PhotoFriday :: Metropolis

 revisting an old photo taken last year but bought into perspective with Lr5b Upright feature

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Metropolis

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

the oaks

PhotoProject :: Photographing Art & Lr5b Upright

One of the biggest issues when photographing art is getting rid of the lens distortions.This barrel morphing of the edges and keystoning, (that trapezoidal effect you see when a projector is at a slant to the screen) means that the frames will not align with the edges. There are some steps you can take when you are taking the photo, like using a prime lens , rather than a wide angle, or especially a wide angle zoom and photographing the work straight on and avoiding strong direct light.

Perspective correction in Photoshop can be used to fix these effect, albeit with a bit of a learning curve. The new upright feature in Lightroom 5 beta is a very easy to use alternative, and ideal for “Fine Tune” straightening up the edges. The above snaps where taken of my art works hanging in private homes, taken hand held in place they hung on the wall, so I was not always able to take a distortion free set up.In Lightroom 5b before I do any other editing I go down to the Lens Correction/Basic Tab and then use either the Auto (which tries to fix the main distorts or the Full (which I probably prefer) which attempts to align both vertical and horizontal strong lines, like the picture frame. I then crop to the art work and do any other exposure adjustments. Remember it is important to get the white balance right but avoid over post processing so you keep the colours real,  It’s that easy!

Yet another sunset

Photos in the clouds

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, just a starting point, prompted by the recent upgrades to skydrive & google+. The following services all offer free cloud storage, have a decent TOS (terms of service) that mean you still own the copyright to your files (unlike other  Social Net service like Facebook & Instagram who assume they own the copyright to anything you upload, others strip out your metadata) . They have private/public sharing options that you control.. All can be used from a variety of computers and mobile devices (apps are available for most devices) and all have the ability to mirror the cloud storage across your own computer device (desktops, laptops, phones, tablets). In other words all offer a decent service.

Drop Box	2GB
Box	5GB
GMail, Google Drive Picasa/Google+ Photo	15GB*
SkyDrive/Outlook/(Hotmail)	25GB*

* Shared space

Cleary Forty Seven gigabytes of space is a lot. How does that relate to how many photos you can save, its approximately twenty four thousand  (or more) jpeg files of the size taken by compact cameras and smart phones, Around three thousand three hundred full sized RAW files, as taken by recent high megapixel model DSLR cameras or four hundred & seventy five-ish HD movie clips (30second to 2minues) or eleven and three quarter eight gigabyte SD cards. So if your an occasional IPhone snapper that’s probably a life time of memories but for a professional photographer it could be just.a few days or a weeks worth of their photographic work. The rest of us will fit somewhere in between and I suspect it will be bandwidth that arbitrates how quickly our photos fill the clouds, but I’m now sure they will.

  

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.

fungai collage

New features for photo display on SkyDrive

I have been struggling a little trying to use adobe’s creative cloud, to provide a “private” place in its cloud to collaboratively share some collections of art and photos, with a very select group of my colleagues. Of course keeping anything “private” (by which I mean only share with those I want) on the net is not a trivial issue. Some the complexity may or may not be “user” related (ie me not understanding). However the issues have been incredibly frustrating because this is exactly what creativity in the cloud is all about. Perhaps I’ll post more on this sad journey later. For now I just gave up and went looking for a better way to share a select collection of my work to just a few people, and there are plenty of options, drop box, google drive and even flickr. As part of this I had a relook at skydrive (after abandoning it for a while). What a surpise, not only is the UI neater and crisper, there are two new display formats that microsoft have snuck into skydrive!

 
The first is an All Phones option under the main menu on the left hand side. This shows all the photos on your skydrive (as an alternative to looking at each folder into which they are loaded). Organized as a date base timeline (not unlike the default way picasa organises your photos on your computer). Once you select an image there is a new, filmstrip dark style, a cross between lightroom and google+ lighbox view. Both these views are very neat and give you a better on-line experience with your photo collection.  The free 25GB of storage should be another encouragement to use SkyDive as your cloud based photo place.

The big advantage of going sky drive for your “private” place in the clouds is the number of ways that can you can share (or not) your folders. This is not a new feature, you have always been able to control access at the folder level, now you can also just give access to selected photos via email, or selected social networks such as facebook & twitter (but then the photo will no longer be “private”!)

Photofriday :: Artifical Light

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Artifical Light

Hard Lessons on the Importance of Backups & Archiving.

In addition to the picasa database mix ups, which may or may not be related, I have suffered three external hard drive crashes, or malfunctions, in the past year, All of them contained photos but fortunately I didn't loose anything! I have been very regular with creating backups and maintaining at least 2 archives.

