RAWing @ Picasa

I prefer to load all my photographs, jpeg, RAW and movies into picasa because it is much faster and easier than waiting around for lightroom. I also prefer to read the SD Card, rather than use a cable to connect to the camera, but this is just a matter of preference. I just leave the import folder at picasa default (date taken, in YYYY-MM-DD format so that an alphabetical sort puts them in date order). I have also experimented with the Windows live photo gallery to do the copy and it is pretty quick and easy as well, but it never grabbed me as better than picasa. In particular I got lost when it tried to guide me to download drivers for RAW format, like my pentax .pef and cannon .cr2  both of which I had already installed the drivers for? Picasa wasn’t perfect here but they provided RAW support some time ago. I got to see the RAW files much sooner than in lightroom but the renderings were sometimes well away from the paired jpeg and what the cannon, pentax utilities did or even what lightroom might do. I don’t really like the picasa rendering on most RAW files and prefer just to see the jpeg version, as the camera took it!

My solution has been to “ignore” the RAW files in picasa, which is very easy to do via Tools/Option/File Types, and just untick the box. However I actually like to make sure that I have actually imported everything (occasionally the import leaves the RAW files or movies on the SD card, not sure why). Also I find it best to delete the bad photos (both jpeg and RAW versions) immediately on my first pass view of the photos as they are uploaded. So I am usually toggling this setting on and off. In other words I like to see picasa load the RAW files but I don’t really look at them or do any serious editing of my RAW files in picasa. That is a job for lightroom, where I just to do a File/import photos and videos from the folder that picasa has loaded the new files into. All this might sound like double handling but it is still faster than loading directly into lightroom, (I can’t figure out why) and I get to cull the duds as a bonus.

No Photos!! Windows Live & Blogger no longer good friends

I was surprised to get this message when I tried to upload a blogger post I had prepared in windows live (as I often do), The error number 500 and description as an Internal server error didn't make a lot of sense and  I just found dead ends searching on Google & Bing but notice a few others have noted similar problems, particularly when loading pictures. So I tried uploading a windows live post with and without an image and clearly the error relates to loading images (mine are loaded via picasa web).

So does anyone have an explanation? Is it problems/changes in picasa web (ie google+ification of the place) or is something broken in windows live writter?

Using the blogger,com web tools to upload pictures is a viable work around for now. But....

Many Mistresses but Master of None

For the past couple of years, I have been dithering over which is the “best” photo management software to use. I have been a big fan of Picasa since I first downloaded it but I also have had the software supplied with my cameras (all good but unfortunately not universally appealing) I’ve also got Windows Live Photo Gallery running it on a few computers, and I have Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements on my “photography” computer  (I have never actually got enthusiastic enough to outlay on the cost of Photoshop). On my old laptop I still have an original version of Corel Photobook (which I still like).  I also have Corel Painter, with a Wacom tablet and  CorelDraw Creative suite X6, (mainly for its illustration capabilities) and its Corel Photo-Paint is a favorite for “special” editing needs, especially its smart carver & clip mask. Then there is a whole menagerie of special tools (picturenaut, autostitch, mosaic creator,geosetter, noiseware and not to forget paint.NET), Just in case I also have Portable Gimp and XnView on my USB Portable apps key and adobe photoshop express and aviary apps on my android phone. I have a great collection of photo utilities but I suspect they are getting the better of me, I often find myself following one processing path only to realize I might have been better going a different route.

