Getting back to Workspaces, where ever they are

 

I am getting more and more convinced that it is being familiar with your workspace and tools is much more important than following a specific workflow. For a creative, how is not an an artificial deadline, the key is being able to find what you want when you need it. That is what saves time and avoids distractions. In a recent status note on known, about the apparent need to “spring clean” my studio I strayed into the issue of roughly organized but not necessarily neat, I realized this applies to computer workspaces as well.

One of the biggest issues today with computing, information and photography becoming more mobile, is the really fundamental issue of where things are. They could be temporarily stored anywhere, on a phone, on one of several computers you have access to or even on the cloud (aka a web based service). The idea that they might be available from everywhere on everything is appealing but most of the offerings at the moment are not quiet magic just yet. I have found a few services that offer at least some rudimentary sharing across devices, my favourite is drop box its low fuss and automatic, The only draw back it is a free account so space is limited. I still like Box but it is a little more effort to use and find files.

I was warming to One Drive (aka SkyDrives) until a I ran into a security check, it would appeared access to my old skydrive stuff has been “quarantined” or lost. I can only assume this has happened in a recent “security” update in windows (and/or the OneDrive service) but it would have been nice to know it was happening, I’ve reconnected a couple of my computers but can’t seem to get the onedrive directory synched (although one note is synching perfectly and I can read my hotmail). So I thought I’d try connecting my older android (damn no longer compatible) C’est la vie. I won’t go into the details but google drive is in much the same camp for me, and surprising the android app is no longer compatible either. I no longer send photos its way, even though it is supposedly sharing the google+ photos space! So both these services fall short for me and I’m not using them either.

One refreshing trend, is that some Browser style software (like Perfect Photo Browser & AfterShot Pro) let you browse in these cloud location. Even File Manager lets you view them providing you have set up the little apps that create and synch directories on your computer. Providing you cloud places are not to large this is wonderful because you can visually scan what's there. Picasa lets you define how you an scan these drives. Other Software that has databases of images and metadata like Lightroom, have to import the images and this can be a hassle if your cloud place changes a lot.

  

This is all well and good for smallish numbers of files, a quick scan of thumbnails is normally all that is required to find the group of photos or photo you were after. It start to become unworkable if you have a lot of images on the cloud spread across several services. I had started to fall into that trap but I’m pulling back. Google+ photos attempt with autobackup to bring all your photos and posts onto their web server and adobe’s are not real solutions for me. Each has some nice features but keeping track of photos could be a lot better.

The cloud is a good place to shares and exchange photos, and browsers that let you see then in conjunction with larger photo collection are a step in the right direction, but storage on-line has a fair way to go, at least for me.

The best solution for me at the moment is still to have a logical network drive (I use the letter S: for Scrapbook, actually the directory name is photo Scrapbook) which I link on all the PCs on my network. (I haven’t figured a way to get my phone connected, but I am considered linking part of it at least to Dropbox.). Do have a scrapbook area on each of my traveling laptops, but I regularly synch these and my recent photos from Dropbox back to the share directory. This directory is backed up to my NAS, but I end up heavily culling this area, since my original photos are archived elsewhere. I only keep the better post processing, and special events stuff. I haven’t figured out the best way to archive this stuff (yet!) so the collection is growing.

Is Google+ the Kragle?

I’ve made a lot about all the many mistresses (software applications) managing my photos on my computers, but that number pales into insignificance against all the potential software available on the net and/or via smartphone or tablet apps. There are just way too many. So I will tell you of just a few.

Flickr & Photobucket, both are well established services that began in the time before the social media thing exploded and they offer fairly similar features. They are primarily place to share photos on line, and the have features to suit groups and communities for those with similar interests . They have grown and now offer many other facilities such as on-line editing, book printing, slide shows, its a long list. I like them both but haven’t been using them much at all, Possibly I’ve become too obsessed with trying to understand what's happening with the next mistress google+ photo.

I do still feel I was railroaded into google+, from gmail & youtube but mainly from Picasa,the web side view of which is now google+ photos. There are certainly a lot of “features” and I only use a few but the auto-backup and notifications are driving me crazy. There have been a few nice surprises, some of the HDR images have been fine and I working hard on being a member of a communities. While google+ photo does give access to a larger and growing community of photographers its really only on her terms. They are not well explained, kind of just take it or leave it.  The on-line google+ photos edit features are pretty good, and certainly cover most basic needs. The picasa web style albums are still fine but auto-backup is creating a really big conglomerated mess (if you can't remember the date taken good luck finding your photos!). The highlights (seem to overlook too many good photos) the stories are not worth mentioning and the “gifts” aren’t in my view autoawesome at all. They are more like the second rule of lord business,"Never listen to anyone else's ideas, yours are the best", in the lego movie. Perhaps google+ is really the kragle to make things social web permanently the way the google-verse wants? 

