Category Archives: Computers

Safety in a box

The PolyBlog
January 15 2020

I have a decent physical backup plan for my existing desktop and files, although primarily I’m interested in the safety of our family photos in digital format, the best of which are also shared to my website in full original size. So I haven’t felt the need for a separate cloud-storage option for those. Other files are either backed up through email or on other backup drives.

But one downside to backup drives is where do you keep them. Some people take them to their office. Some people have “backup buddies” the same way they exchange house keys with neighbours. Or they store them with family. And still there are those few souls who follow some good online advice and keep them with their important documents and jewelry in a safe-deposit box.

There are some unfortunate souls who say, “No problem, I keep my backup drives in a fire-proof safe” and think that actually keeps them safe. First of all, “fire-proof” is not the same as “heat-proof”. While paper is safe up until 451 degrees Fahrenheit, more or less, your hard drives will melt LONG before that. Plus, many of those safes are fire-proof but not water-proof. Fires in homes attract firefighters who soak the entire house, often deluging the safe with tons of water. The end result is a perfectly safe set of contents that never caught fire but did melt and sit in water. Neither are good for backup drives. And some of the safes come with guarantees — where the guarantee is just that they’ll refund the purchase cost of your safe if you lose everything on your drive. That first word of your child? Gone. But they’ll give you a couple of hundred dollars to make up for it. Maybe.

I admit that I have been burned in the past from not having a regular enough backup schedule, and that can still happen (I don’t do daily backups for instance). But for the most part, I won’t lose much anymore. At the moment. But my files are growing with my astrophotography work and a bunch of my current photo gallery work. So a home for my disk drives is in order, but it needs to be something that I can access regularly to do swap outs with new backups or it doesn’t work.

I have two good drives for that, small, portable, and capable of one set of backups from my desktop, Andrea’s desktop, Jacob’s desktop, and my laptop. With a bit of room to spare. And then I have a big multi-terrabyte drive that can hold lots of things, plus Network-Attached-Storage that I don’t use properly as it’s kind of slow. I don’t have an off-site location to store things with friends or family that would work, nor do I want to take it to work (although I have in a pinch). No, what I need is a paid storage option.

Enter the Safety Deposit Boxes

The most obvious solution is to get a safety deposit box that I can access easily and swap the small drives out. Or put the big one in it. The question is cost vs. the cost for a cloud storage option capable of holding everything.

While having an SDB used to be a sign of “adulthood” in a sense, it is now more like “Okay, Grandpa”. People put bonds in them (I have none), jewelry (I have none), house and will documents (kept with the lawyer), and other investment certificates. If you DO keep investment stuff in it, it is theoretically tax-deductible as an expense on said investments. I also don’t have coin collections or important business contracts. It really is just about my disk drives.

Almost every SDB is big enough to hold business size envelopes. 5″ wide is a relatively standard dimension, 24″ long, and of varying heights. My small drives are less than 4″ in width so would easily fit. My larger drive is more like 5.5″ x 6.5″, and 3″ thick. Not a great option to find a cheap box to fit. On the other hand, some banks give you a free box if you have your investments or accounts with them and maintain over a certain balance. We use a virtual bank (Simplii) so that doesn’t help, and others with CIBC don’t come with any freebies.

Looking around, I see:

  • Scotiabank: $55/year for their smallest box which would hold the small drives; the larger drive would necessitate one at $125/year;
  • TD Trust: Free if you meet certain requirements, or $60 for a small, $100 a medium, but size isn’t clear, could require a large for the big drive, $150/year;
  • RBC: $60 for small, $90 for medium;
  • CIBC: $60 for small, unsure for medium;

Apparently credit unions are often a bit cheaper although I don’t see obvious choices nearby. And then there is the off-site storage option. Places like Dymon Storage also rent them. And while they are supposed to be “cheaper”, they aren’t when it comes to the sizes I need. For example, Dymon has one size for $120 a year (and right now, if you ACT NOW!, you get 3 months free). But there’s no minimum when you sign up, $10 a month, easy access, etc. You can even insure the contents, which you can’t do at the banks. Although proving your claim is always a challenge, but I digress.

So they’re in the middle on cost between a small and a medium box, right? Not really. They’re actually a really good deal because they have decent security and access like they have for the rest of their stuff, but the box itself is 12″ x 12″ x 12″, much bigger than the basic ones at the banks. It basically holds a banker’s box size set of files. That would run you well into the $200+ range at any bank. But it is WAY more than I need.

Which means I’m in the small box option of around $60 somewhere. Or finding an alternative.

Enter the cloud servers

As I said above, I don’t particularly want to go the cloud storage route as my files are too big a collection, now representing more than a terrabyte of info. Which includes:

  • Data Drive 1 — astronomy info, creative stuff I’ve done with memes and graphics for websites, etc., documents going all the way back to my university days, all carefully organized, along with some key work things I kept, my ebook collection, music collection, some learning materials, materials about photography, backups of my website content, and, last but certainly not least, all my writing. Total size: 374 GB.
  • Data Drive 2 — mostly photos and pictures, photobooks, videos, apps I’ve installed, a backup of my music folders, and a small clipart collection that I use with my graphics. Total size: 869 GB
  • Data Drive 3 — this is mostly current stuff, bookmarks, and my “current” photo repository, which much of Data Drive 2 will migrate to over time. Total size: 35 GB.