The two packages picasa and lightroom are my definitely favorites because they are both non-destructive editing systems. They leave the original untouched, and instead of adjusting the pixels in the image itself, they store the process that is used to edit the photo and can reproduce the exact same result again whenever the photo is viewed or printed.. Picasa is great in its easy of loading new photos and scanning through load of photos its fast and has nice basic editing tools (cropping,straightening and “light” exposure controls. Windows Live Photo gallery is also fast but it not transparent in how it edits photos and where it puts the originals, it is not as obviously non-destructive and has fallen from favour. I’m also a fraction worried (ok quiet worried) that google will strangle the life out of a nice mature package like picasa as they rebadge and social network it into just a google photo product . The new Lightroom is really a better way to edit RAW files and has a more serious editing features, However it is really slow to load in a lot of RAW photos, painfully slow even in the 64 bit version. Thus I tend to load everything into picasa, review it and tag what I like and only take a small subset into Lightroom. My biggest hassle is remembering, did I do the adjustments in Lightroom or Picasa or both! The really annoying issue is that neither program can (or deliberately wants to) see the adjustment they other has made. Or was it a special edit in Corel Photo-Paint or a final cleanup in noiseware?  Keeping track of all the foibles of this many mistresses is not as easy as it might appear, but it would be nice if they at least talk to each other, and stop the gossip of who’s prettier or a better housekeeper.

So am I going to settle down and just choose one system, one workflow and ignore the rest. I doubt it, vive la différence.

Uploading photos from a camera phone without a cable (or a computer)?

This is probably the most widely unasked question for new smart phone users. Well smartphone users over maybe 30, those with 20 somethings or teenagers in house possible already know how to upload to facebook or share with the world on twitter. Older folk generally only want to upload their photos so they can make prints and share with just a few family members, not the world. Looking through phone manual (if it hasn’t already been thrown out) often draws a blank look and frustration, perhaps even diverting attention towards some additional accessory cable and software.

Well if you have web access on your phone (via 3G or 4G on the phone or WiFi) you will be able to make use of one of many cloud based webservices to transfer  from your phone to where ever you want. The tricky bit is making sure your privacy is maintained. Most such services are free up to a certain storage limit and you need to read the terms and conditions carefully. The first options, which I have chosen to call the big three, really depend on which computer and software you want to use to store and manage your photo collection.

1. Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, (also known as Google+ photos to google+ users) its been around for a while now an is well tested and stable (ok the google+ apps are still in flux). You will need to download either the Official google+ app (best option if you don’t already have a picasa web album) or one of the picasa “tools” apps around (is you do have a web album). To be honest I removed the google+ app from my phone recently (read why) but picasa is probably the easiest place to start. If you don’t want google+ involved google also offer the Google Drive, a cloud based storage/exchange which is photo aware.

2. Windows Live Photo Gallery & Skydrive, which you may have already if you have investigated hotmail recently. Microsoft just announced today that they are phasing out hotmail to be replaced by outlook.com. Fortunately the skydrive connection, which is a cloud based exchange & storage, is also well integrated into that and with both mobile & PC based apps. This is a very nicely integrated combination and ideal for dedicated windows PC users.


3. IPhone, IPad, ICloud and apple MAC, despite the claims of universal sharing this is a bit of a closed shop for the apple fans. To be honest I’m not a fan and will therefore keep my opinions to myself, if you are apple oriented and have all these devices then ICloud is the way to go. If you just have an IPhone both of the previous choices are still valid, because free IPhone apps are available for those services.

If you want to stay away from the big three, there are still plenty of options. Flickr already has a comprehensive set of ways to upload photos from your phone. If you are using a free account remember you can only see the last 200 photos uploaded and there is a month size limit, but you have a lot of control about privacy and sharing and access to a range of print service via snapfish. Photobucket  also has several ways to directly upload from your phone, and again the free signup doesn’t give you access to all facilities.  Both give you access to on-line editing factilities, so you only need web access not a dedicated computer. Today even the local photo processor or photo kiosk at your local shopping centre can offer an upload service from you phone and remember that they can also write the photos to a CD or a web album, instead of or as well as printing the photos.

So stop worrying about all those photos on your phone, get them moving through the cloud, now!

PhotoProject :: Skyscapes

The clouds this afternoon where dramatic, but on a much larger scale than a normal photo  captures. An obvious application for multi-image stitched panorama, This time I have used the panorama stitched within Windows Live Photo Gallery, rather than my favourite autostich.

