Comfortably Numb

Yellow Orchid II

A photo posted by norm hanson (@apimageo) on Aug 19, 2016 at 4:56pm PDT

 

The Pink Floyd song (my I am showing my age) comfortably numb (I prefer the Van Morison cover) contains the lyrics

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb

This nicely summaries how I feel about uploading to on-line services, on the go. Once upon a time I thought I had it figured out but that is now just a smudge on the horizon. On my recent trip I totally lost confidence in google (and using picasa to upload to google “Private” photo albums, By the way, If you share a photo or photo album on google it is no longer private, just the weird address will be hard to guess). The waves of change are confusing and too often surreal like someone talking but no sound a kind of metaphysical painting in a very still piazza. I can feel/see something happening but it is hard to comprehend and where it is going. Thus I am shrinking back on the number of ways and places I try to share my work. DropBox for private shares, Flickr & Instagram for public shares with the occasional Tumblr. I am well over the pain of change and things not working or being deprecated, I just want to be Comfortably Numb.

http://myscratchings.tumblr.com/post/149207230105/test-2

 

PS All three versions of these flowers where processed on and posted from my phone.

Google Photos without the +

Between the time I posted my blog post and shared some photos with family & friend from the Singapore airlines lounge in Singapore, just before midnight Singapore time last thrursday, and arrive back this morning in Melbourne friday morning.  Google+ Photos had changed to just plain Google Photos. The logo is the same, just mining the + in the name, and superficially the screen displays are the same (the update is for both the web albums and mobile+ apps, at least for the android app) but the menu panel is minimal and gone are the  album selection menu and controls at the top of the view. The few controls visible are just small icons. the first Icon on the upper right is assistant and my assistant tells me I’m all caught up but I suspect this is where the former autoawesomes might live for now one. The middle icon is for photos and where thumbnails of the photos are  display, organised by date (uploaded). the final icon is for collections and seems to house both stories and albums. the three dots access some additional settings/features, but if you preferred the old drop down menu you can click on the menu square in the upper right (it has three horizontal lines.

At first impressions it can be very difficult to find being able to do much at this level and you really have to click on a photo to find any familiar tools, such as being able to edit the image, but again using something much simpler than snapseed. The one important change I found quickly was in the ability to share (now very much focussed on sharing with the world rather than just google+ folk, The Ability to share into blogger and flickr do seem serious oversights. The import addition is the blue circle with a chain to indicate a direct link, which the image URL that can be posted in included in web links etc. (note it is not html the code to embedded a links just the URL itself).

At this stage the interface is certainly clean but it is over simple if you are used to picasa web album and have put up with google+ photos. The introductory screen that claims it is easy to edit and share photos is correct because at first look that would seem all you can do (you seem to have to let google do the other stuff on your behalf). My real concern with the way google auto backup (called autosync) is pulling everything into the cloud is how are the photos being organizes and it would appear that the assistant will do that (despite telling me there is nothing to do) I’ll guess I’ll really have to wait to judge just how useful the assistant is going to be. The start up introductory screen also shows a screen called Automatically organized and searchable, with an example of finding all the dog photos, like the new flickr classification this looks like the style of feature I thought showed promise in everpix. However where is it and how does it work? well it popped up automatically as soon as I tried to do a search (using the lonely looking search box at the top of the main screen. Well it obviously is trying some sort of subject recognition system on the images to let you search but such categories.

I was both a little surprised at how well it had search through my photos for Things & Places and apparently doing a reasonable job. yet there where clearly a number that where also wrong.  It would be nice to be able to correct these misclassifications, but as yet I can’t see how. I really hope that this uses an AI image recognition whereby I could help train the selection further for even better automatically tagging and grouping. Lets see what the future brings.

I then got side tracked trying to checkout the Updated Android Google Photo app which downloaded ok BUT then reported I need to update the Google Play Services (but that failed!) and left me unable to get access to any photos on the net. Effectively turning  what was a reasonable photos app off. Was Not Happy about that. However I have subsequently deleted some space hungry google apps got play services to play and reloaded those apps.  Not sure my access to my picture is any better but the theme search seems a bit of fun (at the moment). Its probably not good enough yet all the same.

Finally there was an interesting claim that you will get unlimited free storage. Big claim but you have to do a bit of investigating and the unlimited free storage, only applies if you leave it to google to decided what is high quality (and will compress larger photos to that size). This may not concern you if you are just using on-line storage as a way to have your images in one place and easy to search as opposed to having the photos on google being your only backup (with full size images). You can still opt to stay with the  free 15TB offer and even pay a little bit to have more stored on-line.

