SnapperTalk

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]

This one’s for my journo friends who sit in your office tapping your story away on that plastic Dell desktop, immersed in technology and the internet age, but secretly pining you were living decades earlier and click-clacking away on a manual typewriter.

You know who you are.

Now you can recreate at least some of that old-school journalist minimalism with the free Q10 full-screen text editor.

No menus, no user-interface, no icons, pretty much nothing at all to distract you from the actual process of writing. Just a blank screen and the romantic key sounds of a manual typewriter to fuel the inspiration for that latest government press release you’re rewriting…

The Canon EOS 5D MkII can shoot video in either 640×480 (VGA) or 1920×1080 (1080P, Full HD) resolution, both encoded with H.264 video compression. Playing video files in the former is easy, but the sheer amount of data that needs to be processed with 1920×1080 resolution can tax even quite modern computers.
VLC has been my video player of choice for many years as it is free, open-source, and will play virtually everything you can throw at it – but disappointingly I couldn’t get it to play 5D MkII videos without major stuttering or no playback at all.

Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:

Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC

I’ve tried it on Windows and all the 5DmkII videos that were problematic before now play perfectly. It also works on Mac, though you may not need to do it on that platform.
Bear in mind this method DOES reduce the playback quality (by not doing any de-blocking noise reduction), so if you aren’t having problems with playback then don’t do it, but if you are then it’s pretty useful.

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

One of the best reasons to use WordPress to run your blog is the massive range of plugins you can add to enhance its functionality. Here’s my list of the best:

Administration:

Fluency Admin – cleans up the whole admin interface
Admin drop down menu – add’s drop down menus to the Admin pages and is compatible with Fluency Admin
One Click Plugin Updater – get notified of plugin updates, do them all in one click, and install plugins in one click without needing to FTP them using the OneClick Installer for WordPress FireFox add-on
WP Enhanced Plugin Manager – adds additional functionality for upgrading plugins
WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Massive timesaver letting you upgrade WP installation to latest version semi-automatically
WP Super Cache – static caching to reduce load on your server
WordPress Database Backup – easily back up your WP database

Security & Anti-Spam

Spam Karma 2 – Essential plugin to prevent against comment spam. The alternative is Akismet which is bundled by default on new WP installations but which is inferior in my opinion.
SABRE – Adds measures to stop spambots registering as users of your site
Bad Behaviour – adds some security measures to prevent against spam and other malicious attacks
WP Security Scan – scans your WP installation to look for security holes
Hotlink Protection – Prevents other websites from hotlinking to images on your site
©Feed – Adds a copyright notice and digital fingerprint to the end of each post when seen in RSS feeds, enabling you to see who is stealing your content
Easy Contact – Adds an anti-spam contact form for readers to send you a message without revealing your email address

Search

All in One SEO Pack – automatically optimizes your site to be more search engine-friendly
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator – automatically generates an XML-Sitemap to allow search engines to more effectively catalog your site
Search Everything – Customise exactly which pages, posts, categories etc are seen by the internal site search

Statistics

Ultimate Google Analytics – enables you view all your site’s statistics using Google Analytics
WordPress.com Stats – A pretty decent statistics package though requires (free) signup at www.wordpress.com if your blog is self-hosted.

Misc

WordPress Mobile Edition – automatically detects if the reader is using a handheld device or phone, and reformats your site for optimal viewing
Subscribe to Comments – allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments

You can find more WordPress plugins here

If you were holding off trying out Tineye the image search engine I wrote about previously, because you were put off by the beta/invite status of it, then you’ll be interested to know that as of Aug. 15th they’ve introduced instant-signup and invitations are no longer required.

When photographers need to search for their photos on the internet there’s a few ways available, such as Google Images and other search engines. What they all share in common is these methods search by the text information associated with the image – whether it be the photo caption itself or the content of the page the image is on.

Fellow photographer Jason Bye tipped me off to a new image search engine called TinEye, currently in private beta, that adopts a radically new method that does not consider the text information at all. Instead it analyses the actual photo itself – “TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.”

You can use the search engine in two ways – either by uploading an image stored locally on your computer, or by cutting/pasting a link to an image posted on the internet, and then asking it to search for all other instances of that image.

How could that work? Surely after small differences such as cropping, toning, and other image adjustments, it wouldn’t be recognised as the same image? I was quite skeptical about this point but it does work, and rather well. The search software is capable of identifying images even after they have been heavily cropped, toned, converted to black & white, even if they have text overlaid on the photo e.g. on a magazine cover.

The search engine is currently in private beta which means you have to sign-up to request a beta invite, however I received mine within a day or so. The image-recognition software behind the search engine is also used in the company’s commercial product PixID, which is currently being used by a number of large photo-agencies and other media organisations to track unlicensed use of images on the web. They even have a nice plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer to enable you to rapidly initiate a search of images.

Those concerned about the copyright of their own images uploaded when using Tineye should note that the terms of service explicitly state that “Copyright for all images submitted to TinEye remains with the original owner/author, and images submitted to TinEye for searching are not added to our index.”

The main limitation I would say is the limited number of images currently indexed – currently about 701,666,310 – sounds like a lot but still misses much. Presumably as the service continues that will improve.

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