Home Sweet Home

As well as trying to keep down the amount of Photo and Art stuff I carried while travelling I also put myself on a software diet. I was travelling with a new but very small Toshiba notebook and I wanted to avoid the over installation of unused software glut, that inevitably slows down any computer (well any of my computers) eventually suffers from. So I deliberately only installed Picasa and some Pentax drivers (notably Remote III so I could tether my camera, which I never did) and a few utilities on a Portable App memory stick (I used Autostitch a lot , Picturenaut and  Noiseworks  less so). The one thing I didn’t have which I might have used (and tried unsuccessfully to achieve) was creating massive panoramas and photosynths. Admittedly you can do the photosynth thing by any browser but uploading all the images could take forever on a lower bandwidth connection. You also have to download some software. So I was glad to get home, get my photos onto my stora (there archive location) and do a bit of reorganizing with Windows Live Photo Gallery (again I could have downloaded any of the windows live stuff while I was travelling, if I got desperate). Finally I was glad to get back to a dedicated flickr uploader facility, rather than wait on the web browser based upload tab with flickr. What I enjoy most of all was the wider bandwidth

Notice I haven’t loaded either Photoshop elements of Lightroom onto my desktop yet.

Less Stressful Uploading

One methods of uploading my photos as I travel that have proved much more reliable are Picasa's web album. I only have a small Toshiba netbook onto which I load my photographs, daily or more frequently if needed. The netbook works well with most Wi-Fi connections I have tried, even though most have been slow. I have Picasa on the notebook to organize the photos as I go and also daily make a copy of the photos onto a backpack style portable hard disk. I have also found that the Picasa's green upload button does reliably upload photo, albeit slowly, and it will also resize the file on the fly. I can also selected to upload by date or use a number of albums I have set up and control weather the photos are private or available to public view. The panorama album below is one of my albums

European Panorama

Heads in the clouds

Web Based Photo Editors and Organizers are coming of age. Over the past year it has become truly possibly to upload, fix up and share your photos without first transferring them to a computer.

On-line Photo Editors

The review of these 4 Web apps at Appstorm.net suggest that you might not always need the power of Photoshop, just to crop an image or do some simple adjustments and I whole heartedly agree. All these web based system give you a lot of power to enhance and manipulate photographic images. Either by an upload direct from mobile phones, webcam, photo directly off cameras, even your computer or possibly the URL of you cloud based album. Picnik is very well integrated into Flickr, Box.net and Picasa Web Album and I have used it from time to time. All four Web Apps have free offerings are all impressive, some have phone Apps you can download to your phone.

Web/Clouds based Albums & Storage

     

These three services have free starter versions and give you a lot for nothing. Further they have the things needed for Photo organization built in. Picasa web is probably the best choice is you also use Picasa on your computer, SkyDrive might be better for those using the Windows Live Photo Gallery, both offer a whopping 20 to 25GB of space free. Box.net a little different it only offers 5GB of free storage (and that’s for the personal account, that’s still a lot of space if you keep you images smallish), it is first and foremost an easy way to share conventional files, documents etc but photos are fine, between you personal devices, but it has nice collaborative sharing of folders, tagging files and preview of images and integrated picture editing via picnik and files can be linked to an embedded in other sites such as blogs facebook etc..

Instagr.am is a major hit on iPhones, It rates its self as fast, beautiful and fun. You just upload you photo, add some cuteness (aka filters) and publish on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. My opinion is there is a lot of hype, little substance, it is as shallow as it sounds, but certainly enjoy it if that is what you want to do with your phone photos.

I have actually left out a lot of web album services, especially the commercial ones associated with printing your photo. It doesn’t mean these service are not worth using. For example I am warming to snapfish, it is fast and efficient and well integrated into the things I use like Flickr, Picasa and Live Photo Gallery ideal for everyday style prints. I still like the custom labs for blow ups and exhibition quality Prints.

