My Norfolk Album on Flickr

Its been a few days trying to figure out how to get Open Live Writer going (without downloading a new version in the very low band width). Trying to get photos loaded to google photo via theiw web interface upload was a joke (How I miss that conserve bandwidth button in picasa). The one reliable thing was the web based upload to flickr. So I have been able to keep up my daily photo posts going. Click on the photo above to see my album grow,

not so fast now

Neither of the two runners are drawing away, in the smartphone photo upload to the cloud race, while I am in low connection - infrequent WiFi land. Not that that worries me, I’m used to uploading photos from my phone regularly. A few images are getting through to the separate clouds, but interestingly they are not the same photos and appear at different times. I haven’t counted exactly but google is probably ahead

The biggest issue I am having is trying to group the one’s I want not those chosen by the google photo assistant (aka annoy-ant). Put simply I don’t like google photo not allowing me to use those new potentially good tools and wasting my time with photo I’d rather overlook. Changing the name from autoawesome to assistant doesn't help, it just annoys me now. Also there is the confusion of terminology now that collections are being used instead of album in some places but not in others, For example if you click on a photo on-line it says add to album but the default view is via collections (aka albums). I also ran into a catch 22 when trying to create a new album from a selected photo when I click on add to album it just showed a dialogue of selected album thumbnails to click on, I could not find anywhere to create a new album of collection on the web version of google photos, BUT it appears you need to be on-line to do it. I had to resort to using the old reliable picasa to create a new album. I can add a collection on the phone and it becomes an album! Its all a bit messy and to be honest I just still prefer to do my organizing in picasa on my laptop

The second issue is how to share the images privately with just nominated family and friends. I have for a long time used picasa web albums (and later google+ albums) to share a progressive updates to an album dedicated to my travels. However some time last year this facility was changes so that the photo could only shared with those that had a google account (which annoyed a lot of people to the point where they would bother looking). Has google photos fixed this? It claims it has. You can get a link you can share and it seems to work. However it is not clear if the collection/album remain private. This combined with the restrictions on staying organized if I’m not spending a lot of time on-line, has made it a bit to difficult to set up my normal progressive album/slideshow just for family. I am still preparing an album in picasa of my travels at the moment but…,. I’m frustrated by try to understand what’s going on with the sharing

This is where flickr is streaking ahead, it is really clear what is private and what is public (via a sharing icon watermark) and when you share private photos you get a link and it clearly states that the photo can only be seen by those that receive the link. If you email this link to a family member only they can see the photo (which is the way it should be) Once again you need to be on-line (ie connected via 3/4G data or WiFi) before you can do any organizing of your uploaded photos in the flickr app. However the phone app and web features are much closer to each other, so you get an integrated feel and they do the job simply and well. I’m actually changing over to using flickr for my progressive trip album to share with family & friends

Creating an album with the Google Photos view on web

Whilst the assistant in the android google photo app you can easily create an album, on both recent photos on the phone and also the photos on-line. On the web access the assistant is unfortunately blanked out (at least at the moment) and with an obtuse message that you are all caught up and up to date. However the very clean (aka very few icons and tools visible) google photo view doesn’t have an obvious way to create an album. Yet it is still simple to create albums but you have to select the photos first. After selecting at least 2 photos you will see some extra icons on the selection bar and then you need click on the + Plus Icon on the right hand side of selection bar.

You now have the option to create a new album or add to an album.

Letting Lightroom regain her dignity

I have not been able to find out exactly why lightrooms started forgetting things, particularly distressing was her forgetting collections. I knew she was a high maintenance mistress and I had been routinely backing up her catalogue but it would seem the problem occurred in bits and pieces, just a few collections here, then a collection or two at another time. This hasn’t stopped me using lightroom but I am careful to use just a smaller catalogue of recent photos I wish to post process at the moment and no memory losses so far.

There where almost 100 backups so going back through everything looked like a nightmare. Transferring collections is possible (you have to export them as a catalogue) but it does involve exporting the images in the collection and the last thing I wanted was having to alter existing the folders and files, or generate a lot of duplicates. I had also got very used to using AfterShot Pro to write sidecar files as a way to transfer metadata and ratings. I had also worked out that the collections (or albums) could also be written into the metadata, using something like the ~alb (for album) prefix in your metadata. This are then easy enough to find or filter in your photo manager and can be used to “re-find” the desired collection (album).

