rails. And that it has turned out to be.

I’m as busy as I’ve ever been, and my income in the past year is the lowest it has been in more than 25 years. But I’m having a great time, and I have a good feeling about where things are headed. I thought I’d take the excuse of this one-year anniversary to look back on my decision to leave Adobe, and catch my readers up on my business thinking.

Looking back on Adobe

I’ve not written much about my experiences at Adobe, in part because I want to avoid any possible appearance of breaking confidentiality agreements, and also because I wanted to gain some perspective first.

Looking back on my five years at Adobe, there’s a lot that I’m grateful for. I learned a tremendous amount about digital imaging and the PC software business, and about life inside a big company. I met a lot of great people, was able to immerse myself in digital photography, and had the opportunity to lead a research team and do technology licensing with the power of a big player behind me. The team I helped build for Fotiva continues on, in large part, as Adobe’s Santa Rosa office, and I’m pleased to have had some small role in growing the software business in the North Bay. And the product that started life at Fotiva has an enduring role as the organizer in Photoshop Elements.

In a strange way, though, I’m most grateful to Adobe for being so thoroughly dysfunctional when it comes to enabling innovation that it drove me out. As someone with a entrepreneurial heart, I found Adobe stifling. If I had been able to accomplish a bit more at Adobe, I might still be there, and then I would have missed out on so much.

To a large degree, the challenges I faced finding happiness at Adobe would be there in any businesses at that scale. But not entirely. Many of the other entrepreneurial folks I met at Adobe, who tried valiantly to build new products and services, have also left. They’re at an assortment of small companies, but also at Google, and Yahoo, and Apple.

One of Adobe’s biggest weaknesses, in my view, is the distance between top management and the people who have passion for innovative new product ideas. It is exhausting, and usually dispiriting in the end, pushing ideas up through a chain that, at it’s pinnacle, doesn’t seem very interested.

The difficulties I had getting new concepts to market at Adobe, especially when they were web-related, are symptomatic of top management’s resistance to exploring new concepts in the marketplace. Adobe doesn’t like to accept the risk of new markets in return for a role (and learning opportunity) as an early player. Perhaps at Adobe’s scale their approach of waiting until market opportunities are clear, and then buying their way in as needed, makes sense. But it did not make for a satisfying place for me to work.

My evolving Ruby on Rails business plan

When I left Adobe, I had done a little Rails development, and read a lot about it, and I felt strongly that it was going to be a big deal. I spent the majority of this year building custom Rails sites for small businesses, and set up Topaz Web Solutions LLC as the home for that work. I enjoyed it, and some of it is ongoing, but my focus has now shifted to Collective Knowledge Works, Inc., the company I cofounded this fall with my partner Christopher Haupt.

I spent quite a while looking for ways to build a business around delivering Rails-based solutions to other small businesses. I continue to believe there is a great opportunity in this domain, but the sales and support challenges are significant.

Collective Knowledge Works grew out of an idea I had to create a portal for Ruby on Rails developers. We’re now deep into doing just that: you can sign up for the beta list at BuildingWebApps.com. Within a couple weeks, we’ll be letting in beta testers, and early next year it will be public. I can’t wait to show it off, and I think it’s going to be a great resource for the Rails community. After eight years away from the editorial, publishing, and training business, I’m glad to be back in it.

Initially, we don’t expect BuildingWebApps.com to generate much revenue directly. Our first revenue stream will be from the Ruby on Rails QuickStart Seminar that we’ll be presenting in February in San Francisco. Later, we believe we can create revenue from the site itself in various ways.

Christopher and I have just launched the Learning Rails podcast, which has been an adventure of its own.

There’s a bigger plan in the background, too. All the technology we’re building for BuildingWebApps.com can be used for any knowledge domain. After we’ve had time to build out this first site, we’re going to develop additional knowledge domains, and enable others to host their own knowledge domains. That’s why we named the company Collective Knowledge Works.

It’s great to be back in this early business-building phase. And it’s wonderful not to have to try to sell new ideas up through multiple layers of management, but simply to decide what to do, and then do it.

Six months into my exploration of Ruby and Rails and the opportunities it represents, I’ve settled into a niche of building web applications that enable small and medium service businesses to better communicate with their customers.

Today, very few small service businesses have web sites that do much for them. Typically, if the business has any web site at all, it is mostly brochure ware, with a contact form as the limit of its interactivity. Yet almost every such business has interactions with its customers that could be facilitated by a customized web application.

For example, health care practitioners must deal with requests for appointments, referrals, records, and prescription refills. The office staff then needs an effective workflow to process these requests.

Accounting, financial services, and design firms have other needs; they typically have confidential documents they need to provide to their clients, and they need data from their clients. A web application can provide a much superior and more secure alternative to email.

There are countless other examples of businesses that could significantly improve their interactions with clients and customers via the web. But the vast majority of them have found it too intimidating and too expensive to implement the web solutions that they need.

I’ve found that my experience running small businesses makes it easy for me to understand the needs of these kinds of businesses and craft solutions that work for them. The Ruby on Rails platform dramatically reduces the time, and therefore the cost, to build these systems. And since I’ve now built several such applications, I have a set of building blocks to draw from that further streamlines the process.

In time, I expect to offer off-the-shelf hosted solutions for certain types of businesses, but for now I’m finding that each business has different needs. The best approach, for now, seems to be building a custom solution using building blocks that I’ve already created, plus new ones as needed for a particular business’ needs.

If you know of a business in need of such an application, please send the my way: ms (at) mslater.com, or 707.829.6447.

Happy new year!

When I left Adobe at the end of November, I promised myself that I would “take a break” for perhaps as long as three months, and certainly through December. So for the first time in decades, I’ve had a little while without a job, and not actively building a business.

“Work” has always been a major focus of my time and energy. For most of my career, I’ve worked for myself, running small businesses. The past five years at Adobe taught me a lot, and there were some good times, but in the end its final lesson was that I prefer being in my own little business. So I decided to change paths, without being entirely sure what the new path would be.

Taking this month “off,” I spent a lot of time with my family and doing things around the house. I’ve been getting more exercise and doing more cooking.

But did “taking a break” mean staying away from my computer? Only a little. I let myself spend time on what I was drawn to. And I’ve ended up spending a chunk of time on this blog (coding and writing) and on building my first from-scratch Ruby on Rails site (for my brother’s medical practice).

I left Adobe with a general direction but not a specific plan. I’m taking time to talk with lots of folks, learn some new technology, and let my thinking evolve before diving into a new business. I’m exploring hosted web services, online communities, niche e-commerce, and training.

Somewhere in there I’m sure there’s a few good business opportunities. Stay tuned. It’s a new year!

Today was my last day at Adobe. It was an odd feeling walking out the door for the last time.

I had a great job at Adobe. There were a lot of exceptional people I had the pleasure of working with. I’ll miss working with many of them, but I’m sure the relationships will endure. I’ll miss being in the digital photography industry, though I think I’ll enjoy it even more as a hobby.

I won’t miss the shrink-wrapped software business model, the isolation from strategic decision making, the split between marketing and development silos, the financial tyranny of being in a public company, and, most of all, the too-small box I felt I was in.

Seven years ago (on Thanksgiving day, in fact) I had the idea for a photo appliance, and registered the PhotoTablet domain. A couple months later we raised a round of financing and started a company, which evolved to be a PC software company and was renamed Fotiva. Two years later we sold the company to Adobe, where I’ve been for five years.

I’m starting on my fourth career. First I was a hardware/firmware engineer; then a newsletter publisher and conference producer; then a manager of software development and research. Now it’s on to building a business based on web applications. I think it’s a bigger opportunity than anything I’ve done in the past.

I’ve just reached the end of a seven-year adventure into software for digital photography. The adventure began with my first digital camera, a Nikon 950, in July 1999. My frustrations with the difficulties of working with digital photos on the PC led me to conceive of a digital photo appliance, a “photo tablet,” during the Thanksgiving weekend that year. In February 2000, my cofounders Ken Rothmuller and Bernard Peuto had signed on, and PhotoTablet was incorporated. A couple months later, we closed on $2 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, thanks to the vision of general partner Stewart Alsop.

During the next six months, we realized that our tablet appliance concept was ahead of its time. Our product plan evolved by September 2000 to be based on a PC application, and by early 2001 we had built a great executive team, including CEO Jim Heeger and VP Marketing Tanya Roberts (both now at PayCycle). We renamed the company Fotiva, and set out to raise a second round of financing to bring the product to market. Alas, the fall of 2001 was the worst of times for raising money, especially for a consumer-focused digital photography company. We ended up selling the company to Adobe Systems in December 2001. The software that we built at Fotiva turned into Photoshop Album, and then into the organizer mode of Photoshop Elements.

