My $10 Photobook arrives

My discount Snapfish photobook arrive in the mail yesterday. I have prepared and ordered photobooks via Snapfish before so I was confident it would be good and in fact it was great. Mainly because it forced me to documented in a physical way something that had up to then only existed in the virtual world.

This little book is mainly based on images that became popular (lots of views and favorites) via flickr’s Explore feature. There are a lot of purist and armchair warrior's that criticise this interestingness based logarithmic selection feature, that‘s ok they are entitled to, providing they explain their reasons (which few do). However I feel a little pride in having photos selected (sometimes I don’t understand the appeal of a specific image) so having them in a physical format is even more satisfying.

The real important observation for me, there is no longer any reason why you can’t take some of your photographs, particular those ones your are proud of and crate a personal photobook. Giving them a more permanent place to exist, because on the glutted stream of social media “photographs” they will soon be forgotten and lost. If your worried about cost. Prepare then now (particularly select the collection of photos to use and the rough layout) and then just wait for a decent discount offer.

Putting Linux to work on my Air Gapped Archive

Yesterday’s realization about Linux, reminded me that I have an older computer dedicated to Linux, the Ubuntu flavour. I only use it occasionally (only 3 times in the last year) and its not connected to the Internet. Its my Air-Gapped Archive. However it is a very important to me. I use this older netbook to handle my photo Archive of original Photographs, including RAW images & photos of my art works.

I choose Linux for a couple of reasons. First the attempts to upgrade my little toshiba netbook to windows 10, initially half worked and progressively slow until an attempted system reset ensured it never worked in Windows again, but I found it worked well with Ubantu . Second Ubantu (and Linux) are Open Source, not propriety operating system so there is less chance of being depricated or abandoned.

I must admit I have only updated twice so far since setting it up and today will be the third update (effectively I’m averaging every 4 months (not 3 months) and that means each year I will be running through the full cycle of Son – Father – Grandfather. This year I’m using a series of Old Hard Disk, which I have reformatted and now I am copying on the complete back up set a fresh (from the external Hard drives (in this case in the red covers). Its not fast, I expect it will take about 3 hours to copy and verify approx. 2.7TB of data.

I have also downloaded a couple of programs to help me out if I end up with only the LINUX access at any time. These are Linux version of XNView MP, a cross platform version of the popular photo/movie viewer and converter, and DarkTable, an excellent open source photo editor, that is also available on several platforms including Linux. Both can handle jpeg and the three RAW format I have .cr2, .pef .orf, I feel happier being able to see my photos. Even though this archive is essentially a digital dataset, seeing it is the best assurance that it is a true archive.

PS I left the complete rebuild run over night and it seems it took closer to 6 hours o copy and verify 2.8GB of photos & videos

Three Weeks On …the cloud photo archive splits into two

              

My cloud photo archiving experiment is continuing but only one of the original contenders, OneDrive, has survived and still running well. I was looking at a way to automated the update process to it and I have gone back to a very “manu-matic” (part manual, part automatic) method utilizing the powers of PhotoMechanic. There is a story behind that choice so I might explain that now.

A real advantage of the OneDrive approach is being able to control the sharing of specific photos with others in a secure (email private perma-link) connection (Dropbox also does this well). Google on the other hand isn’t secured (their idea of secure is just to have complicated file names, but that file name does have a permanent url, which is always publically accessible) AND I’m sure their approach will soon be, if not already being hacked. This private share feature would make such a service a good place for a family photo resource, that is only shared with the “trusted” family members.

This then got me thinking about making the family photos archive separately, and the more I think of it the better this strategy becomes. The difficulty is how to separate out the photos and more importantly the family just wants one or a few good photos not everything. The solution is good rating and culling. Damn, more work! This can be done with lightroom, On1, Aftershot Pro, Darktable using star & colour tab ratings. Providing I have this software automatically writes out. xmp sidecar files, I can make and change these rating at any time. These programs all monitor the .xmp rankings (Pick flag are an exception which none of the software seems to want to exchange, and I don’t use them anyway)  As I am reviewing or processing my photos I consciously mark those photos with the purple colour tab (pressing <Alt>5 in most software, but not lightroom). However I like to recheck my ratings and colours using PhotoMechanic’s contact sheet display view perhaps once a week, I review each days contact sheet (PhotoMechanics Term for the folder/thumbnail view) and I can then filter to see only one star and above rated. I can also check the colour tags and metadata updates if required. and recheck the ratings (eg change * to ** etc.). Next I remove the purple tagged family photos (they will go into a separate archive (see below) and finally I “save as” the selected group to my OneDrive folder on my computer. I am only saving finished jpeg files and have adopted the practice of resizing the photos to 2400 pixels on the longest dimension and jpeg quality to high. This approach to reduces the file size but in future being able to print approx 10” by 8”.  Finally it wpould be possible still be able to upscale because I have not utilized the .jpeg lossy compression to reduce size.

There was a secondary benefit from reaching back to a manu-matic step, after uploading my better photos into the cloud archive, without family photos included. I could switch the filtering to only include family photos (the purple colour tag and 2 starts of greater) and upload those to my trials of a private flickr family group and revised dropbox family folder. More is likely to unfold with this second type of cloud archive, so say tuned for updated.

Two Weeks On … only one and a half left in the cloud archive race

         

My photo archiving experiment is really just reduced to microsoft’s OneDrive, which is functioning without any hiccups although I haven’t yet managed to fully automate it, because I don’t want a to create “google style vacuum cleaner suck-in everything” What I am considering building is a synchronization script that takes only the final jpeg version of stared photos and also incorporates the identification (If not removal) of duplicates, copying them into an appropriate OneDrive Directory/Folder on my main Desktop Computer, I expect y=to have to initiate this script/process.  From there OneDrive features take over and do the synch into the cloud completely automatically and in the background (ie no fuss or further actions required)

A niffty feature(aka magic) in the new version on OneDrive (under windows 10) is the free up space option on OneDive directories. At very regular intervals the OneDrive checked and any new files synched to the OneDrive cloud. Any items in a folder or subfolder marked as free up space gets removed and represented by a set of place holders. Just clicking on that icon or filename (givens the message available on line) and can instigate its immediate down load. Its very seamless but does free up the need for a lot of local diskspace. Perhaps it would have be nice to have just thumbnails of photo in the place holder files but hat sort of review/search  can be oust as easily done in the cloud version on OneDrive Photo Archive.

I suggested in last week’s post I was considering Flickr and I have been, and I’m including here because it is free up to 1TB of storage. Which is a lot if you are only storing snapshot sized (4” by 6” or 2400 pixel on the longest side) jpeg images, Which I think would be ideal for a family photo archive. The biggest concern here is privacy.

We don't mine our customers' photos for information to sell to the highest bidder, or to turn into targeted advertising campaigns.

…Don McAskill (Owner Smug Mug)

Smug Mug recently bought Flickr from Oath who bought it from Yahoo.While their photo sharing and storage is not free, but they have been suggesting things at flickr might be much the same in the near future (which seems to include free accounts and the 1TB limit). So I’m encouraged to try out a small scale and very private Family Archive Photo Cloud based on around flickr. I wont be sharing anything here (ie public) other than it has been very easy to step up and use. Also I’m sure that even if I had to move in future to the basic level of Smug Mug subscription USD$3.99 per month (that's the discount if you pay annually, ~$50/year) I might have built a good resource for the wider family that will justify the outlay.