SnapperTalk

Came across this the other day, which might prove useful for some people… Cameras by Flexibits is a free preference pane for Mac OS X that let’s you manage what happens when you connect different cameras or card readers to your Mac. Normally you can only set one action or application to open when a card or camera containing images is connected to the machine but with this preference pane you can assign different functions to different models of camera, card reader etc. Simple but useful.

If you like the Tilt-Shift lens effect but don’t have any Tilt-Shift lenses, you can now recreate the effect via a new application called, appropriately, TiltShift Generator.

Written by Takayuki Fukatsu, it can be used as an online application direct from the webpage or downloaded to your computer to run as a standalone program and since it’s built from Adobe Air it will run on Windows, Mac or Linux.

Designed for use with low-resolution cameraphone pictures such as those from the iPhone it does choke a little when you throw it a high-end DSLR image but eventually it does produce a result. Quite a fun application to play with, just bear in mind that using this would be considered image-manipulation, so it’s not at all suitable for journalistic photos.

If you do happen to have an iPhone, check out some of Takayuki’s other photography-related applications for the iPhone.

Back in early February I wrote about Skype releasing a new version of its application for Windows containing the new wideband SILK codec. Codecs are the part of the software that encodes/decodes the audio for transmission, and are absolutely central to the whole thing because the quality of the compression the codec is capable of achieving is key in determining the resulting call quality.
This is particularly important for users in places with limited internet bandwidth e.g. many parts of Africa and other developing countries. The new SILK codec Skype engineered promised to provide much better use of bandwidth and so better call quality overrall, particularly for those in countries with poor internet but also for users with high bandwidth, and from most reports it seems to have done so successfully.

Unfortunately the update that contained the new codec was only for Windows, and Mac users were left out… until now. A couple of days ago Skype fairly quietly released a new beta version 2.8.0.438 for Mac OS X and the changelog posted here made no mention at all of SILK codec support.

However I can now confirm (thanks to the heads-up here) that the new beta does indeed use the new codec. To test this I placed a call from a Mac running OS X and the new beta version 2.8.0.438 to a Windows computer running Skype version 4.0 – and as you can see from the technical call info the call was indeed using the new codec.

A few things to bear in mind regarding use of the new codec:

1. It will only be used if both computers are using a SILK-capable version of Skype. If either one is using an older version that is not SILK-capable then the call will use the older and inferior SVOPC codec.

2. As far as I know, SILK does not get used in any case when placing calls to real telephones i.e. when using Skype Out.

I’ve yet to fully test the new version for improved call quality, but am glad Mac users are no longer left out. There are still some questions lingering though – Does the new Skype for iPhone & iPod touch use SILK? When will SILK be available for standalone devices such as wifi phones? Will existing devices be able to add SILK via a firmware update or will users have to buy completely new hardware?

Bearing in mind that both parties have to have the SILK codec for it to be used, these are important questions for all Skype users….

Skype Beta for Mac OS X page
Skype Beta for Mac OS X direct download [DMG file, 41.4mb]
Skype for Mac OS X user forum
Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X user forum

If you have an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch and a Canon EOS 5DmkII… you might be interested in Handi 5Dmk2 – a new quick reference guide application for those devices that contains the custom functions, menu settings, and other options of the camera, for easily checking in the field.
Once installed it can be used without a network connection. They also offer a Canon EOS 50D version. Both are priced at $1.99 from the iTunes App Store.

[via Planet5D blog]

A recent post by someone on an internet forum who’d just had his laptop stolen reminded me about this relatively new, free, and open source tracking tool I came across a while back.

Adeona is software currently being developed by a group of students at the University of Washington and is designed to help you try to locate your laptop should it get stolen. The information you can glean from it includes the internal IP address, public IP address, traceroute, name of wireless access point, and if you use the Mac OS X version on a Macbook with built-in webcam then you can also receive photos of the thief using the isightcapture tool.

There’s been plenty such offerings of a commercial nature before, usually requiring a yearly subscription, but this is the first free one I’ve seen. There’s a number of ways in which all these methods won’t work, or can be disabled by a knowledgeable thief, but being free you have little to lose. I haven’t tried it myself but someone who has done wrote this about his experiences here

Came across this rather nice hard case for MacBooks and MacBook Pros. It’s the kind of case that stays on the laptop all the time and you can actually work from.
The company DecoCases says the case is made from aluminium and magnesium, neoprene-lined, and has an integrated heat conduction plate – which all sounds good for the rough travel photographers inflict on their machines.

Mozilla have announced their expectation that the new version 3 of their popular web browser Firefox will be released this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Why is this a big deal for photographers in particular? Let’s step back a bit…

Colour management of photographs can be a complicated and misunderstood process, but the end goal is always to ensure that the viewer sees the image – with regard to tonality and colour – in the way that the photographer intended.
To achieve this, images are usually saved in a certain colour space such as AdobeRGB or sRGB, which defines the potential range of colours and embeds this information profile in the image in a way that can be understood by any colour-profile-aware application.
So if I view an image saved in sRGB and another in AdobeRGB, my colour-aware application can sense the difference and automatically convert the colours so that what I actually see is pretty much the same. Great huh?

However, if you look at the graph above, you will see that sRGB displays a much lower range of colours – a smaller gamut – than AdobeRGB. Professional photographers generally shoot and save their images in AdobeRGB because its larger gamut is better for capturing the full range of colours and for printing purposes.

The current problem is that most web browsers COMPLETELY IGNORE this colour profile information and assume that the image is saved in sRGB – you can test your browser to see if it is compliant at the ICC Test Page. Therefore when these AdobeRGB images are uploaded to the web and seen on the vast majority of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox 2, Opera, etc) they appear flat and dull – as you can see in the some of the examples here.

Ideally photographers should save an AdobeRGB version for print, and then convert this to a separate sRGB version for web use – but that is of course, a pain. Up until now the only browser that supported colour profiles was Apple’s Safari – which is now available for both Mac and PC. Safari is quite a good browser but has a low market share, and doesn’t offer the wide range of useful plugins and customisations that Firefox does.

Enter Firefox 3. The new version of the browser isn’t colour-profile-aware by default but happily it can be easily fixed by either a hack explained here, or there is already an easy plugin created by Sean Hayes called “Color Management” that does the job – available here on the Mozilla site or here on the author’s homepage. The latter requires no registration.

This is certainly a step in the right direction as far as photography on the web is concerned. It gives me a way to see images on the web as the photographer intended. However the decision to have it off by default means it’s unlikely to help the majority of Firefox users and I find that disappointing, although some of the reasons are discussed here.

Until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer starts recognising colour profiles, and Firefox 3 starts doing so by default, the majority of web users will still be seeing much photography on the web incorrectly represented and not as the photographer intended – but at least I don’t have to any more.

UPDATE 17/06/08: Firefox 3 is now out, I’ve installed the Color Management plugin, and I can say that colour photographs on most websites I frequent look much, much better than before.

Archiving photos is a tedious, time-consuming experience and the transition from storing negatives to digital files on CD, DVD, or hard drives hasn’t really improved matters all that much. On the other hand, losing images because they weren’t archived properly is even worse and the potential for losing large numbers of images is arguably even greater with digital.
Many friends and colleagues ask me how I archive my photos and what I recommend as a backup solution, so I wrote this post to illustrate the strategy I use:

Image sorting structure

I keep every image shot irrespective of what the subject is, because you can never know what will be important in the future. I also find going through and deleting so-called “unnecessary” photos just takes too much time.
Every card gets copied to my laptop using Photo Mechanic‘s Ingest function which is set-up to automatically sort the photos in a hierarchical folder structure according to year, month, date, and card – for example:

HD > Archive > 2008 > 2008-04 April > 20080401 > card-01

I then use the same structure to save all the photos which I actually transmit, e.g.:

HD > Transmit > 2008 > 2008-06 June> 20080612 > card-04

Having a clear structure like this is not just to make it easy and quick to find photos – it is also designed to reduce the chances of accidental deletion/overwriting.