Overall, that’s 1.278 GB of data that I would rather not pay to store as the plans get expensive above 500GB-1TB. There is some redundance built in, so maybe call it 1.1 GB in active data, but still. And it is that 1 terrabyte limit that will bite me in the heinie.

If I go with Apple, for example, their 2TB plan is $12.99 a month. Or $156 a year, although cheaper with some annual discount in there, I believe, and shareable across the family. It’s certainly a viable option.

Google Drive could be an option, although I don’t really like it for these types of things, I find it clunky. It is $13.00 a month. $139.99 annually (as I said, there’s a discount).

Microsoft One Drive is great at only $6.40 per month, but only 1TB. Pooh.

Dropbox Plus is an obvious option, but at $12.99 a month for 2TB, not ideal.

Sync.com offers a $5/TB option, but you have to have a minimum of two users so a TB each or $10/month.

Box.com offers small storage plans (100GB) and $7 / user per month, minimum 3 users. Umm, how about no?

Pcloud gets good kudos but have a $350 LIFETIME charge, but who would commit to that? Monthly is $8 with annual discount applied for 2TB.

Egnyte sounds great at $8 for 5TB except that is per user, minimum 5 users. So $40 a month. Again, how about no?

Opendrive is probably the best deal for growing data, as my astronomy is going to do for bytes. Open drive is $10/mth with unlimited storage. Not the most feature-rich though. And it has some strange wording about not storing media libraries there, although that could be more about cross-listing “public” libraries more than backups.

And then it gets complicated

You see, I have Amazon Prime, so that is already paid for. And with it comes unlimited storage for full resolution photos. Like all my astro data to come. But Amazon wants $125 for 1 TB of non-photos…so all my photos would be free to backup, but not other files. They start at $25 for 100GB. Which I would over-ride in about 10 seconds.

They also have a limit of 5GB of total video storage, but beggars can’t be choosers. Particularly if, for example, I was to use Amazon Prime for all my photos, maybe my videos, and another online tool for my other documents. A hybrid online solution. Not as neat, but potentially cheaper than an SDB or any of the other options.

Conclusion

I don’t really know yet. I have a couple of other things to work out. But if I could do online storage of my photos and videos with Amazon as an “extra” for free, and then “deposit” my harddrives at some place like Royal Bank which is two blocks from my house for $5 a month, that’s not a bad solution. I don’t think I’m ready to go all in on cloud storage. At least not until I get around to sorting those extra digital files a bit more into docs and other. My biggest worry is astrophotography. It won’t take long for large files to start overwhelming any of my existing solutions.

What do you do?

Revisiting my digital photo gallery

The PolyBlog
December 12 2019

As part of my #50by50 posts, I repatriated all my videos and pictures from SmugMug, threw them into Piwigo, and (mostly) completed a good layout and design for my online photo gallery. I had tried integrating directly into WordPress, but the biggest and best (relatively speaking) gallery called Next Gen Gallery just didn’t play well with some of my other plugins, and I couldn’t get it to work right. I tried various other WP tools, but nothing was jiving for me. Piwigo worked, I found some themes I liked, I tweaked some stuff, called it a day. Then proceeded to put a LOT of time and effort into uploading 12755 photos and videos of various types and sizes.

I made it as good as I could, but it was far from “perfect”, if there is any such thing. For example, Piwigo likes to play with different size images. So it would take the original ~13K photos and make a thumbnail for each one. Plus a medium size. And a large size. Which means ~13K photos suddenly becomes ~52K files on the site. Plus the Piwigo install itself…plugins, core files, themes, etc. Call it another 3K in admin files, and I’m at 55K for the number of files. Which isn’t a problem on the one hand — my account comes with unlimited storage space. Great! Except there’s a small caveat to that unlimited storage space. It only allows 200,000 nodes which are basically file markers. 200K nodes = 200K files. I’m only at 55K, but the wrinkle?

That’s just the gallery. I also have AstroPontiac, ManagementConsultingServices, and oh, yeah, all of POLYWOGG.CA i.e. this site within the 200K too, with separate full installs of WordPress three times (that’s another story, but still). Which at one point put me close to 150K nodes. As I continue to add and upload stuff, that “margin” starts to shrink. Not a problem “yet”, but I’m looking at expanding my online presence soon, and Piwigo is taking up a lot of nodes.

Enter a new wrinkle — or two!

My hosting provider recently migrated a whole bunch of accounts to new, larger, faster servers, and my account went with it. But after it was done, for some reason, part of my WordPress install and part of my Gallery were no longer working. This is not an uncommon problem, actually. One of the downsides of running multiple installs on my server is that a couple of key files, mostly related to security, all reside in the same directory. So three copies of WordPress and one copy of Gallery all want to play in that same directory, and they don’t all know how to play nicely. When something changes for one, it can — and does — present challenges for the other installations. The three WP sites got along fine. But my Piwigo gallery wasn’t liking the new server setup.

My hoster fixed it, great. Then it broke again when something changed. So they fixed it again, great. Then it broke again. So they fixed it a third time, and it was still broke. A fourth time, still broke. A fifth time, fixed and stayed fixed. But it required a couple of tweaks that are not optimal for site operations. Not mission-critical problems, but a small design challenge, and likely to cause me problems down the road with other plugins and operations.