As all three of the drives were also holding my music library which iTunes was using at the time of the crashes AND there are so many hits on the net offering advice about recovering your iTunes library when you disc crashes (more often than not in iTunes 10). I started to get suspicious about iTunes 10 being actually responsible. No music was lost but I now rely on windows media play to listen to my music and just use iTunes 11 (which I really don't like) on an old machine to get podcasts and manage my old iPod Nano (which I still like)

Un-Jumbling Picasa

Non Destructive Photo Editors, have an achilles’ heal. Whilst they don’t change the original file (some may make a copy of it) they normal have to store the procedure that was undertaken and this is typically stored in a datafile somewhere. It might be a sidecar style file (like lightroom’s .xmp format) or a in the same directory (like picasa’s ini file) or even in a master database (lightroom’s catalogues). Because these files are normally hidden then it is possible to miss a corruption and damaged data could easily get formally rolled into your backups and archives.

In the process of moving around a lot of my photos I started to noticed that on at least two of my computers that Picasa occasionally displayed the wrong thumbnail. Clicking on a photo might reveal something else. The full view was the correct photo but the thumbnail didn’t match. Pressing the Refresh Thumbnails in the folder View did fix this locally. However the more I looked the worse the mix ups became, what appeared to be folders of new photos seemed to have some old photos scattered around. then the thumbnails would change! It looked bad. Yet I didn’t panic I know enough about picasa to know the original photos would be untouched. What was happening was some kind of mixup in the linking to the photos. But what about all my editing, tagging, and geocoding. Time to tread warily.
Then I updated to version 3.9, build 136.20, and my main photographic machine would not load picasa at all. Looking at the release notes didn’t give me any hint of what was going on The thumbnail mix up just got worse and worse. Time to get serious.

Fixing the Mix Up

The Google Picasa Help, recommends a fairly drastic way to Rebuild your Picasa Database, if you follow this approach you should definitely backup your photos first (yes they do recommend that). Yet I was still not convinced I needed such a drastic measure!

A much gentler explanation and procedure to follow appears in Picasa Tutorials , under the post/tip by Chris Guld, When your pictures get "All Messed UP" however her first approach no longer works (at least in picasa 3.9). The second approach might sound a bit scary but it is actually easy just make sure you have closed picasa and rename the folder C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2 (replace User with your user name) to something else (like …\Google\Picasa_corrupt).  Notice I suggest renaming the folder not deleting it, this might be vedry important (see saving Face below).

Now is the time to follow the instruction to uninstall picasa, download the latest version and reinstall it. When picasa restarts it will set about recreating the database. This can take a long time! So I did it in two steps for the initial run as prompted I just guided picasa to look through my pictures directory only. Later I used the File/Add Folder to Picasa... menu to identify my external hard drive folders and selected just the folders containing my archived photos. Rather than having the scan always I selected these to be scanned once and also checked the face detection on for these folders

Picasa.ini to the Rescue

Picasa stores most of the actions you undertake on your photos in a hidden file called picasa.ini which is stored in the same folder (sub-directory as the photos). Mostly this is to do with how the photos has been edited and what process/filter has been applied. Details of which photos you have starred and any album you have chosen to also include that photo within. Some of this information is also stored in teh central data files but the picasa.,ini file remain a secondary location and when picasa is re-installed and begins reading through your directories it can use this information to recreate you views in picasa as before.
Simple example of what’s in a picasa.ini file

[Picasa]
name=2013-04-07
category=Folders on Disk
date=41371.460810
[IMG_0999.JPG]
backuphash=278
crop=rect64(25c10987c527f872)
filters=crop64=1,25c10987c527f872;

As I had extensively used staring and albums as part of my organizational tasks as I load new photos into picasa I was keen not to loose this information, and it was preserved. Also the geotagging information was actuall stored embedded into the EXIF metadata so it was also preserved.

Saving Face

The one thing that may be lost in the picasa database rebuild process is the identity of which face can be recognized in which photo. This is a bit complex because the recognition that a photo contains a face is stored in the picasa.ini file, but like the thumbnails the actual contact name is stored in the main database. Further with the google+ changes the way these names are synced is a bit different. So the good news is in theory if you have sync to the web ticked on the tools/people manger tab (shown here) then your contact information will already be synced to gmails and/or google+. However what if they aren’t? Great Aunt Mable probably doesn’t have an email address anyway. That is why it was better to rename the picasa2 folder, because all your names can still be accessed in the file called contacts.xml. You just need to copy this back into the new folder once it is set up (ie soon after picasa start searching your computer for folders). As this process progressed I noted that under 3.8 build 136.20 where the person is identified by you, their name with their email address when defined, is now included under the new [contacts2] label in the picasa.ini file. So Maybe these hassle can be avoided in the future.

It  has actually taken me a few days (mainly taken up as picasa trawled my directories and photo storage location on external hard drives) but I am now confident I don’t have any more funnies in my photo collection. My confidence in picasa as a reliable non-destructive Photo Organizer has been restored.
So in the words of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Don’t Panic.

Trying some alternate geotagging software

I’ve been a bit quiet about geotagging lately, because I was been happy with my two favourite approaches to geotagging, using picasa/google earth &/or geosetter, also I am still a little worried about the dangers of over publising my location details. I do like being able to set the gps on my phone on, and collect a wayfile as I take my photos. Then I can later use this to match up with my photos, and have the embedded location in the EXIF metadata, the hassle here is getting the time matching, but once you figure out how the time shifting works it is nice to have your photos also organized by location.

Picasa (and google maps)

This is probably the preferred google way to do this. Rather than use the tools/geotag/geotag with google earth... you can just click on the red map tag on the left hand side of the individual photo or folder view screen. This pulls out the map dialogue, which is essentially a google map window. You must basically navigate to the photo location using an address, and you can not load your gps wayfile. However it is very easy to use and it immediately write the GPS coordinates (rather than the address) back into EXIF Metadata of the photo.

Lighroom 5 beta

Possibly like most Lightroom user, I did look at the Map module in version LR4 and had a little play but kind of dismissed it as nice but not what I wanted. Probably the biggest thing at the time was the fact that the location details where keep back in the main catalogue. It was a fair bit of work to ensure that the location detail got back into the EXIF data, also I has trouble loading and particularly got lost on the time shift dialogues. I suspect that not many lightroom fans have really delved However I have had a relook at the LR5 beta Map Module , and although I can’t see any major updates but I have found the gps tacklog load and matching does work well now. It also has a nice reverse geocoding feature that will determine the address and write that into the IPTC data. There is still the issue of the extra steps to write this back into the photos (or XMP sidecar files) however overall I it is pretty easy to use.

Photo Mechanic

  
I’m only trying out the demo version of photo mechanic, initially just to review photo load times, but I soon discovered it has neat getagging feature, being able to merge gps wayfiles (albeit I have only had success with .gpx files captured my google’s my tracks app on an android phone) and also accommodate timeshifts between the camera and gps device. Like picasa the details are written back into the embedded metadata in the original file (both jpeg & RAW). Photo Mechanic also have some very nice features for working with EXIF and IPTC metadata, including a IPTC stationery pad that lets you quickly update a lot of standard photo captioning. Also like picasa this is efficient and fast. This is a serious alternative to geosetter, that many keen photographers may already have.

Getting location into your photos is only the beginning, the real power comes with being able to use that as an additional means to organize and view your data. all of these options do give decent maps but you have to select the photos some other way first before you display them on a map.

Synchronise those watches (cameras)

The key to getting the allocation of geotags allocated automatically, when your GPS, or Smartphone is collecting the waypoints, is in synchronizing the clocks on the gps device and your camera.

Photo geotagging software, that merge external waypoints with photos do it via the photos time stamp. Some match to the closest waypoint, a few will let you interpolate a path between the way points. However this does rely on accurate time stamping on both devices. There are a few things that can conspired to get your devices out of sync.

1. Changing time zones, usually smartphones will automatically adjust as you travel into a new time some and the phone connects to a different network/carrier or even the same network in the new location. This is great but your camera won't!
2. Daylight Saving, this is a bit like changing time zone, where you smartphone, and computer, probably will but your camera may or may not. Further if you camera does change it might change on a different weekend to the gazetted times at the place you are staying .
3. Normal drift in the accuracy of embedded clocks, usually this is only measured in seconds but I just checked and my two computers are 56 second different, my phone a few seconds different again, my canon camera is 5minutes fast and my Pentax 2 minutes slow!! Ok last time I did check their synchronization was last October, in a different time zone.!

It really doesn't matter which is the "correct" time as long as they are all synchronized. A few second is probably not going to make any difference to reliable geotagging if you are on foot. However if you are cycling or drive between photo shots you might find some photos get misplaced.

Most of the geotagging software now does allow for time shifts between the camera and the gps device, but the method of correction is often very confusing.

Accurate Times.Is

Time.is, is a very simple web applet that gives you the accurate time at your location based on web connection to time servers that access an atomic clock. It updates at the beginning of each second. Importantly it uses nice big easy to read numbers so that you can read it at a distance while be setting your camera and phone.
Time in Monash:

Black Swans at the Beach

The bay was particularly calm today and the black swans were happy feeding at ricket's point.