The enthusiasm for using anything Google or Facebook is being sucked out of me

I had been noticing for a while that it was just too co0incidental I would search for say a toner cartridge and then the same ads would be dished up on youtube, other searches, in Gmail. Instagram and Facebook for days/ Was someone spying on me listening in on everything I do, well yes. However, all the scrapping of every little bit of metadata is being justified on the grounds that it helps you see better content! I think that should be rephrased puts you in a bubble so you only see some of what you like and more significantly lifts the advertising revenue of those serving you the content (they most don't pay for).

So I have done a little research and just made two changes. I most often now used the search engine Duck Duck Go and also mostly (but not always because I do still use a few google tools) I have started using the browser Brave. The change to both was painless. Ok the top third of the page of the Duck Duck Go queries are not filled with paid adds and Brave seems a bit faster and streamlined, Also pretty well all those co-incidental bombardments of the same ads has virtually stopped. A little investigation in Brave gave me a good idea way.

By the way, these stats are just after a couple of hour on an average day.

Well it look like there is a lot more sharing (or piracy) of the thing left on out computer caches by some browser and social media services, than they want to admit too. I don't miss these creepy things.

I'm much happier now and I'm not going back!

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.

Sitemeter problem

This blog suddeny started crashing today, co-incidentally, by the way, just after I sent details of my blog's copy & paste plagiarist as a DCMA notice. However many other bloggers also struck the same problem and it turns out the problem is related to using the free sitemeter counter. On my site I got the error message above followed by a the bare blue on white "Internet Explorer cannot display webpage" error message, but I gather some others have experienced their browser crashing. I have temporarily removed the offending sitemeter code and set up the simpler easy counter version, just to keep tabs (until the site meter issue is fixed). Bizarely I figured out this problem after I recieved my weekly notice from sitemeter summarizing traffic and tried their site and recievd tha same error. So they may be sending out reports unaware of the havoc going on in the blogsphere.

Sorry to any regular readers that may have been distressed by their browser crashing.



LATE NEWS :: Sitemeter is back online (3rd. August)