Of course you do still need a computer, netbook, smart phone of iPad to access these services but that can be anywhere, a cyber cafe, library, WiFi hotspot you no longer have to be home and at your desk based computer

New Windows Live Photo Gallery (Beta)

The new Beta is available for Windows Live essentials (its kind of hidden away so here is a link to download it now). One of the new items is a revamp of Live Photo Gallery. One thing I noticed straight away is that it is extremely fast (compared with Picasa & Photoshop organiser) and I mean lightening fast. Maybe I just haven’t loaded enough photos into it yet! Ok while writing this, I got live gallery to scan this PC and external USB Drive for photos, it did it in less than 10 minutes, around quarter of a million images, that’s really good (two hours faster than PSE organiser)  and it is still fast.

So “Is it a good Photo Manager?”

Certainly YES. Window Live Photo Gallery has all the basic editing functions (plus a decent noise reduction filter) It supports organisation by Date/Time (the default), People (but a manumatic face recognition) General Tags and Geotags, it even keeps track of what you have “published” to the web and where. It has tags, captions and a 5 star rating system. It also has nice features to appropriately resize for emails, to publish directly to facebook & flickr and even makes maintain backups and shareable albums on you own personal Sky Drive. It has a very simple easy to use camera import facilities and seems to handle of  the image and Video format I have tried. I did have to download some extra Codec for my Raw files (BTW the Pentax Supplied Codec only work in Vista or windows 7). So if you have a microsoft Vista or Windows 7 based PC, a new digital camera and/or a camera phone you should consider downloading it now, its free!

Is it as good as Photoshop?

Well NO, but… Photo shop has way more features,  PS & PSE are expensive and spoken of with great reverence by many bloggers and expert photographers. However I can also let you into an unspoken truth, the Photoshop family of photo editors, perhaps with the exception of lightroom are blotted, chronically slow and can be extremely tedious to learn and use efficiently. Yet PhotoShop can do some magic in the right hands and make other packages look ordinary in comparison. So for the vast majority of new camera user who don’t want to spend hours tweaking their photos or don’t already have Photoshop and one or more of those many glossy How to Photoshop books, Live Photo Gallery is much easier to use software to start with and its free.

Ok then “Its it a Picasa Killer App?”

Probably NOT. It doesn’t have a lot of the feature Picasa offers, like automatic face recognition, printing large posters, collages, HTML web galleries, screen savers, making movies from still images, backup & Gift CD/DVDs and the nice integration with the On-line Picasa Web Album, with its well thought out security/collaboration options. I’m sure there are more features I’ve overlooked, Picasa is an established and well liked application, something I would still highly recommend to a new digital camera owner. The one thing loyal picasa users are complaining about in all the forums at the moment is how slow picasa is getting, and I agree. The integration of Sky Drive into Live Photo Gallery gives you a personal place for photographic albums & archives in the Cloud, this is possibly its best and most important differentiating feature.  Live Photo Gallery does have a nice Panoramic photo stitcher built in and good integration with Photosynth.  So I think this upgrade to Live Photo Gallery is very timely and it has some great potentials and I for one will be running it on my desktop PC in parallel with picasa for a while to come.

Movie Maker, Live Mail and Messenger have also had decent overhauls and Live Writer, which I am using to make this blog post now has the new office style ribbon. So do they all. I’m not really sold on the Ribbon, I was quiet happy back in the office XP/2003 style menus.

Did I mention Live Photo Gallery is fast?

Sometimes the Photoshop Crop Tool is all you need?

You’ve probably already seen this photo photo with the caption "no, I did not photoshop this" but gizmodo, the bible for those with the must have shiny toys, give proof that it was photoshoped. Which brings me to the point that the easiest way to improve your digital photos is via cropping and you don’t need expensive photo editing software, like photoshop, to be able to achieve that.

Picasa from google is free to download, and works on both windows & apple mac, has an easy to use and nicely visual crop tools. So does Windows Live Photogallery and  gimp. So no need to fork out a small fortune to start improving your photos.

There are also now many on-line photo editors,like Picnik, which is available to edit within flickr & facebook. A new kid on the block is Aviary, which is written in flash and thus a little slower. The cropping is part of the Phoenix image editor. However it is an amazing full featured suite for a free on-line tool. So go get creative.