So, I reached back into my blog, pulled up my musings from earlier about different plugins to replace Piwigo with the idea of trying to fully integrate into my blog, and of course came across Next Gen Gallery again. Over 900,000 sites use the plugin for galleries. And yet again, I thought, “Why won’t it work with mine?”. So I gave it another go, expecting it to fail but thinking maybe this time I could devote some time and figure out what the conflict was and fix it.

I installed NGG, activated it, tried a test gallery, worked perfectly. Wait…what?

Setting up NGG for my gallery

Yep, it works now. I think mostly because I’ve switched security plugins and now it likes my configuration. Or at least doesn’t hate it. Well, that changes things. I started playing with it, a few limitations that I can live with, and I decided to go for broke and buy the pro version. Also works perfectly. Relatively anyway.

Sure, I have to tweak it for setup to match my themes and blog, as I would with any plugin. There are a bunch of gallery themes, none that work well enough to replace my overall theme, so I can ditch those. There are also layout templates, some basic, some pro, and lots of tweaks that each one can do. In the end, I really like a first page which shows thumbnail images. My favorite is called the Pro Thumbnail Grid, lets me put a legacy caption below each photo, space them out more or less grid style, and also make them fully responsive (i.e. on small screens, you get 2 images across; on my wide-screen, I get 4; on mobile, just 1). I can set a default for most of the settings, change the colours to match my blog’s theme a bit more, etc.

And then choose from a handful of different lightbox settings (i.e. the way it looks when you click on a thumbnail and it opens the pic into a full image, complete with caption, social media sharing icons, and a place to comment on the picture if you want). I had to do styling tweaks on both to get the result to look the way I wanted it to look, but one of the benefits of having the pro version is that it comes with support. So I asked questions of the developers and they told me how to style some of my unique tweaks. Which then led me to figure out some of the tweaking on my own, a sense of accomplishment that pushes my ego button pretty hard. I was pretty self-satisfied with my initial progress, particularly as it has me doing some CSS style sheet tweaks that I’ve never really done before at this level. 🙂

There are still some formatting bugs to work out such as some styling of breadcrumbs on an internally-generated virtual page. I also found a great alternative layout to use for my astronomy photos. It includes EXIF data (camera setting info), which is helpful to see with each picture. I haven’t fully styled that page, but should be only minor tweaks once I get to my astro photos.

But wait, there’s more

One of the ongoing challenges I have always had with my images is that a lot of the data is manually entered with the pics online. So all of my so-called meta data for captions, folder names, descriptions? They exist only in cyberspace in the database of the apps I’m using; the pics themselves do not include those descriptions. Which means when they went from desktop to SmugMug, they all had to be re-coded manually. When the photos went from Smugmug to Piwigo, a small percentage of the data went with them, but most had to be manually re-entered. Now that I’m going from Piwigo to WordPress, the spectre of potential recoding rears its ugly head yet again.

But as I went through photo editors last year including looking at photo management options, I tripped over a program called Mylio. It is not the best editor by far, but it has an advantage over others. It allows you to directly edit metadata, embed it in the photo so it never has to be updated again, and when uploaded to NextGen Gallery? It can read the info and display it. Including not only captions to go with each photo but any extra “tags” I put on the photos. Sure, there are other programs that do that, but can they do it in an easy to edit “group photo” page? And more importantly, not for the blog, but for self organization, can the others do decent facial recognition? No, not very well.

Yet Mylio was one I tried before, and at the time, I set it aside for later when I plan to process some photos from my mom. But if I’m going to the trouble of fixing all the metadata — and doing it right so I never have to do it again! — then I might as well have the biggest tagging aid working properly too for my own photos. Booyah!

But wait, there’s less

While having Next Gen Gallery working and using Mylio to organize the photos before uploading are great, there’s always a catch, right? Of course there is. NGG doesn’t manage videos.

Crickets. Chirping.

So? So, I have a fair number of videos of Jacob, for instance, embedded in my current gallery. Which works REALLY well, and I like it. Alas, NGG won’t handle video. And 18 months ago when I ran through a whole whack of gallery options, if it didn’t have an option for video, I killed it right away. 18 months later, I’m not as fussed about that. I can find work arounds, as long as I have a really decent photo gallery working that is fully integrated with my website. I have a couple of other plugins to automate my video management for me, but otherwise, it’s all good to go.

