Towards Keppel

It's mine

It's mine, originally uploaded by imageo.

Hooked on Synch

I have been experimenting with using various file synchronising systems to "automate" my flow of photos (see also my ABC of photo flow post). At the moment I don't have a perfect set of procedures developed yet but I certainly have simplified my life a lot.

The basic principle is to have a set of simple to customise processes that will regularly check for new files and the also copy (or move them) to another location (or multiple locations) all transparently in background. There are lots of software packages that tackle this but after some experimenting I have chosen to go with Synkron, which is a public open source project and also available as a Portable App (so I can also have it on my USB Darkroom). However if you are new to the ways of file synchronization I might suggest you start with the elegant freeFileSync utility which has a simple drag and drop interface and separate compare and synchronization buttons to do the work. It can created batch processes for you but once you get the hang of filters and the difference between mirroring, two way synch and moves you will probably be ready to set up your own customized synchronisation task in Synkron.

I already have a task that backs up any recent photos loaded onto a photolibrary on an external backpack drive, I carry this around with me and thus backup photos there from any computer I'm using. I also have another task that synchs this library with a master photo archive, after I have run that I run another task that moves any movies out of the photo libraries to a shared video library location.

I have also set up some named filters (the example is one that I can use to move or copy just movie files). The real gem in the tools is Multisync, that lets you collect the files from several location (the computer doing the synch must be able to see all the folders involved) and can use Variables to tame the complexity of your Lan File structures. I am slowly prototyping the types of photo transfers I need and then as I find the right approach I customise and schedule a new task.

 

Warning :: Lightroom users take care

There is a massive word of caution here. If you are using lightroom, be warned it doesn't play well with file synching. Instead it wants to always be in charge of your files. The issue is the central but not shareable catalogue. This catalogue is where lightroom stores image previews and details of the post processing you have undertaken. If you synch the actual file directory you will only copy the original files and not be copying the editing carried out on the file. Picasa on the other hand stores this information in a file called picasa.ini which lives in the same directory as the original photo and is handled as part of the normal synch operations. lightroom is in reality a single computer single user system, and whilst you can store your originals on an external drive you must have a single catalogue that links to those photos. You can get around this limit by exporting catalogues and reimporting them, using DNG files to save you edits or using individual sidecar files (.xmp ) and I am still experimenting with all three alternatives but it still seems very messy me. I just have to live with the recognition that if I use lightroom on my laptop I have to make a special effort to “manually” make sure that any edits, tagging etc get into the master photo library. Perhaps this hassle is why I still prefer to shot both RAW and JPEG and use Picasa to load the photos and do the initial organization, ranking, and metadata tagging using the jpeg and RAW pair of files. Which is a pity because then a lot of the organizational power of lightroom goes unused.

Sunny Afternoon Walk

Photo-chemical smog over the bay

Photo-chemical smog over the bay, originally uploaded by imageo.

Big Sky :: Winter Sunset

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.

The Super Moon

IMGP6597.jpg, originally uploaded by imageo.

First full moon of Winter was a Super Moon

PhotoProject :: Wet in the City

   

City lights by Nihjt on a wet pavement can make for a great photo opprtunity, but I only had my phone with me. So I took these with DHR Camera+

Photofriday :: Body of Water

Bass Straight in Winter, multi image stitched panorama

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Body of Water

 

This is a different, more immersive, way to view the stitched images created with ICE & perspective view, the uploaded to photosynth

Bigger and maybe brighter LCD screen for you camera.

I think most of us with LCD screens on the back of our DSLR or new digital compact camera know that looking at the LCD screen outside can be a real challenge, Firstly they are typically very small and more significantly they can be very hard to make out what is being displayed with the glare and reflections outside.

Somewhat by accident I discovered I already have a very cheap and easy to use, bigger LCD Screen on my camera. Ok not exactly on my camera but very easy to add. It was one of those (cheap) flat plastic magnifying lens. They are a type of Fresnel lens, a series of concentric lenses that appear as a single lens at around their focal length. I happened to have one inside a A6 sketch book in the back pocket of my camera bag, I frequently carry a small sketch book there. It isn’t exactly magic, you do need to tilt and twist and adjust the distance from the camera to get a decent view. However it is about twice the size of the screen and through a special property of the Fresnel lenses, which can capture more light at oblique angles (a feature that has made them very popular of lighthouses). There will still be glare and reflection on the lens but the image can be enriched and sharpened with appropriate tilts in the lens. The real draw back is it requires and extra hand, so works nicely with a tripod but your will have to juggle your camera in one hand and the lens in the other in most situation. Still it makes a big difference when you need to review your image in the field.

  

My A6 sheet lens only cosy $1.50 (from the $2 shop), but plenty of other (more expensive) forms and sizes are available from newsagents and officeworks.

Finding those forgotten images.

Google has connected up “computer vision” to your google+ photos so you can now use My Photos of … in the search box. This means in theory searching your photos no longer require keywording to help you re-find images. Try it out, it is pretty remarkable but only works on your collection of images on your google+ photo account. However don’t rely on it, it isn’t perfect quiet yet!

The Oyster-catchers

 

Being Less than Creative in the Cloud

I must admit I have given adobe's creative cloud a long look, albeit using its introductory offer, but I've decided its not for me. Not because I think it would be too expensive. I think renting software (and computer equipment) is a well established practise and can be a good way to avoid the up front high cost of purchase and for legitimate a business application more tax effective (ie it’s a legitimate business expense rather than an asset that has to be depreciated). In Australia you can "write off" software that cost less than $300 immediately as a business expense but must depreciate more expensive software over two and a half years (or four years), I must admit I don’t understand the different methods. It was more a disappointment with the performance, and particularly a series of frustrations when I was trying to share my work with firstly myself and especially with non creative cloud users.

The first frustration was my expectation that I could use the creative cloud to let me edit one image from several computers in Lightroom. The reality was equally unwieldy as the other work-arounds I had tried, like exporting and importing collections or using xmp files, or "processed" version of dng files. Thqt multi-computer, muti-user Lightroom catalogue remains a pipe dream.

The second annoyance is the long dance creative cloud wants to take to make sure you are on-line. It is certainly possible to use the creative cloud programs off line (once you have downloaded them). However I do travel a fair bit and often to places with very limited internet access (ok I can use a local wifi hot spot on my phone, but that is slow and expensive bandwidth). It is bad enough waiting for windows to boot up, it is painful to have to crawl long for several more minute while loading spinners on pop-up windows struggle to try andbretry to connect you to the net, when there is clearly no need. I really wish the creative cloud knew that cancel meant cancel the first time!

Over the past few weeks there has been a number of on-line service upgrades. One collaborative project I had really wasted a lot of time on in creative clouds, without real success, I was able to set up in a couple of hours in SkyDrive, and then move to DropBox, to better suit my collaborators, by the next morning. It was an eye opener, a good example of simplicity winning out over sophisticated, but complex systems . The important caveat here is I was delivering jpeg files, not trying to jointly editing RAW files.

Finally it all got a bit tedious and I didn't really want to play with the other adobe offerings anyway, because of their learning curves. Whilst the creative cloud does integrate a number of adobe offerings, particularly at the exchange aspects, they still have their own peculiar ways. Out in the field I don't have the time or bandwidth to sit down and wade through even more introductory instructional videos. I suspect that I am not the only one to get frustrated by this.

One aspect the creative cloud handles well is on-line security (at least from my perspective, I think images are less likely to be "stolen" or turned in "orphans" that on the recent on-line service offerings). However this actually created hassles for those I wanted to share with. So bye for now creative cloud.

Waiting for the Aurora

Milky Way Panorama 1, originally uploaded by imageo.

The K-index has been 3 and over for the past few days which signals there is a possibility that the Aurora Australia will be visible from the southern coast of Victoria. Well it rained a lot but between breaks I got good views of the milky way arcing across the sky. Both these images are prepared from a sets of photos and stitched with Autostitch.

milky Way Panorama 2, originally uploaded by imageo.

PhotoFriday :: After the storm

Yesterday was a very clear beginning of winter. After a stormy night the sun straights to break through.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Shades of Gray

Starry, Starry Night

Some experiments with trying to map the sky at night. Using a set of 15 second exposures. Autostitch is actually up to the task, providing you have something detailed in the foregrounds, but I much prefer the warmer tines of my simple picasa picture pile collage.

Reassigning a drive letter

For the past couple of months I have been using two 1.5 terabyte USB drives, that contain my photo library, one is the master the other is a backup. I just keep the active months photos on my computer hard drive but the full photo library on theses external drives and carry them between computers when working on or searching for older photos. All was going well until somehow the drive letters became exchanged. Lightroom started to do weird things, which looked like my photos where being deleted, other times it appeared to be duplicating some photos. Picasa just ignore files even when they where present. Eventually I twigged it was a problem with the drive letters being allocated. I suspect it was a couple of background synching utilities, I am experimenting with that where creating the duplicate files and it was probably moving the USB drive between computer that created the drive letter changes in the first place. How then to get out of this mess?



Its easy just reassigned the drive letters, the steps are straight forward, on a windows machine you need to find Computer Management Utility, which is under control panel/[system and security]/Administrative Tools. Once in that window select Disk Management, and wait for it to find what's on your system then select the USB drive and right click to bring up the Change Drive Letter and Path Dialogue (shown above). Click change and set the letter you wish. Remember some drive letters may not be available as other devices are already using them. When you click ok you will be warned some programs rely on a specific drive letter to run correct. Thanks I understand that now, but that message would have been nicer a lot sooner!

Yet another tree collage