I am taking steps to get less involved, only letting her backup from a specific directory, returning to picasa as my preferred method of sharing, reducing the number of people in my circles and turning off notification (with  the exception of  ThePatch Community)

The last on-line mistresses I want to discussed, she is actually more like a butler, she is DropBox. The service that provides easy file transfer between computers and across the web. Unlike the other services above her photographic credentials are pretty simple (Ok I haven’t tested carousel, because my android phone is still running an old version, however most android apps have no trouble sharing with her, ie DropBox) She can be instructed to atomically upload any photos from you phone (or tablet) when she detects a WiFi signal. She can also manage a small part of your file system on your computer onto which any new files will get synchronise. So one minute a photo is on your phone the next it can easily be accessed from any computer you have connected and synched. If you want you can set up little albums (virtual  organizations of these photos) still within the drop box synch area (and synched across all devices). It is also easy to share with one (via email) or many (email and conventional HTML links). I do appreciate DropBox.

The Biggest Workspace of Them All

In my post about workspace not workflow, I omitted the biggest workspace, the all pervasive, everywhere at once internet, now often just referred to as the cloud. This oversight may be because I am still uncertain what it has to offer, even what it is? Rather than being on uniform and extensive place, it is a mismatch of different services, formats and connections.

So Why even put stuff there? Well the ease of exchange and sharing is wonderful and services like drop box make it very easy, not to forget email which is over 20 years old now.The other reason often suggested is that social media can be a great way to expose your work to others. In fact all I see is a pervasive pressure to go viral and become an overnight celebrity, that drives a lot of appallingly bad content. So much of what is on offer is boringly the same copy-cat, look at me stuff (eg rise of selfies and LOLcats, need I say more). I am starting to firmly believe it is ok to share what you are working on (as in provenance) your thought and methods and some of your works, but it is more important to be honest in following your creativity (ie don’t worry about the crowd).

I have had negative and unresolved issue with scrapping of my content and unauthorised (aka stealing) of my images. So I only want to share publically via services that offer creative commons licences. I am also not sure that social media is as secure as they pretend. I worry about small things like less desirable people I don’t want to share with, just what is actually being stolen and reused as some one else work or worse sold. I’m very conscious of the filter bubble effect that social media sites like google+ and facebook can create.

So I am very unlike to do much more than token photographic works and art publically in the cloud. I am certainly unlikely to put my entire collection of photos in the cloud even for a backup. Lets see if I am forced to eat my words in the next 10 years!

Even More Mistresses

Not content with have a number of photo managers (aka Mistresses) that don’t really get along, I just noticed that I have a growing line of “cloud storage” courtesans vying for my attention, my files, many of which are photos and a bit more bandwidth demand for syncing (slowing start up). Whilst I used to use BOX and Google Drive extensively, I must admit I have moved to dropbox for things photographic, and specifically for syncing photos from my phone. Its really easy and automatic (I have set my android up to upload any photos whenever the phone finds a WiFi link).

Whilst in theory Google Drive is integrated with Google+ photos (& Picasa Web Albums) in practice I’m still a bit lost and haven’t use it for photos in quiet a while. The update of Skydrive to One Drive, seems to be in name mainly and a little bit of cleaning up the interface. Like Skydrive it does have photo friendly features.

I’m no closer to choosing one over the others and will probably keep using which ever is appropriate for my current needs on an ad hoc basis.

CNet’s Sarah Mitroff, has a good summary of the offerings of these four cloud storage services.

Picture Life in the slow lane

Following the demise of everpix, I decided to take a look at alternatives. There are of course some well established on-line photo sharing sites, including but not limited to instagram, flickr, google+ and photobucket, however the emphasis here is on sharing your photo with others and some may have very unfortunate terms of service. What I was looking for was something to mange “my” photos on-line, sometimes privately sometimes publically and whilst these services mentioned can allow privacy, they are really more focused on the sharing aspects. One service that I have seen frequently mentioned as an everypix alternative is Picturelife. This is a cloud based service to store all your photos and video on-line. It promotes that itself by the slogan “You take the pictures. We’ll keep them safe.”