But wait, there’s work…lots and lots of work

Yep, it is work. Work that I’ve done before, in a sense, but I can re-use that work from before. Captions, album descriptions, consistent workflows, etc., it’s all saved on my site. So much so, that I have it nailed as a twelve-step process to get a gallery (what I used to call albums) up and running (a single month is a gallery, for example). Here is the process:

  1. SORT THE PHOTOS — This is MOSTLY already done. I have a good file structure that distinguishes between “extra” photos and what I consider “production” photos, i.e. the ones that I’m willing to share. Sometimes that might be 10 group photos where only one has everyone looking the right way. The other nine go in a sub-folder called EXTRAS, the good one goes in a root. But I do have a bit of tweaking here and there to do for the files, such as breaking really large galleries into 2 or 3 by event rather than just dumping the whole month in a single folder. Sometimes that is either a special trip during the month to, say, Toronto or Montreal; in another, I have 6 folders of day to day life doing various things, and 1 folder of a wedding with 100 photos of family. If I dump them all in one MONTHLY folder, it gets unwieldy to navigate. Not impossible, but a few times when I was working with the old photo galleries, I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should have organized that differently.” Now, since I’m “redoing” some of it anyway, I can fix it as I go. AKA the “anal retentive” step.
  2. STAGING — Before I import into Mylio, I like to make a separate copy of just the production photos and put them in a separate folder. Then my import is completely clean with no chance of huge duplicates. Nor do I end up with the videos clogging the sub-system. This also has an extra advantage I hadn’t foreseen — when I go to make photo books later, as I want to do, they will already be “reduced” down to the key ones to consider.
  3. INTO MYLIO — While this is generally a question of just importing, I also do the facial recognition at the same time. I have it scan all the photos, do the best job it can in finding faces, and then it prompts me to identify people in batches. If you think of a wedding as a good example, there will likely be a fair number of photos of the bride. Almost always in good light facing the camera. At least in theory. So Mylio is going to be able to tell her across a bunch of photos in each folder. Then it asks me, “Who’s this?” and groups every face that seems to match that same configuration i.e. all the faces of the bride look the same, and has me answer. “Jill” for example. Then it tags them all with Jane’s name. Then it shows me face group 2 — likely a slightly smaller subset of some dude’s face, in a hetero couple at least — and voila, I can tag “Jack” for all the photos that have a face that matches Jack’s in it. And it shows me the set that it thinks are all Jack so I can quickly verify before tagging them all. Oh wait, it got a slightly blurry face in there too that it thought was Jack but is really his cousin Bob. Tag that one out, tag the rest as Bob. And so on. Until it gets down to a very small set of photos that it doesn’t know who they are from the database, and not that many to group. So it gives you a photo, maybe one that has Jack and Jill already tagged, along with Aunt Martha. So now you add the tag for Martha. How well does it work? Pretty impressively actually and pretty funnily too at times. I have tagged myself at age 20 and 14, and bam, it looked at a photo of my family where I’m under age 5, and it said, “Hey, is this Paul?”. Yes, it makes predictions. On the funny side, it looked at another photo of my grandmother and thought it was my brother Mike. Another one was a photo of my dad holding a garden gnome, and the computer thought the gnome was a person — my sister Marie. I REALLY wanted to click, “Why, yes, my sister IS a garden gnome” but that seemed counter-productive for a reliable database. Instead, I can just click ignore on faces that are not actually people or even ignore faces in photos where there are 4 strangers in a street scene.
  4. MYLIO FOLDERS — The import feature is a bit tempermental, partly as I want to make sure the folder names in Mylio are consistent. So I tend to import them, and then play with them a bit. Nothing major, just some minor cleaning up in a working sub-area and then “moving” them where they should go.
  5. MYLIO KEYWORDS — I then tag a group of photos, and add some keywords. Could be simple like “Wedding, Family, Cottage” for cousins who got married at the cottage. Or could be “Trip, travel, Bangladesh” for a trip Andrea took to Bangladesh. Any photo that has identified / tagged people in gets their names added to the keywords too as these show up as “tags” in WordPress later. The benefit of that is that when everything is uploaded, I can show a “tag cloud” and click on the tags to see a virtual album of all the photos that match. Such as “Jupiter” for all my astro photos of Jupiter. Or “planets”.
  6. MYLIO CAPTIONS — While keywords handle the themes, I usually like to have captions for each of the photos that describes more specifically what is in the photo. It often is a series of captions for sub-groups of photos. Like “dancing” for a bunch of photos from the wedding. Or “skating on the canal” for four or five shots that are all about skating on the canal. However, sometimes there will be a sub-shot that I’ll be more specific about like “first dance” while the rest are just “dancing at the wedding”. I’ve often grouped photos that way in my previous galleries rather than trying to name each photo separately. It’s hard to be creative enough to say “dancing” 20 times in different ways.
  7. NEXT GEN GALLERY UPLOAD — Okay, finally, I’ve got a gallery in Mylio ready to go, and I have to upload it to WordPress. I could “cheat” and try to import the photos directly from the Piwigo site a few cyber folders away, but while it would save upload time, I’d lose all the captions and keywords. Hence why I’m doing it completely anally this time. I name the new gallery according to a very specific filenaming convention to give me an easily sortable list, add file links, and say UPLOAD. Oddly, it has a limited number of formats that it likes. Video is not one of them, and if it hits a video, it just ignores it. I would rather it said, “Hey, VIDEO HERE”. But alas, it doesn’t.
  8. CREATE A GALLERY PAGE — Now that I’ve uploaded a gallery, such as 2005-01 January, I create a page on the website to “embed” the gallery with the right layout, templates, etc. and ensuring the right file structure so the URLs have a simple and easy to navigate structure. And making sure it doesn’t conflict with my PIWIGO install. Yikes. I also add a light touch to the page with a description describing the photos in the gallery (mostly a copy/paste from earlier descriptions). Unfortunately, Mylio doesn’t do descriptions of folders, just images. So this part is still manual.
  9. ADD VIDEOS — Before finishingthe page, I upload any videos for that gallery and save them manually to the bottom of the Thumbnail page. Add a few captions, tweak the layout a bit for size of the video player, then save, publish, and the page is good to go.
  10. MODIFY GALLERY DESCRIPTION — Once I have written my little description as the intro to the page, I copy and paste it over to the actual database and have Next Gen Gallery remember it. There’s an option to display ALBUMS of sub-galleries, and I can have it both keep a description to show online in a virtual page, as well as make sure cover photos are showing for each gallery.
  11. FACEBOOK — Once the gallery is “finished” and the page is good to go, I share it on Facebook, along with the description and tag Andrea.
  12. MOVE BACKUP PICTURES — Back at the start, I moved a temporary copy into a working folder for Mylio to play with. The import process creates a copy and saves it somewhere else, so I can delete the folder. However, I do have two other folders to manage — the collection of photos that have been successfully uploaded, and the collection of photos still to be processed. Both include ALL the photos — extras, videos, maybe even some text files if there was something relevant to the “event”. All those get moved to a backup directory so that I don’t lose everything if I lose a disk drive in my computer. Plus of course all the areas (Mylio, TO BE UPLOADED, and UPLOADED) are backed up separately too.

