Whether a cat was still alive or not had no bearing on my selections, just because I was certainly going to use pictures of my now-departed Harvo, RanTan, Ecto and Otto, and Happy’s besottedly beloved Tbone, so I wasn’t going to put current cat restrictions on anyone else either.
I started out picking one photo from each person, to make sure I didn’t miss anyone (of course, with some people I only had one picture). Then I dumped all the pictures into the program, and was told that that wasn’t going to fly. In the end I must have had 20 minutes worth of cat pictures for a 4:33 song.
I made a separate folder called Maybe and started throwing in pictures that I just had to have. That got me about 10 minutes, so I started culling again.
Besides making sure I used at least one picture from each person who contributed, I wanted to make sure I used at least one picture from each cat I saw in someone’s album. I didn’t quite make that goal but I got close. I think I missed MrBusGuy’s Boo, for one. So, from yours, I got Tikva, Samson, Mystery and Handsome. I regret not using the picture of Mystery and Handsome on the railing. That’s one of many that I would use if doing it over.
The program I used has a utility to reconcile the music length with the number of pictures and it determines how long each picture is shown and how long each transition is. When I finally got the number of pictures down to where it would even accept them, they went so rapid-fire fast it looked more like a pounding, pulsing dance track. Not good. More culling.
I finally got the number down to where the transitions actually fit the music, but the auto-pan and zooms were doing nasty things to pictures, cutting off cat heads and faces, so I turned the pan and zoom to off, and manually pan and zoomed them. Having never done that before I made many mistakes. Some are too fast, a couple were forgotten. I tried as best I could to move pics around to fit the lyrics, which was only partially successful. Looking at it now, I could have used different pics at different points, such as during the last use of “small and big, this body I fit in” with a kitten MrBusGuy’s Cuervo and full-grown Cuervo, instead of one kitten (Spica) and a full-grown Zebulon. Ah well. Then I got new pictures in and had to throw out even more so they’d fit in. Man, that was painful.
Last, since the program chose the length of pictures and transitions, I manually changed some of them to make a few last longer, like with the picture of Shasta the cat and Shasta the Mount. In the process of doing that, other pictures got their times reduced and I had to figure out which ones where and try to adjust. I made some of my cat’s pictures shorter to make up, but I missed some, which is regrettable, because some cats got shorted. My apologies to Audrey Levins, for instance, because she only had two cat pictures and both of them ended up as blink-and-you’ll-miss-them. It was unintentional.
So that was the gist of how I chose pictures. Mistakes were made, but it was my first attempt, and it was all fun.
Hey, you asked. 
I covet all your cats, since the only one I have left is cute as hell, which is why I used a lot of pictures of him, but he is a jerk. Jork the Jerk. He’s in the most loving home imaginable, quiet, no kids, no one to mess with him, quiet laid-back people who love each other and never fight or even raise their voices, people who love him and treat him well and want for him to love us, but he was feral and hasn’t outgrown that. You never know when you reach out to pet him if he’ll let you or if he’ll draw blood. He hates being picked up and held. We can’t get a second cat because he’d tear the poor thing’s throat out. Sigh. I’m glad we rescued him from a (probably very short) life in the woods, but dammit, I wish he were a loving, cuddly cat. So I do have envy in my heart when I went through your albums, put together the video and watch it.