So I haven’t tried to rebuild a full catalogue of all my archived photos, what I have done is progressively worked through the backup (with the catalogue running from an external backpack location and then use lightroom to write a suitable ~alb collection name  tag to the photos in that collection into the metadata, creating a xmp sidecar file for the photos involved.  Ok that is taking time but I think storing the collections in a way that can be shared around the software packages I use (the one that can read the metadata in xmp files) is a worthwhile step. Reloading the photos into lightroom is now just on an ad-hoc basis. It will still take me a few months of occasional work to recover all my collection organization but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

For new photos I really like the OnOne Perfect Photo Browser. version 9.5 now supports Albums and it is a simple task to transfer these into lightroom collections. More importantly I only load those photos in the collection into lightroom. Naturally I also make sure I add the ~alb codes into my metadata before doing this transfer.

The days of trusting lightroom to look after my entire collect are over but I am still glad to let her beautiful develop tools enhance my work.

Flickr’s new Camera Roll

 

Without any fanfare, well not that I have noticed, the revitalised flickr folk have rolled out a new way to view and organize your photos. You can’t miss it its got an orange beta tag beside it and it is now at the top of your You menu tab (where your photostream used to be, its now second).

At the moment it only provides a time line that you can sort by date taken or date uploaded. It only show one or a few (more viewed) photos from each month and the months are only expanded for the year you are interested in. At the bottom of the screen you can access icon to adjust privacy, edit selected images and add them to albums. Thus it won’t rival the current photo organise tool, also under the You menu Items on the flickr menu bar, but I still find this organizer a bit clunky so I’m interested to see what extra features  and flickrbots might be added. I do see some glimmers that the camera roll may tackle some of the promising ways everpix (ie the meta collection) seemed to be heading, before it shutdown.

I like the idea of being able to browse through a large collection, be guided to the highlights and have some smarts behind the scene grouping and refining what I see

Not sure Flickr’s camera roll will deliver this but its probably a step in the right direction.

One Clue closer to understanding a LR foible

Last night I was tired and left Lightroom running on my laptop computer, which was plugged in but in Sleep mode. This morning my computer showed that windows had preformed and “important” security update for Windows 7 and restarted my computer sometime over night. Lightroom was up and running but a Collection (Adobe’s name for an album) I had definitely set up last night was missing, it was missing in the last catalogue backup made as well (not surprisingly as this was made earlier). This starts to explain at some of the unexplained problems and frustration I was having with Lightroom late last year and earlier in the year. I now suspect that, if the computer is shutdown (in this case by a windows update) and the catalogue backup not run,(It may have been waiting for a user response to run it) and lightroom terminated. Then when the system resumes although lightroom resumed fine it uses an older backup. So the problem really is triggered by the windows update. At least one of the problem events earlier in the year related to a significant power outage. I had already identified that leaving lightroom running overnight was not a good idea, so I have to share a little of the blame.

Ok why this time didn’t I loose any RAW edits? The answer was simple I have adopted the tactic of always writing any changes to a sidecar file (.xmp file) immediately.

Thus what we have is not really a BUG in lightroom more a personality foible to do with how she maintains her precious catalogue. (How to do this is mentioned in my previous post).

The moral, Lightroom is a High Maintenance Mistress

Don’t Leave Her (Lightroom) Running Unattended (ie overnight)

A Better way to post Google+ Photos in Blogger

There is another way to get your photos from google+ photo into blogger, that gives you a little more control, thanks to a relic from picasa web album days (picasa web album is now google+ photos). If you look inside the new post screen in blogger and click on the insert picture icon, you see the dialogue window (shown on the right). The third item lets you insert from a picasa web album, but here is the rub, you may not find any recently uploaded photos, They must be in an album. This means you have to nominate an album when you upload the photo or Move the photo from the general date based Auto-back or Autoawesome areas into an album (you can create a new album in that move operation if ot doesn't already exist). I don’t think you actually move anything you just create a link to the photo from the album view. (Yes it is pretty obviously smoke and mirror stuff). Thus avoiding the duplicate comments/posts issues I have struck using the share/embed approach from within google+ photos. Once your photo has been posted it also shows up in an special extra Photos from your Post album. The image of the frustrated dog chasing his tail is getting stronger!