Photo-Friendliness of SkyDrive

SkyDrive has been out of beta for some now, and is now more tightly included in Windows Live Essentials (the useful utility software that are now no longer included in Windows 7). So an update on my previous review is well and truly due.

Photo-friendly features

There is now Photo a folder in your SkyDrive. This lets you create and share on-line photo albums. Any folder is created under the main photo is considered an album and you get a slideshow option in t he menu and the viewer can automatically step through the photos. It is worth noting, by default new folders in this photo area will have public access but you can easily change permission and limit access to a specific users or groups.

If you also have Windows Live Photo Gallery (also part of windows live essential and free to download) the uploading and managing becomes very easy. Just select the photos you want and select “Publish” and then when the file transfer is finished click on the “View album” button

The Default Free capacity of Skydrive is now 25 Giga bytes (that’s a lot)

Whilst photo backup is not specifically mentioned in the SkyDrive promotions, I am willing to bet it becomes one of its most used features. Because the folder structure is photo friendly, not only will you photos be stored safely in a second location they will be much easy to find and access than searching through a shoebox full of CDs.

Accessing Your Skydrive

The downside of SkyDrive is still the same as in the beta version, the default upload and access features are web based, and most significantly just apply to one file at a time. There is a package called Gladinet, that lets you set up the skydrive as virtual drive with its own drive letter, albeit a slow drive but the concept sounds neat. However there is a lot of web backchat that people have trouble getting this to work.  So I haven’t tried it yet! What I have tried and kept using is SkyDrive Explorer, which extends the web application to also work on groups of files, folders etc. for copy renaming and deleting etc. the best bit is it allows drag and drop for these file operations. My one complaint is it does not currently have a move option, so you need to copy, [check it worked] and delete. It even gives reliable estimates of how long the operation it might take, and it will still be much longer than a local copy. It is a simple & small  explorer add-in and doesn’t require extra drivers installed on your computers or Active-X, and importantly follow secure protocols to transfer files so they protected from your average snoopers.

My Virtual Scrapbooks

I work on a few different computers these days, two different notebooks and a desktop. Not to mention mobile phones, cyber cafes and whatever computer is handy as i travel. I always end up with collections of half processed but still interesting projects scattered all over the place. So I decided to create a couple of virtual scrapbook on my SkyDrive. I still work on things, like autostitching, HDRI merges, collages, noise filtering on copies of photos locally, but now I religiously copy these temporary working folders to the skydrive and delete the local working copy. Why? Well when I want to find these half finished and semi forgotten projects I no longer have to search in four or five places. I have my folders on the SkyDrive organized by project type & theme. I also can look through this  every month or so and just delete stuff that I am unlikely to consider again, or re-prioritise things of interest. So this has both freed up my computers from a lot of unnecessary file clutter and at the same time made it easier to find things that I only need occasionally.

The idea of photo scrapbooks doesn’t have to be implemented via SkyDrive by the way, it could be a virtual drive or shared folder on your network or even on a flash or USB back-pack drive. Using SkyDrive, which is always there if you have internet access, just removes the worries like “Is the that drive connected?” and “is that computer turned on?”

Emailing photos

Digital cameras have advanced in photo resolution at a much greater rate than the average Internet connection capacity (and remember RuddNet is pretty much still a pipe dream). Further many companies and ISPs have limits on attachment size, frequently this is only a couple of megabytes and that might only be enough for half your photo! So here are a couple things you might want to considered and set up before you start emailing lots of photos from your new camera to aunty Flo with her old (and very slow) bigpond dial up internet connection.

Go JPEG

Most camera will allow you to take photos in JPEG format (the file will end in .jpg or .jpeg) or the camera manufacturer will normally bundle software to convert its .RAW format to jpeg. This jpeg format has two very important advantages

1. Compressable, there is a trade off between image file size and quality but 10:1 compression can normally be achieved with with little perceptible loss in image quality.
2. (almost) Universally supported for the format by software (especially file & photo viewers, browsers)

Photographing directly in jpeg format will mean you can fit many more photos on your camera card.