And since I’m completely anal, I have a tracking sheet for each year. For 2005, I have 19 separate galleries to do (12 months plus 7 special events) with 12 steps above. This means a total of 228 steps to cover the year. Some are a bit time-consuming, some are pretty short. But I track them to make sure I don’t miss any steps and suddenly find myself with “some photos” processed and others in the same folders not even reviewed. Like I said, anal-retentive.

I wouldn’t say I’m completely satisfied with everything, but I do really like having it all in one install of WordPress rather than separate installs. Particularly as I often blog about events that match the photos — now I can embed the gallery and blog around the pics more easily than embedding separate photos as I had to before.

It’s a work in progress, as my blog always is. But I’m pretty satisfied with my progress so far. Ask me in a year when I get through all the galleries and get caught back up.

Inventing a new game – Apple Music Trivia

The PolyBlog
July 28 2019

Before you go searching for an app, there isn’t one. This is just a DIY trivia game that requires nothing more than a streaming service, a streaming device (like your phone) and preferably a second person to make it fun. My wife and I invented the game by accident, but now we’re playing in the car all the time to pass the commute or part of long trips.

We have Apple Music, although any streaming service will do. All of them have genre playlists or radio stations, and with Apple Music, we go for the radio station option for the variety. We click on RADIO STATION / GENRES / YEARS and then we often choose 1980s POP (one of the few years where we both have a good chance). We press PLAY, and then turn the phone away.

As the song starts, we play NAME THAT TUNE and try for the title and artist. A few notes in, we almost always recognize it, but putting that recognition to use to name a title or artist is way more challenging. Sometimes it’s obvious, like the opening notes for a Madonna song. Other times, it’s a mid-80s rock ballad and they all sound the same! Fun is when in the first few notes, we have a strong guess…and then five notes later, that guess is CLEARLY not right. Once we get it, since I’m driving, my wife turns over the phone to check title and artist, then turns it back and I press the advance button on the bluetooth controller (she could press it on the phone but the next one comes up so fast, often her eyes end up reading it and spoiling it before she can look away, the same problem you have if you play by yourself, obviously not when you’re driving though).

We occasionally listen to the whole song, but most of the time we don’t, we get it and then skip to the next one. Here’s the REALLY weird part. I know diddly squat about music. It has come up often in my relationship with my wife, seriously. I might know a song, but I rarely know the title exactly, nor even the artist. U2 is a regular failure, but bands in general I never know. I have a shot at the title, not so much the band. Which actually works out well sometimes when we’re playing — I might get the title, but she’ll get the band afterwards.

As I said, we play ’80s Pop the most. For ’70s Pop, Andrea doesn’t get many of them. And one day last week I was on fire — I had titles and the artists for a whole bunch in a row! For ’90s Pop, Andrea knows almost every one, many of which I’m not sure I’ve even ever heard (I listened to radio at home in Peterborough up until ’91, but in Victoria and Ottawa in the ’90s, I was more likely to listen to Country than Pop…reminds me of the classic line, “We have BOTH kinds of music…country AND western”, but I digress).

Jacob helps too and seems to enjoy it…he takes over the phone, and since he can’t guess them, he’s happy to be the one to tell us the answers if we can’t get it, or confirm when we’re right. Other times, he controls the music choices which tend towards Weird Al, Imagine Dragons, Bob Seger or Elton John/The Who for Pinball Wizard. Don’t ask about the eclectic nature of his choices or the weird musical world that has him memorizing all the words to American Pie. As long as he’s happy, that’s all that matters, except we limit Weird Al after about two songs on long car rides and no John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot or Kim Mitchell. If Andrea hears Patio Lanterns, it’s not good for anyone in the vicinity.

We haven’t tried 2000s Pop, but we enjoy trying for ’50s and ’60s Pop. Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Petula Clark are popular…At some point, I’m hoping to play in a larger group up at the cottage, not for competition, just a broader group of people trying who know different eras.