This post is a week late because of the hassles with the blogger not found errors. Live writer is back and publishing and that’s probably more important to me than the changes in Google Photo.

Where to store your photos if you don’t have a computer?

Now that almost every smart phone is also a camera. There are a lot of people taking photos and many of them will just have the phone not a personal computer, or they may have to share computer access. The result is often photo spread all over the place. Some on social media sites, other hiding on old equipment or on a variety of computers, USB key and external hard dives. Whilst the idea of cloud storage of photos is not new it is certainly being offered by more and more services.

Canon have had a service, irista, like many other photographic and social media companies, for some time that offers on-line storage, The difference is they are now prompting it as the perfect place to store all your photos and offering a decent 10 gigabyte storage for free, What’s more you can sign up with your log in from a number of popular social media log ins, like facebook, twitter, google+ or Yahoo! As a photo manager this offering are more than adequate you can filter tag and organize your photos into albums or find them by date, camera etc. The on-line web pages can be accessed wherever internet access is available, there are apps and utilities to help upload photos. It can be set up much like dropbox, but after my experience with google+ backup hoovering up any photo or image I work on. So I am just letting the irista uploader sync from a specific directory at the moment  I use picasa to export to that directory and soon after the photos are settled into irista on the web. Very simple but importantly under my control.

There is an important clause in their terms of service, something like this needs to be in a lot of other services, but isn’t.

 6.2. We don’t own Your Content or any of the intellectual property rights in Your Content.; 

The terms of service do go onto some restrictions of what you can upload, and conditions that the service might be cancelled. They are fine, mainly ensuring your account is not used for anything unlawful, but make sure you read them for yourself Canon are also promoting the idea that their on-line storage is the one place to safely store your memories

All it takes is a lost phone, a damaged camera, or a broken or corrupt hard drive, and your photos and memories could be lost forever.

However remember safe storage “forever” just means as long as Canon provides the free service (which is likely to be a long time and they are also most likely to give you the option to transfer out, rather than just shutting down). At present sharing is limited to just facebook and flickr (ie no private sharing via email) and share can ne revoked. At present you can not edit the images on-line, and I see this as a significant limitation compared with google+. So I see this service primarily as a storage and organizing facility aimed at mobile users. I would not recommend using irista, or any other on-line service, as the only place to stored photos but it is a good place to start if you lack your own computer space.

This little teaser video doesn’t go into detail but it should give you an good idea of what they are promoting. If your photos are scatter across lots of devices, (computers, phones old memory cards) and places (instagram. facebook, twitter) now might be a good time to think of consolidating where they live, and a free account on Irista will probably suit most family and causal photographers.

irista teaser video from Canon Australia on Vimeo.

Perhaps this will be the year of the photo book?

I bravely claimed at the being of last year that it would be the year of the photobook. There are certainly photobook offerings a plenty, but alas every time I started to prepare one I found a stumbling block, sometime of my own doing, mainly procrastination but often what I saw as fundamental limitation in layout. The one’s that offered “simple” templates where difficult to customize and the ones with lots of formatting options required a lot of training to use (more trial and error investigation). I had been moving towards blurb (because it built into lightroom) and momento because you can set up an manipulate the book locally on your computer. Trouble was it had become tedious and I had lost interest.

What I had learned is it was a good idea to sort through your images and group them into an album or collection and have a rough idea of the way you want the photos grouped, and do a few back of the envelope checks for number of photos per page and number of pages needed. Remember you can only add and remove two pages at a time in most of the photo book applications. Most photobooks will start with the end pages set up so you add and subtract pairs of facing pages.

I did look at several of the on-line photobook offering, but quickly dismissed them, as I wasn’t interested in adding zany sticker of having cuddly themed backgrounds. A lot of folk might. Of this group the flickr offering seemed the most photographic, flickr photobooks are incredible easy to create and infact I do have two books partially set up. What stop me at the time was the cost, but I notice that has fallen. However I got to retry a few on-line templates for creating calanders before Christmas and found the process and templates of vistaprint and shutterfly much more to my liking.

So to recap, as this new year started I had a big backlog of ideas and half finished projects, but I also had two family events that really needed photobooks rather than standard prints (the type that go on the fridge and them get lost). Up to Christmas and then again at the turn of the New Year I was flooded with discount offers on photobooks, so I investigated a few. The one that interested me most was snapfish, they have an XXL (28 by 35cm) hardcover Landscape book (that’s big enough to do justice to good photos) and a good discount was available (sorry that offer will have expired by the time you see this. I have been using snapfish to order prints on-line for many years and find them competitively prices and easy to use. So in my next post I will tell a little bit about how I set up my snapfish photo book of a past vacation (a really outstanding project).