At the features level it is very similar to everypix, just a little more appleverse oriented, there are auto-uploading apps for mobile devices, syncing from Macs &PCs, duplicate detection (“Keep the best, hide the rest”), intelligent photo organization (one claim I’m not able to substantiate), backing up photos from the major social networks and private emails and photostreams for family and friends. It also have Iphoto and Aperture support and the IOS apps support airplay so you could get your photos displayed on Apple TV. There is also a new IOS app called memories, which works a lot like everpix flashbacks. If you want to store everything in one place (and in the cloud) this will probably appeal to you but the pricing could become expensive with a large collection (eg a 500 GB subscription cost $250 per year, whereas a 500GB USB external backpack will probably cost less that $75). The Web App (actually just a browser view) is nice and simple with album, places and a time line view. but it doesn’t load very fast and you get to see a colour swatch as the photos load. I certainly hope the premium accounts are more responsive. It you have your own Amazon S3 bucket you can use that to backup your photos via picturelife.

At the operational level it is even more remarkably similar to everpix, except when it come to performance. You download a small program (app) that then trawls your computer for nominated folders (eg C:/username/pictures) and Syncs them in background up to your account. I’m not sure if it the fact that I’m trialling a free account but after 2 days I only have 34 photos and one video uploaded (most are the raw version) out of 80 days and approx. 15,000 photos, just a tiny part of the photo collection I now have, but the status window is suggesting its going to take 50 days to sync those! However my free trial account only give me a 5GB limit and those ~15,000 files are closer to 180GB. Now at this trickle slow speed, which will also consume your band width as well, if I had to up load a terra byte of images It could takes years.. I surmise that everpix was much faster because it was only creating a thumbnail/preview on the web. Then I realised picturelife was uploading RAW files (presumable not the matching JPEG). This RAW file support is great if you want you whole photo collection on-line, but RAW files are large and they must be rendered as .jpg for web display anyway. So I’d be just as happy having the jpeg file or a preview on line and the original’s (and RAW files) locally.

So I will keep trying it out picturelife for a little while at least but I’m convinced I would not want to pay a premium to slowly store my photos on-line and I’m perfectly happy using drop box to automatically sync from my cameraphone now while I still maintain my collection myself locally with a external hard drive backup.

More Street Art

Richmond is probably most famous for its hard edge street art (aka graffiti covered in tags), but I found this sculpture wall and reflective space on the very busy corner of Bridge & Punt Rd.

Yet another example of a Smartphone photo taken and synced via dropbox before I even got home (no Instagram involved)

who gives a TOS?

Google are about to updated their terms of service (TOS) and it is very refreshing to see an on-line service provider, firstly notify its users about the changes and also focus on those aspects that let the user control what is to be shared. However the common click to accept terms, expressed in very verbose legalese, are seldom read by most of us. we just want to join up not spend half and hour or more trying to figure out what is meant.

If you are creative type and produce original works it is really in your interest to review the TOS of all on-line services you use. Many services assume ownership of anything your uploaded into their services, Facebook and Instagram assume you given then very draconian rights over redistribution, Dropbox which one held part of the middle grade have recently changed to claim more rights over your content.  Flick/Yahoo! and google+ are generally considered better. Terms of Service are fine, and necessary, they cover such things as the services right to cancel your account if you do bad things and the fact that they may take little or no responsibility for what you upload, most don’t claim they own your content but that statement will probably be followed by a clause that you “grant them non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post”. If you are not ok with this perhaps it is best not to use that service!

If like most of us you have tried to read the fine print and are still uncertain, here is a community (ToS;DR Terms of Service Didn’t Read) and website that understand and they aim to address and fix the biggest lie on the web “I have read and agree to the Terms” in one click!

The Benefits of Drop Box (& HDR)

I was out reseaching Sir John Monash, for my current art project, and took a HDR set with my android phone, because I have Drop Box set to upload new photos whenever it connects to a WiFi network.On the way home I travelled by train and thus passed through a station with the Metro Wifi, and by the time I got home the image set had been up loaded to my computers (which also run the Drop Box app. No extra effort required,

The statues is weathered brass and set against a grey yet bright sky, not the situation that would normally give a decent photo. I was expecting a silhouette against a blown out sky and yet the HDR Camera+ app actually made a reasonable job of preserving some (perhaps not enough) detail. Having a HDR capacity always in your pocket can be handy, when you are looking for art reference material even if it doesn’t create a perfect photo.

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.

PhotoFriday :: Mobile Phone Photo

In yet another bit of self reference, this is the artists manikin from my body clip, showing that he was photographed by my mobile phone and uploaded automatically to Drop Box, before being posted here.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Mobile Phone Photo