We seem to have default guesses for some decades. Andrea guesses the Four Tops, Four Seasons and the Temptations a lot for earlier years. I can never spot Stevie Wonder. I surprisingly think more people sound like Rod Stewart than is humanly possible, something Andrea is happy to ridicule me for, as she should.

It’s fun, it’s frustrating, and then out of the blue you’ll nail One Fine Day and that it’s the version by the Chiffons. Mind. Blown. What esoteric part of my brain is holding on to THAT info?

But I think I enjoy it most when one of us gets the first part, and the other comes up with the second part. Teamwork makes the dream work. And yes, I say that when it happens. Just to be annoying. Andrea just skips to the next song. After we do a ridiculous fist bump.

Give it a go. Bet you can’t stop, not even in the name of love. Note: Ear worms are commonplace. Proceed at your own risk.

Photo organizers

The PolyBlog
June 23 2019

After playing around with some Photo editors, I realized that some of the functionality I was hoping for at a slightly higher level was in fact more for a photo organizer / management program than an editor. So now I’m going down a different rabbit hole looking at free ones.

First up, surprisingly, is Adobe Bridge. I say surprisingly because I just blew all the old copies of all Adobe products OFF my system, so why would I download it? Well, just to try it. And I’m underwhelmed. It’s okay, and if I was into tagging or keywords, sure. One thing it does REALLY well is handle metadata. There’s even a view mode i.e. kind of like details in a file listing where you have about eight columns of metadata with dates, times, keywords, ratings, etc. Not bad, but nothing I really need. Pass.

Now, with the behemoth out of the way, I am moving on to XNViewMP, one that I am really interested in. I have already used XNView in the past, nowhere near using the full power of the tool, and this version is the upgrade. Heck, I’m impressed when I get to the first folder of files. It shows me it in “preview” thumbnail mode, but below each photo is a bunch of EXIF data. Fantastic. Different “views” show different info, but the default includes dates, sizes, and then lens mm (irrelevant for the iPhone ones), f stop, exposure duration, and ISO. Sweet. File conversions to other formats are built in, which is useful for comics and memes in making them all JPGs (better for sharing on social media). And BAM! it allows me to flip horizontal too, without changing the quality or file size. Double sweet. Let’s see what else it can do.

Change thumbnail size, occasionally useful. Add tags and ratings, doubtful (although the ratings are nice — six levels of excellent to poor, but also separated from the tags which allow for personal / work / etc.). Resizing for email, always useful. Upload, probably not the tool I’ll use. Some GPS work that I’ll probably ignore (I try to turn it off on my photos). Oooh, nice, I can edit the EXIF thumbnail, which annoys me sometimes with not matching the proper orientation. I like it.

Oh, interesting, there is even a decent screen capture option with a built-in delay so you can tab over to get it looking right on your screen. It could even tell when I told it to look that I had a webpage over in Firefox and gave me the option to capture just that. Sweet Jesus, this thing has some features I never even knew I needed! Including a CREATE function for file listings, contact sheets, a banner even…wow. This software is downright awesome. I’m in love. Now, if it would only let me do a bunch of internal editing. 🙂 Okay, okay, that’s not the point of this post. Just saying. Oh, and it does a bunch of other things including batch processing, most of which I can do in my file explorer, so not as critical.

While I’m already in love with the XN software, I thought I would check out its cousins:

  • XNConvert — I didn’t see any reason to download this, as XNView already includes conversion. But not like this…every mask / filter / tweak you ever thought of doing, you can do in this batch tool. Denoise, blur, crop even. I don’t know when or if I would ever use it, but it’s a lot of power at once.
  • XNRetro — allows you in theory to provide just a bunch of filter looks to existing photos, but it actually does more than that…you can adjust brightness, contrast, colours, etc. all manually too in a VERY simple interface. I tried it on my darker-than-desired shot of Jacob inside a tube slide, and although 20 retro looks/colours, 15 lightings, 5 vignettes, and 30 frames later and it wasn’t really doing anything for me, it is still nice to have, and free, so might as well leave it installed. I could play with brightness, contrast, etc. myself, not really the point of looking for simple “out of the box” adjustments though. Weird that it runs as a standalone file, i.e. doesn’t need to be installed. Could probably run it from a USB key if you wanted to.
  • XNSketch — allows you to convert your photo into something like a sketch or oil painting. Nothing awesome, although I confess I thought the photocopy effect looked the most realistic of a bad photocopy from the past. Okay to leave it installed, nothing exciting when trying it on a pic of Jacob and Andrea. However, I did a sketch version of my telescope setup and it is pretty sharp. Definitely some interesting possibilities for the future.
  • XNShell — by installing this, it adds a bunch of the functionality of XNView to my context (right click) menus in file explorer or my replacement program. Including horizontal flips. Nice.

I almost don’t need to continue, I already have success! But okay, why not?

I’ll give StudioLine Photo Basic 4 the next test slot. Okay, weird startup. It wants to save its data in C:\StudioLine. Why would it think anyone would want it in the C:\ root as opposed to under \Data or \Documents or \Pictures? Or even \user\blah blah blah. Whatever. Okay, time for abandonment. Like a few of the other classic “managers”, it wants you to import everything into a database. I don’t have time for that, I’m modifying locations and files on the fly. The database just can’t keep up. I played with a few settings, and almost nothing was intuitive to me. Pass, uninstall.

FastStone Image Viewer has a simpler interface, very clean and clear. Easy to navigate because it looks like a file manager. A few clicks, and I can flip pics horizontally with lossless JPEG format. Resizing for email or other purposes is pretty easy, with option to just copy and save to another folder. All of it from the right-click / context menu. I tried full view mode, which was a good option. And from that view, taking my mouse all the way to the left pulls up a sidebar-like set of menus (resizing, files, rotations, colors, effects); going to the top gives you a filmstrip of other files; going to the bottom is a navigator menu with the most used options from the main menu I think; and over to the right gives you all the EXIF data. My scroll wheel takes me to the next photo in the filmstrip. There’s a crop and heal function for a shirt with a stain, but I’m no artist at fixing blendings. Lighting adjustments on a dark pic of Jacob on a tube slide were pretty basic. And it has options to create Contact Sheets, etc. Overall? A pretty good tool. But doesn’t do anything that XNViewMP can’t do, and most not as well. Pass, uninstalling.

Moving on to Magix Photo Manager. On the install, I normally accept default installs, but for these, I’m afraid things are going to change my Picture File Associations, so I’m going custom. And this one? It was going to install something called Music Maker too (for soundtracks for videos)? No warnings, not a question, just extra bloat to install by default. Not impressed. Equally, there was a bloatware program called SimplyClean…default in custom was NOT to install, wonder what default was in regular install. I hate software that does that. Not many options that I want for stuff. However, it does have an option for basic facial recognition, which could be useful, but it didn’t seem to recognize Andrea or Jacob in two photos taken seconds apart. Pass, uninstall. Except after I was done, there were three extra remnants left that I had to uninstall manually. I don’t know if it’s malware, or what, but seriously unimpressed.

Apowersoft Photo Viewer was next on my list. It was pretty basic, and it really was mostly a viewer, but even the basic editing didn’t integrate well. Nothing to write home about, pass/uninstall.

Nomacs Image Lounge. The program did nothing for me, nothing to make it stand out. But I would remiss in mentioning that it has a basic Mosaic option I haven’t seen in any other program i.e. take a photo, tell it a batch of other photos, and have it create a mosaic by arranging tiles of all the other photos into the shape of the original. I tried it with a basic print of the moon, and only a handful of images for it to work with, but it turned out well enough for me to keep it as an option to try some other time with much more complicated inputs.

Okay, so what’s next. DigiKam. Okay…oops, it says I have it already installed. Not promising if I don’t even remember still having it. Well, at least I can update to the latest version, right? Okay, so I have no idea what’s going on. In my folder for Pictures, I have one called Working, and in it I have the batch I’m playing with called B1 as the folder. Digikam won’t show it to me. It won’t even show me it exists. Okaaay, so I went to my sub-folder that has my latest imports in it. Nada, doesn’t like that folder either. There are four or five sub-folders under it, but even with REFRESHING the folder, it doesn’t do squat. Trying to import the folder or files doesn’t help either. WTF? Okay, well bye bye, thanks for coming out. Oh, wait, it comes with another program called ShowFoto. Which kind of does the same stuff as other organizers, but not well. Okay, enough time wasted. Uninstalling. I think I only had it in there because it handles RAW. And then, wtf, the importing of a folder created some sort of recursion within the folder. 10K files duplicated, and 20GB of data later, it looked like there was no end. So I zapped the directory. Yikers. No idea what that was about. But definitely glad I removed it.

Well, I’m going to keep plowing ahead. I tweaked my anti-virus and anti-malware and my firewalls to max, even though I already had it on high alert and was only downloading based on high-end sites reviewing the software and certifying it safe to try.

Photo QT Image Viewer is next up. A fairly decent photo viewer. With an odd “transparency” model built in to see the apps running behind it. In full pic mode, I can lock the metadata info bar on the left, decent layout. But nothing exceptional, and XNViewMP blows it away by a mile. Moving on, uninstalling.

And last, but not least, is WildBit Viewer. The viewer was basic except when it comes to EXIF / metadata — it had it laid out in SPADES. Almost worth it to keep it just for that. But most of that I never use beyond the basics. The editor is decent, but when I saved a flipped image, it dropped the size by 30%. Nope, can’t have that. Okay, I’m done. Bye bye.

Looks like XNViewMP was the clear winner. Good to know. And soon I’ll have all the bases covered. Now I want to see what’s out there for facial recognition and mosaics.

Photo editors

The PolyBlog
June 20 2019

Since I’m getting into the whole AstroPhotography thing, at least insofar as I’m doing iPhone stuff at the eyepiece, I decided I would play with some software to see how easily I could stack some stuff. Although I’m mainly interested in single-frame stuff, planets are proving elusive for single frames. So I went with what I already had installed and didn’t have a lot of luck out of the gate.

But I began to wonder if I’m jumping too far ahead. Interestingly, I noticed I was having troubles even with just basic photo processing. While I had an old unreliable version of Photoshop, Lightroom, and even Photo Essentials, I’ve never liked what they do to my photo organization. I want something that does what I tell it to do, and nothing else — so I blew all three of the Adobe products off. I can always put them back if I need the power, but for now, gone with the wind.