Is this year going to be the year of the Photobook? Maybe not, but it might be for me. If you are printing lot of photos and don’t mind the time to organise then and perhaps want something more permanent,  I suggest now is a good time to look out for good photobook deals, and just order the standard book, Then see if you like the quality and enjoyed the process before you spend too much money.

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.

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.

Photobucket has been updated too

I must admit I haven't used Photobucket in a while, it seemed to be keeping place with changes in other on-line services like google+,flickr & tumbler but I kind of backslide into just using blogger and flickr for my blog posts. It was once my first choice to add photos into my blogger posts! Ok that was almost a decade ago. I actually liked their idea of stories, but never got around to creating any. Anyway the display of photo and the uploads have had some significant updates, see the video below.

 

If you are new to storing your photos and videos on the web, and want a safe place to share a few (not everything) then a photobucket free account is a good place to start. Photobucket is a solid well thought out service, that has been around a fair while now and gives you one place to upload, edit, organise, share and print your digital photos, with the addition of an active community as well, albeit largely teenagers these days.

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.

Clipping Magic

Whilst I know the bigger software groups like Adobe and Corel are trying to provide packages that do everything. I have always been happy with a really good, and usually very simple, utility program that just does the thing I want. Ok like Apps on your phone such utilities can quickly grow into a big menagerie. Yet they usually let you get the job done quietly and efficiently.The same logic really applies to on-line applications. There are more and more becoming available, particularly with google's promotion of chrome. One such application that you need to check out for yourself is called clipping magic, and its still just and Alpha release. I know that Adobe's photoshop and Corel's power clipping can do much the same job but you need a few weeks of learning and a fair bit of skill to use them. Clipping Magic is actually really simple, you just need to draw a bit of green on the "foreground" (the part you want to clip to keep) and red over a few parts of the "background" (the part of the image you want to remove. It really is that simple and at the moment its free to try out.

5 steps to avoid sharing your on-line photos with the world!

There are many services that offer to share our photos on-line, and most, specifically the social media places, make it very easy but have defaults that mean your photos are being shared with anyone with net access. Perhaps you just wanted to share your photos with a few friends of family members. To really scare yourself, try finding some of your own images on-line using google’s neat reverse image search. To do that just drag and drop a photo you want to check onto the little camera icon on the google’s images search screen.

Ok now your scared! Time to pause and check whether that photo also lets others know where you live. You can find the extra information buried in your on-line photo by copying its URL to metapicz

So how do you fix it so your images and the hidden information they contain are not being shared with everyone in the future? Here are 5 steps you can take.

1) Make sure you know and set appropriately the default sharing setting when you upload photos. Most of the specialist photosharing sites like flickr, google+, photobucket, smugmug etc have a multi-level security/sharing system for just family, friends or then the public. Google+ have the added organizational control of just sharing with your selected circles.  Some cloud based photo services like Skydrive, and Drop Box also have multi-level sharing security and the private side normally involves sending those you wish to share with, a secure link (ie it has an access password/switch built into the link). A big limitation of these systems is in the  photo uploaders they provide, which often have public set as their sharing default. So you can unknowingly make your photo available to everyone. So it is in your interest to set the default to private and only set those you intend to share as public on an individual photo basis.

2) Be careful that you don’t share links to otherwise private photo, by reposting to public sites (like you blog or a social network site like twitter). in those systems that do allow you to share your images on another service such as facebook or twitter, Often they use some variant of OAuth to establish the authority to post on the attached site, unfortunately they seldom inherit the same privacy setting from your original post and the photo is posted as public. Generally if there is no mention of sharing security when you do the authorization there will be none (eg Sharing to twitter from flickr, even if the photo is private on flickr once it is shared to twitter it will be publically viewable on twitter)

3) If you don’t want strangers to find out where you live, work, go to school. Consider turning off the GPS in your phone, or finding the setting in your photo uploader to remove geotags/geolocation data. Flickr has a nice geo fence feature that allows you to supress showing location if your are close to sensitivity place (eg home, school etc). Lightroom has a setting to remove any geolocation data when posting an image via their Export or Publishing Services. You can also control the types of metadata exported.