Use a photo email feature

Most new digital cameras (and that includes mobile phones with cameras) come bundled with software, to upload, manage and do some editing of photos. Usually there will be an option to email photos and a ability to select the size to email, it may called share rather than email and it may involve reading the dreaded manual, assuming you kept it.
Alternatively you can use tools probably already on your computer, for example in vista when you just click on an image in a normal explorer view, you will see the menu bar change to include and email option  If you click on this you will get a submenu to select the photo size for the attachment. Usually the small (800 by 600 pixels) is more than adequate for an emailed photo and the files size is likely to be less that 300kb.
If you are still using XP you can get the same feature by downloading the Windows Live Photo Gallery. The most recent version of which gives you some fairly nifty formatting features inside Windows Live email so that the photo is part of the email, much more aunt or grandma friendly, instead of as an attachment that must be downloaded and/or opened separately.
However I prefer to use the excellent email feature within picasa, which lets you edit and crop the image and just press the email button. You can both select a number of default formats and size or choose between using your default email and gmail on the fly. If you have outlook you can also create a HTML story book (ie photos are embedded in the email rather than as attachments.)
Having shown you all this one thing I definitely don't recommend is resizing your photo directly, because you can so easily accidentally overwrite the original and lose a lot of detail if you ever wanted to get a blow up printed at a later date.

Windows Live Essentials

View Full Album

I have just updated my Windows Live Writer, which I use a lot for preparing these blog posts, other than support for tables and maps which I haven’t tired out yet. It has a couple nice insert features for photographer (and movie maker). You can now insert a photo album,like the one to the left, but only by uploading the photos directly or using the windows live on-line album feature. The insert video feature is much the same but also has the ability to add video from common on-line services like You Tube. A similar feature for the photo gallery that read from Flickr, photo bucket and/or picasa web albums would have been a winner. Windows live essentials can be downloaded for free and includes a few other neat utilities, but just getting windows live writer will make your blogging life easier.

The other surprise was that sky drive, also free, now gives you 25 gigabytes of space for free! Yes, I got that right 25Gb! That is a lot so I have started to use it as a trial place to do my daily backups (of photos) so they are not just on one storage media (ie my camera card then my whichever computer I am using) even when I am travelling. Will keep you posted on how this goes.

Stitching in an unusual place

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know I love the extra wide perspective you get when you stitch several images together. Normally I have been using autostitch, but I have just discovered a very serviceable stitching tool inside window Live photo gallery (one of the tools that you can get in windows live)

The Downside, depending on you view it could be an upside, is the fact that it works completely automatically, no settings to tweak, no sliders to slide or knobs to turn. You just select the photos you want to join and then click on the little make item on the menu and pick the first option create panoramic photo... That's it

It generally seems to to a good job. It even does multi panelled grids of overlapping images

I haven't cropped or rotated (Live Photo Gallery does not seem to have a straightening tool!) so you can see exactly the image produced.

opening up your ability to share

Windows Live, or the latest beta update, available for down now by clicking here, is Microsoft's attempt to catch up into the web 2.0 social networking- , photosharing- and blogging- -verse. Yahoo's Flickr and Googles, Picasa and blogger already have done this for some time. the software comes with four tools, the Window Live Messenger, a rebadging of the tried and true instant message system, Windows Live Email, which is Hotmail on steroids that give you a workable way to also access multiple pop mail services, next comes the nice looking Window Live Photo Gallery, which is a stripped down version of the tools in Vista, with nice web publishing/upload features, and finally Window Live Writer, a nice and simple tool to edit blog posts in a WISYWIG way.

I'm not convinced Photo Live Gallery is a patch on picasa, but it is simple and free. If uploading photos to your web presence is frustrating, give it a try. the only downside is it does the thumbnail versions of your photo on the fly and this can be slow

Live writer works nicely with blogger, much better than the word macro I downloaded for blogger I uploaded some time ago. The nicest feature is writers ability to find the format template of your blog by uploading a temp post (which it also them deletes. The only downside is it doesn't do blogger's labels, something I have been routinely.