Primary Photo Archive

Every week or two I manually copy the new images in these folders to my primary photo archive hard drive. It’s easy to know what has already been copied due to the strict folder structure. You may be wondering why don’t I use some kind of backup script to automate the process? Well, I’ve found automating this process to be just complex enough to run the risk of accidentally deleting or overwriting existing images, and so I feel safer doing it manually.

For my primary photo archive I use the Stardom SR3610 (model# SR3610-2S-SB2) external RAID-1 hard drive enclosure shown above (read a review here) which has both eSATA and USB 2.0 connections (or there’s a Firewire/USB unit if you prefer that – model# SR3610-2S-WBC).
I chose this model because it’s relatively affordable, has a hardware RAID-1 controller, hot swappable drive trays, eSATA for speed and USB 2.0 for compatibility, and most importantly has excellent cooling due to the temperature-regulated internal fans monitored by the controller. I am currently using 2 x 500GB 7200rpm Samsung SATA drives in a RAID-1 configuration inside giving me 500GB of useable space – which I chose because Samsungs tend to be cool-running and in my opinion very reliable. Saying that, these are almost full and I am looking to upgrade them to 1TB Samsung F1 drives.
In my opinion, particularly for those living in hot climates, overheating is a significant cause of hard drive failure so having a well-cooled enclosure is critical.
In addition, such countries often have irregular mains power therefore all my hardware is connected to this 1500VA APC UPS unit to prevent against data loss caused by power outages/blackouts, brownouts, overvoltage, surges, and line noise.
All my drives are formatted with the “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” filesystem (now the system default) because this gives journalling protection should the system shutdown in the middle of copying files.

RAID is not the same as a Backup

There’s a widespread misconception that RAID is all you need to protect your data – it is not. RAID-1 will protect you against DISK FAILURE of a single drive – if one drive dies your data is safe because the other is always a perfect mirror. That’s all fine and necessary, but disk failure is not the only cause of data loss. User error e.g. accidentally deleting files or folders, applications corrupting the files themselves, backup up an “old” folder over a “new” folder, etc can also result in the loss of your images, and with any RAID system these errors will be replicated on all drives.
Therefore you also need a separate backup archive.

Secondary/Backup photo archive

One of the reasons I chose the SR3610 is that the drive trays are hot-swappable and interchangeable with other Stardom enclosures.

So for my backup photo archive I chose the Stardom iTank i302 shown above (read a review here) – a non-RAID single-SATA-drive enclosure with eSATA and USB 2.0 connections, which uses the exact same drive trays as the SR3610, so I can quickly swap drives around if I want to. Inside the enclosure I use the same model Samsung 500GB drive.

Maintaining the Backup

So we have a RAID-1-protected primary archive, and a secondary backup archive on a single disk – what is the best way to ensure that the first gets properly backed up to the second?
If software cost isn’t an issue I’d recommend using Retrospect. This is one of the best backup applications and is available for Macintosh and Windows. Initially it may seem hard to configure, but with a little time you’ll realise just how powerful it is.

What I would recommend is setting up a “Duplicate” script that clones the RAID volume to the secondary drive. This will compare all the files on the primary archive with the secondary one and then copy over just those images that have been added since the last backup (Note: and also delete any files on the secondary drive that are no longer present on the primary drive).
Why not just use any old backup program to do this? Retrospect has an important option called “byte-by-byte-verification” which once it has finished copying, goes back and compares every 1 and 0 between the original and copied files to ensure it has made a perfect copy with no file corruption. Many other backup programs verify the copy made but most do this simply by looking at the date-stamp and size of the file – which confirms the file has been copied but does not confirm that no corruption has occurred.
The only disadvantage of this method is it takes almost twice as long – but is probably worth it for peace of mind.

Other respected backup applications on Mac OS X that are worth considering:

Carbon Copy Cloner: This is an excellent and free (donations are welcomed) utility for MacOSX that lets you create a bit-for-bit copy of one volume or folder, to another volume or folder.

SuperDuper: Is another very well-respected general backup application.

For further Mac OS X backup applications look here.

What about Apple’s Time Machine? This is attractive because it keeps multiple versions of files if they do change, but in my mind isn’t quite ready for critical backups because of the lack of user-control over how it operates.

Improvements

If your level of data-loss paranoia is somewhat higher, you could use another SR3610 as the secondary drive instead of the iTank, providing increased protection against drive failure.

Another step that I would definitely recommend is to make an extra copy of all data on either a hard drive or DVDs and leave it in another physical location. This is really easy to accomplish with the above hardware because you can easily add more drives to the setup simply by purchasing extra drive trays as shown above.

Other storage ideas

Networked Attached Storage (NAS) of different RAID varieties, though particularly RAID-5, is an increasingly popular option for data storage. Personally I’m not yet convinced of the reliability of large-volume data-transfer over ethernet, and I don’t need 24/7 network availability of my photos, so I continue to prefer direct-attached storage.

If you do like the idea of accessing your entire library 24/7 – including remotely – then a NAS such as those made by Netgear, QNAP, and Synology might be for you. For great comprehensive info on different NAS models go to the SmallNetBuilder site.

In the future I think the ZFS file-system will become the preferred option for photo archiving as it has some really impressive next-generation features, and Apple says ZFS read/write support will be included in the next version 10.6 of OS X Server codenamed “Snow Leopard” – but at the moment it is way too experimental on OS X for real-world use.

Conclusion

This setup works nicely for me, your needs may vary – particularly if you have many terabytes of data to protect. In that case you are going to want to have multiple sets of drives that you rotate-out as they get filled up – which you could do with the above hardware by purchasing more drive trays. Or, you’re going to have to start looking at a multi-drive RAID-5 setup.
So far I’ve avoided RAID-5 because I prefer the simplicity of RAID-1. If a drive dies in a RAID-5 setup the RAID controller should be able to rebuild the volume, but if for instance the RAID controller itself dies, rebuilding is not so easy a task. With RAID-1 you can just remove the good drive and connect it directly to the computer – this I see as a very great advantage for the average user.

Well, if you’ve made it this far (!) I guess you are somewhat interested in this subject, so you might want to take a look at this “RAID for photographers” article I wrote back in 2006 which has some more in-depth information.

If you use a backup system that has advantages over this in terms of either workflow or hardware, or have any other photo archiving tips, please share your experiences by leaving a comment below.

Following on from the previous post, German server software company Helios is reporting they’ve discovered a serious bug in the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update whereby “Images saved from Photoshop CS3 can get corrupted visually (stripes or
similar in the image) or even structurally so that they cannot be opened again in Photoshop or another application”.
They say this occurs with Apple based AFP servers (i.e. Apple filesharing over ethernet) as well as with their own sharing software.
The changelog for the OS X update mentions it “Improves Spotlight searches on a AFP file server volumes” and I wonder if the two are related.

UPDATE: Macworld has more info on this particular problem which seems to affect images that are saved directly to network volumes. This seems to be part of a more long-running problem between Adobe and Apple and not related to the Spotlight update I mentioned above.

UPDATE 2: Senior Product Manager of Adobe Photoshop John Nack writes in his blog that he’s been receiving a lot of inquiries about “problems saving files from Photoshop directly to network drives when using the recently released Mac OS 10.5.3″. He goes on to say Adobe is “working closely with Apple to troubleshoot the issue and have identified the cause. Apple is working on a fix, and we expect they’ll release it in the next System Update.” Advice then is until this is fixed, do not save directly to network drives – save it locally then transfer the file.

UPDATE 01/07/08: Apple now claims to have fixed this problem in the 10.5.4 update release today

There have been some initial reports of a slowdown in image-browsing speed using PhotoMechanic, particularly when viewing images direct from the camera card, after installing the recent Mac OS X 10.5.3 update.
Those who haven’t updated yet might want to hold off until the situation has been clarified. Follow this thread over at the Camera Bits forums for further information.