4) Remove the photos from google search if necessary. I haven’t been a fan of the google’s official forums because they are often hard to figure out the context of the advice being given and even what the FAQs are actually asking. My impression has been that google staff must not actively moderate their forums or perhaps even read them (maybe I’m being a bit unkind here). However the Picasa Resources site does provide some good discussion on key FAQs about picasa and its advice on How to remove your images from google search gives some good advice on what to do, albeit quite technical advice. The photos don’t have to have been shared via picasa.

5) Don’t use Facebook (and probably Instagram), for any photo you don’t want to share with the world because someone else liking or tagging your photo will start sharing that with all their friends and so on. These access links can spread quickly and soon many folk you don’t know will be able to see and use your photos. Also the facebook TOS (terms of service), means they assume ownership of anything you post. I don’t have a facebook account, and I don’t want to be accused of facebook bashing but I understand in the past it wasn’t so easy or obvious how to remove and permanently delete photos, I gather facebook has yielded to pressure and here is a link to Steve’s Digicam with instruction on deleting facebook photos and albums.

So don’t panic, make sure you understand the sharing security on your favourite photo service and set the defaults appropriately. It is certainly not wrong to share your photos with others. It might just be wise to do little bit of checking right now for any existing images you don’t want shared publically.

Using Lr Publishing Services straight into DropBox

Probably about 6 months ago I had the idea of creating a “private place” on the net that would act as my own on-line gallery where I could show some of my works (both finished and in progress) only to those I choose to show it rather that everyone on the net. I won't go into my reasons just yet but I started to search through the TOS (terms of service) of many online albums and photo sharing sites and looking at what tools and apps where around to do this. In fact I got quiet distracted by adobe’s Create Cloud and after a lot of frustration and false starts I put this project aside. When I looked around last week at the cloud storage offering for photos I noticed that four had the TOS and tools I was after.So here is by first experiment using Lightroom’s Publishing services to load and “manage”  photos directly into DropBox.
I always liked the idea of publishing serves directly from lightroom but, perhaps like many I never really used any other than the flickr service. The flickr service, which I still use very occasionally, is pretty simple and doesn’t really do a lot. The only reason I see to use it is to stop double handling (ie exporting a jpeg just for upload then changing to another application to actually do the upload and perhaps add some tags and  retype the title etc, you know the tedium I’m sure. The Publish service to hard disk struck me just as a duplication of the export feature. However I figured if I used it to publish to a synched folder, it would then automatically be uploaded to drop box. Such a service is very simple to set up. The imprtant steps are to first identify the directory on your computer that is the one that dropbox has been set to synchronize. Note if you want to use a subdirectory of that it can not be changed once the service is set up, so instead I suggest you created a folder set underneath the published service. Thus allows you to control the folders from within light room.. There are a few other items that can help customize the export to suit web display, such as use the sRGB colour space I also wanted to keep the file size just large enough to get a good screen viewing and added the standards sharpening for screen display. The big advantage of the publish serevice is it will keep track of changes you maked and next time you select the Publish now it makes the appropriate changes into the DorpBox.

I’m also exploiting the new photo sharing & previewing feature in dropbox, You need to download and install the small applet, that syncs a folder from your computer with your box. Once that is set up anything published from lightroom will arrive in the appropriate location in your dropbox storage. In the photo view of your files on dropbox you see a timeline style view with “square” thumbnails of your photos, clicking on a specific photo takes you to dark “lighbox” style view. In addition the drop box owner (and collaborators) have the ability to create albums of the photos in the dropbox collection that are independent of the actual folders. The albums are a virtual organization view and you can have one image in several albums if you desire. I haven’t figured out a way to sync the dropbox albums with the lightroom collection but that doesn’t really matter here. Sharing just the album’s then gives you a lot of control over what you show others. So here is an album of my art for public view.
There were however two disappointments with dropbox photo feature, like so many other downloaded applications it tries to assume control of you photo imports (jumping in as soon as you insert a SD card, USB Key, camera or smart phone and tries to upload everything to dropbox. This is a nice option if that’s what you want to do BUT lucking there is a don’t ask me again option down the bottom (once turned off however I can’t see how to turn it back on). The second disappointment is less forgivable. Whilst the files with in dropbox are exactly as you uploaded them, if some one else downloads them from the photo view, then the metadata (and your copyright message etc) are stripped out. Which really make dropbox useless for my application

new layout in google+ (photo) & some enhancements

I also just noticed a significant change in the UI (user interface) for google+ and the layout of google+ photo (the old picasa album format is still there, and perhaps a bit easier to find, look for  the album menu item). The layout is definitely even clean and makes better use of space. One item that seems to have drawn less discussion on the net is that the size of the free account space has been increased to 15GB (for photos greater than 2048 pixels, smaller than that you have an unlimited capacity) however this is now shared across gmail, google drive and google+. It is still a BIG increase.