Along the way, I learned a great deal about the photo industry, the shrink-wrapped software business, and life in a big company. It was a grand adventure, but I’m thrilled to now be returning to the world of building a small business.

View the Fotiva web site, captured for posterity as a PDF file before it was taken offline. (Keep in mind that this is more than five years old now, so many of the external links and email addresses no longer work.)

Just in case you want to dig into my deep dark past, during which I wrote hundreds of articles on microprocessors, personal computing technology, and even digital photography, here’s a few of them. These are all pretty old – I put my writing career on hold for my seven-year dive into digital photography software – but I think they stand the test of time reasonably well.

Microprocessors

• Microprocessors Changing the World: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Microprocessor, Microprocessor Report, August 1996

• Microprocessors: The Next Five Years, EE Times, October 1996

• Looking Back on Ten Years of Microprocessor Report, , Microprocessor Report, August 1997

• The Microprocessor Millennium: Ruminations on Microprocessors, Computing, and Thinking, Microprocessor Report, December 1999

Digital Photography

• Digital Photography Coming of Age, Microprocessor Report, July 1999

• An New Era for Digital Photography—And Me, Microprocessor Report, July 2000

Computing Platforms

• The Future of Computing Platforms, , Microprocessor Report, August 1994

• USB Destined to Dominate, EE Times, May 1995

• The Future of Serial Buses, Microprocessor Report, November 1999

• Appliances vs. PCs: The Future of Computing Platforms, Microprocessor Report, January, 2001

• Rethinking Web Appliances, EE Times, September, 2000

So now that I’m on my way out of Adobe, what’s next?

I’m not sure yet. I’m interested in building a bootstrapped (vs. venture financed) small business in the web applications space. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to serve niche markets with focused solutions. I love the idea of a very small company being able to deploy hosted applications that make a real difference to its customers. It’s amazing what you can accomplish today with a few people and a great framework like Ruby on Rails.

Watch this space for updates as my plans solidify.

From late 2001 through November 2006, I was at Adobe Systems. I joined Adobe when it purchased Fotiva, a startup I cofounded two years earlier. My most recent work there was as director of a small research team that prototyped leading-edge features for future products and evaluated advanced imaging technologies for licensing. The features my team developed include the Flash photo gallery in Photoshop Elements 5 and Lightroom, the map view in Photoshop Elements 5, and the auto-stacking feature in that product. Other features remain in development, so I can’t disclose them.

Fotiva began as PhotoTablet, which I cofounded with Ken Rothmuller and Bernard Peuto to create a tablet-based appliance for digital photography. With venture funding from Stewart Alsop at New Enterprise Associates, we began developing the tablet in early 2000 but quickly switched to creating a PC application, PhotoJournal. Jim Heeger joined in early 2001 as CEO. At the end of 2001, we sold the company to Adobe, and PhotoJournal evolved into Photoshop Album, and then into the Organizer mode of Photoshop Elements.

For 12 years, from 1987 through 1999, I was a computer technology analyst, consultant, writer, publisher, and conference producer. I created the Microprocessor Report newsletter in 1987 and launched the Microprocessor Forum conference the following year. During the next decade, we added the Embedded Systems Report newsletter and PC Tech Forum and Embedded Processor Forum conferences.

Before starting Microprocessor Report, I was an independent consultant specializing in embedded microprocessor applications. I began my career as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where I worked from 1977-1980.

I have always enjoyed writing. At Hewlett-Packard, back in 1978, I wrote a self-instructional text for technicians, titled Practical Microprocessors. While working as a consultant in the mid-80s, I wrote Microprocessor-Based Design, a textbook on embedded systems engineering. Between 1987 and 2000, I wrote hundreds of articles for Microprocessor Report, as well as for publications such as PC Magazine, EE Times, Electronic Business, and Nikkei Electronics Asia. (See Selected Writings.) More recently, I wrote books on how to make the most out of Photoshop Album (The Photoshop Album 2.0 Book) and Photoshop Elements (Organize Your Photos with Photoshop Elements 3).

My primary hobbies are photography and boating, which are combined in my web site, BoatingSF.com. You can more than 1,000 of my photos there. I’m currently shooting with a Canon 20D (and a Canon SD700 for casual shooting).