Yes, yesterday was magnificent!

Virtual Albums

One aspect of digital photo management that I like is the ability to create virtual albums (collection in lightroom).  These are not duplicate copies of the photos just different views that show only the photos selected without having to move to the folder/directory in which it is stored.  The photos remain in the original folder on the computer, there is just an additional link entry in your album to find that photo and display it.  It is the perfect way to store and show only a best photos or photos on a given theme. They are a great way to organise your photo collection and probably deserves a more detail post in the future.

The downside using an album structure in current software is that it can be very hard to transfer this structure to other computers and/or software.  Each package has the unique way to maintain the album contained within its code.  A few packages will let you exports and upload the contents of albums but fall short of being able to export the album structure,    For example Lightroom does allow their collections to be exported as lightroom catalogues, then reimport this catalogue into lightroom on a different computer.  The process is simple enough but is better described by Steve’s Digicam post. Another examples is the original Picasa and Picasa Web Albums (the on-line side, which is now google+ photos) which lets you maintain matching Albums on-line as on your computer and synch the two.

Use Album Keywords as Metadata

A neat way I have to be able to exchange the the organization you have established with your albums and then be able to exchange this between packages or onto online services that support the Album concept, is to code all the contents of the album (or collection) with a unique Keyword, tag or Hashtag. I was for a time using the ~collection_  prefix to identify this organization metadata by I have abbreviated this to ~alb_ (for Album). Of a  photo or batch of photos is transfered it is usually easy to search for the new metadata, Tags or Hashtags and create a new album or similar grouping from the search results.

To finish here is a great post by +Will James, on how to reorganize your albums in google+/picasa web albums.

A different take on organizing photos

At the moment I suspect there are two diverging school on what organizing your photo mean. The first group, which is the loudest amongst photo “experts” on the social webs, involve specific “workflows and organization and keywording” as you load your photos, into such packages a photshop, elements and lightroom. Whilst they claim to organised your photos, I see them more as filters that will help you find the classification you have diligently coded into your photos as you load them. Ok this is not the reality for most of us. The real world just has larger and larger sets of photos scattered all over the place. The modern equivalent of a shoebox full of snaps shoots only the shoe box is no longer just in one place. In other words most of us have a mess rather than a collection. I was looking around for a more automated way to sort through a large mess, following the example of everpix that was at least showing the way to classify your photos into different groups from the image itself rather than from keywords you have to add. Picture life was my first review, but its slowness left me looking for more.

When I first downloaded photologhy, I tested it on on about 8,000 photo (picture life has just reached 130 photo scanned) and it was super fast. It creates a thumbnail style view of all your photos, set up as one scrollable collection. However the goodness starts when you use the variety of filters that run down the left hand side of the screen, which can be used to created a search, which is show graphically on the right hand side of the screen. These filters can be combined to narrow down your search. They cover time of day (which I presume comes from the exif details), features (shown below),location (just inside & outside), content (such as sunset, people, beaches …) text (back to search in file name and exif metadata) and color (via a simple colour whee-lish pick list).b It will take no time to get the hang of using it and you can very quickly skrink down what you are looking for. Will you find everything, maybe not but you will very quickly get to the most likely set of images from there it will be easy to review in the scrollable thumbnails.

Once you find the photo or photos you are after you can click on it and go into the photoscreen, which will let you find the photo’s location by clicking on the little folder icon, You also a tool bar along the bottom, which lets you set up new groups (like albums), export the images to files a web site and flickr and Picasa web (all easy to set up). There is a simple print and post the image as you screen wallpaper and even a limited editing capability. Not to forget a trash bin, which deletes the image from disk not just from photology’s index! (I couldn’t find a remove from index option). All these controls are basic but really cover the main tasks you are likely to undertake when you are browsing through your photos.

Well the honeymoon was over when I tried to connect up to my main collection (approx 215,000 photos). The scanning took over the computer and nothing else really got a look in for hours. Then I hit a number of crashes which started about 150.000 photos point. At each crash I was asked me to email the diagnostics which I did and then there was a length rebuilding index step and the program stop. Restart photology would run for a little while before another crash, and so on and so on….  Discouraging to say the least.

The getphotology.com web site is in german and seems more like a blog.even with google translate on. I was not able to find the tutorial section but the layout and controls of the software are pretty simple once you discover that the settings can be assessed under the q at the top right of the screen.

So Photology is only something I can only recommend “as is” and that’s probably just as a glimpse of the concept and its potential, which is promising. However there is a way to go before it can become a useful tool.

Everpix as “the” meta-collection?

I probably picked the wrong day to start using everpix (well just the free trial), because flickr was down as I was trying to set everpix up and I got taken around a series of connection errors, so I could not figure out if everything was ok of not. That frustration aside everpix is a kind of metacollection, that handles your photos where ever they are on whatever device you want! Ok its not universally magic just yet but is a refreshing move in the right direction for most of us.
Everpix is a great idea, aimed at tackling the great "photo mess" you know all those photos from different devices, posted and stored in different place. As the introduction states " The problem is… the more photos we have, the harder it is to organize them, or sort through that endless mess." Once upon a time they where prints or perhaps negative in shoeboxes. I know you are not inclined to sort through them right now but at least they are largely in one place. In a recent interview on the digital story podcast, the developers commented that most uses start with a collection of about 10,000 images including duplicates scattered around the web. Organising this manually is getting beyond comprehension.
Rather than display everything, it claims to intelligently select the more significant photos as "highlights" and then selecting them will take you into the similar photos. This is not unlike google+ highlights feature and seems to make similar choices. There is also a another feature called flashback, which starts with todays photos and lets you explore your collection for special moments from there. from there. As well as a date classification it shows icons for food, nature, cities and people but these four categories haven't been discover in my collection yet (there is a warning it may take a while)! The collection is also viewable by source. It works a lot smoother than flickr but is similar to the big new seamless mosaic display. . Only now you see what is in flicker, google+ (picasaweb) and on your phone and computer all together. Be patient it can take some time to scan through (sync) your collection, however this is very kind on your bandwidth as you don't have upload the images to yet another location.At the moment they have apps to do the search and syncing for Windows, Mac and IOS devices (Iphone and Ipod), I note the claim that android is coming soon
Under the bonnet everpix does seem to maintain web optimized thumbnails (big enough for current computer screens) on their servers. These are a lot like lightroom’s smart previews and if you are using a chrome or opera browser you can opt to use WebP for a faster performance and significant space saving.
There are two important features that I think will make this popular, because they not adequately addressed by most other web sites and services

1. The default is full privacy, You can share, via a neat little paper aeroplane icon, via email, facebook, or twitter or create a photo page on the web, but you must authorize the sharing. You own and control the images and no metadata is stripped out, syncing and connections are made via https and is encrypted.
2. The system recognizes duplicates, even at different sizes and resolutions and only keep one copy for display, at the highest resolution, but will combine the metadata from all copies and also the link to where they are stored.

If you want to try out everpix, try this link and you will be emailed the details to set up and account. The free trial give you access to the last twelve months of your photos (although it will index older files as well) and you can earn extra time by using the apps, recommending it to others or pay for an unlimited photos in the collection.

Collections, Photosets & Albums

How you organize your photos on the computer is not necessarily contingent on where the files are stored. Many packages also offer another way to organize how you view your photos. My many mistresses project, has shown me it is this second. more virtual view, rather than the actual folder location, that brings real power to how you interact with your collections on your computer or on-line.

The idea is to have a second method of organising just the photos you wish to see in a given [computer] "album". This album is much like an old fashion photo album with those peel back or transparent sleaves. You can easily rearranges the contents but at any given time it will have a fixed content that anyone can look through. Picasa and Photoshop elements use the term album, Lightroom uses collections and Flickr calls them photosets but they are essentially the same type of always editable collections of the photos you wish to show as a group. The albums don’t actually exist as folders on your computer disk, and they will probably contain photos spread across many actual folders of photos on your computers, or the net. Importantly deleting a photo from an album doesn’t delete the original from its folder on your computer. Without doubt they are the best way to group and organize your photo collections. It is also a great way to always have only "the good ones" to show guests, or groom you portfolios.

The Big Downside to using Collections & Albums as an organization tool is that they are not easily exchanged between different software or even computers and other logical collections of images. The following mind map tries to document the many paths (and processes) that I have learnt to follow trying to preserve the integrity of my albums (which are shown as the shaded wavy/bubble edged groupings)

Without doubt the best tool for me has been picasa. its albums are easy to setup and maintain, with the big bonus that if I move or copy the directories containing the original files (such as backing up and archiving them) then the flagging of those photos from specific albums travels with the photos inside the picasa.ini file. So that when you look at those photos on the new machine using picasa that will automatically create the same albums. Also you can easily choose to upload the whole album of just selected photos from it to google+ and the album name and attributes are also created as well as a link to indicate the file has been uploaded. My album names and content tend to be quiet ad hoc, depending mainly on what I am photographing at the time. I also generally tag the data with suitable keywords that identify the album contents. Whilst on the initial machine I upload to (typically my laptop) I do load and display both the raw and jpeg files, I have recently stopped including the raw files in my picasa albums (ie they are becoming exclusively just the jpegs) but I do tag both the jpeg and matching raw files with the same keyword tags. This ability to quickly organize the photos as well as the speed of importing are the prime reasons I prefer to load everything into picasa first.

I have recently gone over pretty exclusively to using dropbox to upload my phone images, because it does it so seamlessly. Dropbox also has an album feature which is useful both to organise and share these phone photos, without having to first upload them to any computer. Since I also have the chrome drop box sync app running, if I just put the drop box folder in my picasa watch list the drop box organization also automatically appears in picasa. Albums are also a great way to control how you share your drop box photos.

Lightroom has proven more fussy and lives up to her precious and self-centred reputation. Collections are essentially the same but lightroom must control all aspects of the collection, and I haven’t yet found a way to let lightroom “share” this organization with other software including photoshop express! However lightroom does offer the most elegant tools to manage and use collections. it has a two tiered structure, so you can have collections within collection sets, which gives you a useful subsetting capability at the collection level. they one down side with collections is I haven’t found a simple keyboard shortcut to add the current photo to these collections (i’ll talk about quick collections, which do have a keyboard shortcut, a little further down). So you have to drag and drop photos from the library grid view or the film strip into the collections, which i find disturbs the selection process a little. You also have the very useful smart collections feature, which has a couple of basic categories such as recently modified, without keywords, video files etc but the real power is you can set up your own smart collections based on any filterable selection you like, by keyword, location,camera exif metadata like ISO or Focal length and elaborate combination of any of these. the beauty of smart collections are they are built automatically. The quick collections are useful, because you can use the B key as a keyboard short cut to add the current image into a quick collection. Quick collections are an grouping that only last for the current lightroom session and that organization is lost next time you start lightroom. So when using quick collections it is important to select the whole new collection (keyboard shortcut is <CTRL> B) then drag and drop this into the appropriate collection, or create an new collection and tick the include the selected photos option. I have found that quick collection often pick up some stray images, not sure why  (<CTRL> <SHI+FT> B clears the quick collection). You can also export collections, as a lightroom catalogue for transferring to other computers (or backup/archiving).

Lightroom’s publishing services, are a great way to “share” collections directly from lightroom but again they rely on a more manual selection and setup. Once selected however its just a case of pressing the publish button and everything else happens according to the options you have set up in the service. I am finding the flickr service works well and I can publish straight into photosets set up in lightroom.

My final observation is that it is very good practise to add appropriate keyword coding into your metadata, because then you can easily use a filter in a different package to reselect your grouping and recreated your album/collection. Typically I will be using keywording created in picasa as I review my new photos to help the grouping in lightroom but the reverse also it very useful for taking a reorganization in lightroom back into picasa.