One “new” feature you should try out immediately is the auto enhance, found under more actions menu item on the lightbox display for a single photo. Picasa has always had the I feel luck button as a kind of auto enhance but this a whole lot better. Google is prompting the highlight feature which supposedly “automatically” chooses the best photos from a collection for a new album. Its good but I’m not totally convinced it’s for me. See a little about these features in the google promotion video below. I haven’t had a chance to play with other new Mix, HDR, Smile, Motion or Pano features as yet.

So what’s in Creative Cloud?

I had signed up for a web presentation of adobe’s creative cloud, BUT I was late and got lost in the Facebook frontend (probably because I am not a facebook member) AND the twitter feed (#hashtag #createnow) was a bit incomprehensible. HOWEVER I am interested in the ideas of creative cloud, a kind of low-ish fee monthly rental that gives you access to the latest and greatest software, tools, and knowledge of how to use them. If you are a struggling creative type, or student, and can’t (or don’t want to) fork out the very larger sums of cash to access the adobe tools (they are particularly expensive here in Australia) then this service is likely to be of great relevance. In addition to providing all the adobe creative software aa downloadable apps (this give the impression you are running them in “the cloud” but in reality you are downloading the applications and running them on your PC or MAC you don’t have to be on-line to use them) you also get 20GB of cloud storage, and access to a broad range of tutorial. If you can visualise an amazing project you should be able to get it up and working in a fraction of the time it might have taken before and better still you will only have had to pay for a few monthly rentals fees. I think this is pretty brave, but sensible, marketing from adobe.

So far this podcast from TV.Adobe is the best summary for a new potential user of what creative cloud is and how you might use it and getting started.

Kodak Gallery, soon to be now more

As part of Kodak's restructuring, their Kodak branded Web Kodak Gallery Service has been sold to Shutterfly, another existing and well used on-line photo service. Any photos or projects still active in the Kodak Gallery will be available only until 2nd July. After that Shutterfly will email instructions (it will be a mass copying of files to the Shutterfly site but I can find no more details on this step yet) on how to transition/move into Shutterfly. If you have photos in a Kodak Gallery (and I was surprised I still did) or just want to find a few more details of the transition, click here. As a bonus Kodak gallery are offering a 25% discount to existing customers during May

Kodak once the household name for film photography, and their marketing tag line a “Kodak Moment” was once wisely use for that precious memories often found within a candid snapshot. They have not found the transition into the digital age very easy.

Back in the Aviary

I have been using the toucan colour editor in aviary lately, to help select harmonious colour schemes in my photo impressions. It have a variety of nice features that I assume are primarily there at the request of web developers. However what I want to write about here is the rapid expansion of capabilties and connections aviary now offers. If you have broadband connection (I would not recommend using it, or any other graphic heavy application on a slow or flacky connection) you may find to can get a photo filtered, cropped and published to the web quickly and easily, probably in less time that it takes Photoshop or Corel Draw to open on your PC. It seems particular popular with those using Facebook & Flickr, being able to read and edit images on those services as well as publishing to them. It also offers a number of ways to share and publish images in the web and a good selection of social networks. You can use your existing twitter, facebook, google or Yahoo accounts to login if you don’t wish to join. Best part its still free.

Their byline says it all -

Aviary is a free, powerful suite of browser-based design tools for people who love to create.

The best way to keep up with their developments is to have a look around their blog.

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?”

On-line Photo Editors

The ability to do things on the web is expanding all the time and on-line photo editors are more or less coming of age now. They may not have all the features of Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro (or even GIMP) but they probably have most of the things you are likely to want to use, albeit just occasionally. Here are three of the better free ones.

PixIr, this is a comprehensive photo editor created in flash. so you need a flash plug-in to use it. Whilst it does cover a range of handy photo manipulation tools it is probably the filters that will appeal to most.

Picnik, is available to edit photos within Flickr, it is really easy to follow and less like the current range of photo edit software with their incomprehensible toolbars. Picnik has tabs that are more like wizards and pull down pick list (just graphics options). The frames and and stickers (stick on clip art) are probably the most fun. 

PiZap, is also easy to use and as it rates itself creativity wacky and the worlds EASIST Free onLine Photo editor. There are not as many features but it definitely for fun.

 

All these offer easy upload to a number of social networks, like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket … etc. All have an optional upgrade or pro membership option so you can store your work online and/or get more editing options.