Upgrade to Snow Leopard – few problems which all could be solved
Now I have upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard. All in all I had no problems, the installation seems to free 35 Gb – unbelievable! Read more details …
A Big Step for Geotagging on Mac
This weekend saw a big step for geotagging on Mac – I might say for geotagging at all – GPSPhotolinker 2.0 Beta.
Even if I am somewhat enthusiastic on myTracks, GPSPhotolinker is still very good and it will get much better in Version 2.0. Both tools are really great but they narrow the issue from different ends. I really would like to see the combination of both:
- GPSPhotolinker has its focus on photos. It provides different methods determining the GPS coordinates which shall be attached to the photos.
- myTracks has its focus on Trackmanagement including editing trackpoints. Photos are bound to trackpoints. It does not know about photos without trackpoint. Even if non tagged photos are loaded, they are attached to a trackpoint of a new track.
GPSPhotolinker 2.0 Beta 5 is very stable and also pretty fast, in particular when dealing with RAW images. I wonder how Jeff achieved this. Besides Geotagging, GPSPhotolinker evolves to a good meta data editor as well. It implements the recommendations specified by http://www.metadataworkinggroup.org.
Weiter…
iPhoto faces looks very interesting
I tried iPhoto’s face recognition on the mac of a friend. It face recognition looks really promising. I find it an interesting feature in particular for for management of family pictures. But as a pity, iPhoto does not write it back to the images. This means, if one invests in it the data are threatened to get lost if a new image manager comes in to place.
As I use Lightroom, I would really like to see the same function in Lightroom or at least to see an option to transfer the data from iPhoto to Lightroom.
Once more the photos from Berlin – now via SmugMug
I am just looking for another more elegant method to provide photos directly from Lightroom. I created a test account on smugmug and uploaded the berlin images there. The images will be available for the next four weeks – unless I go for an account there.
Weiter…
Geotagging user story updated
Today I updated the userstory about geotagging.
MyTracks is evolving well. Also I found some helpful plugins for Lightroom.
Generating KMZ-File
I promised to finetune my Lightroom export setting and publish it here. Not that I am really satisfied with it, but as Tim asked for it, I publish the current status.
You need to install Lightroom Transporter.
Here is the Lightroom export preset (use context menu “save target to …”):
kml-export.lrtemplate
Note that this preset also moves camera settings as well as “IPTC Title” and “IPTC Image Description” to the KML-File.
I have to perform the following steps to create a kmz file:
- Select the geocoded photos in Lightrom
- Make sure that “IPTC Title” and “IPTC Image Description” are filled properly
- Export the photos using the preset above, you get a KML file named “summary.kml”
- Create a kml-file from the relevant tracks. I manage my tracks in MyTracks which provides an kml export feature.
- Open both kml-files in googleMaps, move the track to the temporary location with the photos
- Export the temporary location to a KMZ-File.
Known issues:
- One has to click twice to an image to show the image in googleMaps properly. I gues this comes from the fact that I increased the size of theimages
- I would love get rid of the manual steps
How many Images can be handled in one Lightroom database?
I tried to orgnaize my imaged in multiple Lightroom Catalog files. But this is not really useful since I use the same images in multiple projects. So I decided to give it a try and have moved all in one catalog: 77000 Images starting from 2001 til now. Raw files as well as corresponding derivatives which I had generated by the different workflows I have been using throughout all the years.
It is of reasonable performance but not very fast. The LR database is on the iMac internal harddisk while the images are all on an external WesternDigital myBook. This drive appears to be slow if I work on it with the finder directly.
However it is, I can give the recommendation to handle everything in one and only one LR database.
Generating a KMZ file by Lightroom export
Today I managed to create a KML file by Lightroom export. You can play with the file by clicking here.
Thanks to Timothy Armes who created LR/Transporter. He was very responsive wrt to my enhancement requests such that I could use this to create a KML file for google earth. As of now I have to manually add the track and to zip it. But even this will hopefully getting better soon.
I plan to finetune the export settings somehow and to publish it here.
Read the rest of this post to see the embedded example.
Blogparade: Fotos organisieren
Photoappar.at hat hat eine Umfrage gestartet zu einem wichtigen Thema. Hier also mein Beitrag
1. Auf wie vielen Datenträgern speicherst Du Deine Fotos?
Die Bilder des laufenden Jahres sind auf meinem iMac (500GB). Die früheren Jahre auf einer externen Festplatte.
2. Wie regelmässig machst Du Backups?
Vielen Dank an Apple für Time Machine. Damit habe ich eine stündliche Sicherung. Einfach genial.
3. In welchem Format speicherst Du Deine Fotos?
CR2 – manchmal konvertiere ich nach DNG.
Die bearbeiteten Fotos speichere ich auch als Photoshop-Datei. JPGs erzeuge ich nach Bedarf in Lightroom
JPG, RAW oder DNG? Oder in allen Formaten? Wo sind die Originale?
4. Welche Ordnerstrukturen oder Dateinamen verwendest Du?
Ich habe eine Ordnerstruktur nach Jahr/Monat/Tag+anlass (
~/Fotos/<jjj>/<mm>/<tag>_<anlass>). Damit finde ich am schnellsten meine bilder. Ich habe die zeitliche Ordnung und den Anlass, über den ich auch per Spotlight suchen kann.Die Bilder haben einen Dateinamen entsprechend dem Schema
JJJJ-MM-DD-HHmmss-nnnnnnn, also Jahr-Monat-Tag-Stunde-minute-Sekunde-Nummer.Damit kann ich jedes bild und jede Version eindeutig identifizeren und finde sie auch sofort in meinem Archiv wieder, auch wenn ich sie z.B. per email verschickt habe und später eine Nachfrage kommt.
5. Wie indizierst Du Deine Fotos?
Mein Ablageschema ist schon ein recht guter Index. Gelegentlich schreibe ich in die IPTC-Felder was rein. Für bestimmte Projekte und Themen verwende ich Kollektionen in Lightroom. Früher, bei IMATCH habe ich Categories verwendet. Die LR-Categories sind genial. Man kann sie mit Lightroom ein bisschen simulieren, man findet aber den Rückweg nicht.
6. Welche Software setzt Du ein?
Hier ist mein Workflow – Dort sind auch die verwendeten und die gewünschten Programme erwähnt.
Für die eiligen, hier die Kurzfassung:
- Lightroom- zum Runterladen udn umbenennen
- Lightroom zur Verwaltung und RAW-Entwicklung
- MyTracks – zum Bearbeiten meiner Geotagger – Tracks
- GPSPhotolinker zum Geotaggen
- Photoshop CS3 zum Panaoramabauen und weiterführender Nachbearbeitung
Getoagging userstory
I created a so called “User Story” about geotagging. It specifies the scenarios of my Geotagging workflow. The document is intended as input for tool developers.
For those cases where no tool is mentioned, I could not yet find a solution!
The document can also be found as pdf in userstory-geotagging.