Designing a test batch

I decided I’d play with two sets of files. First are my moon shots from a few nights ago — they all need flipping left to right (horizontal). Second is a photo from a few years ago with Andrea and Jacob, and it’s a great shot except for a stain on her shirt. I cropped around it previously, but the shot is decent, so I’d like to just remove the blemish so to speak.

Starting the product review

I tried PhotoScape X, which was from the Windows store. I’m a little worried it doesn’t even seem to show up in my “installed files”, yet it is indeed installed. Individual photo editing seems non-intuitive, but I loved the viewer mode — it let me, for example, provide a horizontal flip on all of my moon photos in one go without reducing the file size, something other apps seem to mess with or requires me to do it one at a time. I might keep it around just for that, unless I can’t find something else I want to keep that has that functionality too. $52 if I want to upgrade to pro mode though. But the simple photo editing seemed complicated — I couldn’t even figure out how to get back to a simple pencil / paint brush editing tool.

Next up to try is inPixio Photo Clip 9, which is a free photo editor. Although as it turns out, it isn’t actually free. Almost all of the good functionality is reserved for the premium version, which is $30-$40 Canadian. Seemed too simple in format, with many missing obvious functions even for a quick touch-up. Except the photo eraser and photo cutter work fine. Not quite what I’m looking for, but an interesting set of features. I’m not a big fan of crippleware, so I uninstalled.

I tried DarkTable which was billed as a good RAW editor and manager, which was fine, but again, the interface didn’t wow me. I did manage to figure out how to do some spot removal on some photos, but nothing else about the tool excited me. And since I’m rarely using RAW right now, I uninstalled, and moved on.

Another popular one is Affinity. It’s not free, runs about $50, but it has a free trial, so why not try it? Well, for one thing, as soon as I loaded it, it told me there was a newer version. Really? Why didn’t it check that before installing? Okay, whatever. And of course there are a bunch of pop-ups. Ads for a workbook to buy. Sales on iPad versions. Try the Designer companion app for free. Save on everything in the store. Or just buy it outright. Grrr…so I got past the ads, it IS a trial version after all, and under the menu, the first thing I see is an option to do a stack. I have three pics of Jupiter that are sitting in my trial zone, so I tried it. Straight-through, no problem, stacked! Complete with adjustments, slight rotations, nicely done. It’s a little washed out when done, but I don’t think that’s the program’s fault.

I played with the stacking on two sets of Jupiter images, did okay. Tried it on a batch of moon images, there’s no “best of” option, it just did its best to include all of them. Final image was okay, but a bit blurry, which isn’t much worse than the originals. It would do in a pinch.

I switched over to the picture with the stain, and while I have no real talent, I could make it work well enough with various brushes and tools to get it to look like the stain was gone without leaving a giant colour difference in the same spot. Not awesome, but that is the painter, not the brush.

I had one more “backup” picture to play with. Taken the same day as the shirt photo, it has Jacob inside a tube slide, and while one or two of the shots at the top of the slide are okay, inside the tube it is VERY dark and almost impossible to see his face. More like a silhouette in a couple of shots, which were easily discarded. It’s far from an amazing shot, just playing with perspective and it didn’t work out. But, I opened the file, played with a bunch of preset lighting options, and after a bit of trial and error, I managed to get the colour down, the light up, the contrast showing, and it’s an usable shot. Not worth the effort, he’s too pale by the time I’m done, but there are other options I could perhaps try and get a better outcome, lighting up some areas but not others perhaps. Nevertheless, it worked. Decent tool.

And, finally, I opened something called the BATCH MODE, and it lets me do a bunch of macros including taking a bunch of files and changing the format, as well as a series of macros (converting to sRGB, stripping metadata, converting to black and white, and HELLO, flipping horizontally). Nice.

I am BARELY scratching the surface of this software and it already can do everything I want. The stacking isn’t amazing, but I’ve got astro software to do that. We have ourselves a contender, even at $50. And if you had a complicated workflow that was streamlined, you can record it as a macro. Sweet.

Next on my list is the everlasting Paint.Net. No, not quite the old Windows program, although lots of people have thought so. Will it do the job? Sure. But so will Windows Photos. And nothing in batch mode. Pass.

Also on my list was Photo Pos Pro v3, yet another free photo editor. After launching, it asked me if I wanted the PRO interface or the Novice interface. Yes, this is a good level question for me. 🙂 Novice it is. But then it asks me about my preference for colour schemes — classic / bright, high contrast (dark background), or silver. High contrast it is. So I played with the order this time…I started with the dark slide photo. One series of “AUTO FIX” options later for brightness and I got everything I got earlier. For the stain, I could probably get better at it, but it wasn’t awesome tool design, even in pro mode. But they have something called a “recovery brush”, and without knowing more about it, just gave it a go. It literally removed the stain and left the underlying shirt the matching colour nearby. Like a facial blemish removal tool, but there was a separate one for that. Decently done. For the “batch” mode, though, I found two problems. First, I tried switching between novice and pro mode, and to do so, it says you have to first save the image, and asks you if you want to save with three options: YES, NO, CANCEL. Presumably you should be able to say no, i.e. you don’t want to save, you just want to switch, but no works the same as cancel, you just go back to the same screen without changing modes. I had to close, say no to saving, and then reopen after switching. That’s just silly. