Replacing Photobucket

I have my entire Cubs card collection scanned.  The scans sit on my hard drive.  I also back them up on Mrs. WW's computer.  And in case the house blows up and both computers are destroyed, I have another copy on Photobucket.

I've been using Photobucket since 2012.  You  can read my first post on the topic here.  My Photobucket albums are here  It's been super easy to upload the files.  They are stored the same way as on my computer... a folder for each brand and subfolders inside of those for each year.

But as you can tell by the post's title, I'm replacing Photobucket.  Take a look at the reason why...

The free version of Photobucket has been severely limited.  You now get just 2.5 GB or 250 images.  My 16,428 are just a bit over the limit.

I did some searching and found the best free replacement is Shutterfly.   It won out over the others because of unlimited storage and the ability to create folders within folders.  I wanted to have a folder for each brand and folders with the brand folder for each year. I couldn't do that with Google Photos and Flickr.

Finding the replacement site was the easy part.  Uploading 16,000 scans was the hard part.  I was happy to find that Shutterfly made that job fairly simple.  I could upload an entire folder at once.

It still took a while, and it got a little tedious too.  But after a few evenings,

I finished!

The only downside to Shutterly that I've run into is that there doesn't seem to be a way to make my folders public.  Sorry, but all this work seems to be for my eyes only.

Utz Cubs

Its nice to see Topps back with a retail partnership.  The last that I can recall was the 2016 partnership with Walmart's Marketside pizza.  This time their partner is the snack-maker, Utz.  As a midwest boy, I am not familiar with the east-coast Utz.  There was also no way for me to get the cards in Utz products.  I instead relied on Ebay.

The Topps / Utz set features 100 cards  You get four cards with each Utz purchase, so you would need to eat a lot of potato chips to complete the set.  The design is identical to the 2019 Topps flagship, with the addition of the Utz logo.  The only difference on the backs is the numbering.

The Cubs scored six players among the 100.  I was able to find all six on Ebay

All six are from Series One.  I wonder if there will be a second series of  Utz when Topps series two comes out?

Five Random Cubs Cards

I've got 16,769 Cubs cards from 198 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.

1900s - 1970s: 1956 Topps #41 Hank Sauer  The action shot shows Sauer making a grab at the Polo Grounds.  

1980s: 1989 Topps #240 Greg Maddux   A card like this reminds me of just how young Maddux was when he came to the Cubs.  This picture was most likely taken in 1988 and Maddux was 22.

1990s: 1990 Donruss Rookies #18 Shawon Boskie  This is from the 56-card rookie set.  Boskie was 5-6 with an ERA of 3.69 in his rookie season of 1990

2000s: 2001 Upper Deck #389 Bill Mueller  Upper Deck needed to Photoshop in some sort of background.  This is one dull looking card!

2010s: 2013 Team Issued #15 Darwin Barney The RNG likes this card.  In early February it picked the season ticket holder version of the card.  Today its the card that was given away May 3, 2013.

Panini Sticker Wrap-Up

Let's wrap things up with Panini today.

Their stickers ran from 1988 through 1996.  They had sets with as many as 480 stickers and as few as 165.  The stickers size changed often too, with seven different sizes over the run.  The number of Cubs had a high of nineteen to a low of two.  Panini was not very consistent!

All together, there are 108 Cubs stickers. 

Ryne Sandberg was the most popular Cub, netting eleven stickers over the years.

Here's a look at all 108 Panini Stickers Cubs.  I've got them arranged by year, with eight stickers per row.  The sizes of the stickers are all relative to each other, so you can see when they were bigger and when they were smaller.

1996 Panini Stickers Cubs

The 1996 set is Panini's last.  Again distributed by Fleer, the set has 248 stickers, a significant increase over the 1995 set.  The Cubs snagged eight in the set, though a few are only sort-of Cubs.

 

These are the sort-of Cubs.  Though they have the Cubs logo on them, you can see that the players were no longer with the Cubs.

 

 

 

 

 

These are the no-doubt Cubs stickers.

1995 Panini Stickers Cubs

Big changes came with the 1995 set.  In fact, the Standard Catalog has no listing under Panini for the 1995 set.  Instead, you find it in the Fleer section.  The catalog states that Fleer bought Panini. 

I had never heard that so I did some digging around.  I couldn't find anything to corroborate that statement.   Panini was founded in Italy in 1960 and is still headquartered there.  Fleer was bought and sold a few times in the late-eighties and early nineties before going belly-up in 2005.

The backs of the 1995 stickers say that the stickers were distributed by Fleer.  Distributing and owning are two different things.  I'm not sure why the catalog says Fleer bought Panini.

The 1995 set shrunk to it's smallest size yet, just 156 stickers.  The stickers themselves got smaller too.  No longer nearly baseball card sized, they measured 1 15/16" x 3".

The Cubs were limited to just two stickers among the 156...

 

.... the logo and Mark Grace.

1994 Panini Stickers Cubs

The 1994 version of Panini Baseball stickers were still ⅛ shy of being baseball-card sized.  The set shrunk, though, from 300 down to 268.  The shrinkage left the Cubs with nine players instead of the previous year's ten.

Logo stickers were eliminated as were the glitter cards.  The league leaders were included and their cards were foil.

Randy Myers led the NL in saves in '93 so he get the foil league leader card

 

 

 

 

 

1993 Panini Stickers Cubs

In 1993 Panini came within ⅛ of an inch of hitting the big time.  The length and width of the stickers was just ⅛ short of being the same size as a regular 2½" x 3½" baseball card.

The set has 300 stickers.  Each team got 10 players (with one of the ten being a foil glitter sticker) and one foil logo sticker.  There were also stickers for league leaders and award winners.  The Cubs got two of those, sort of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The award and league leader stickers were sort-of Cubs because the featured Greg Maddux, who left as a free agent after the 1992 season.  He's shown in the set as a Cub, but in 1993 he was a Brave.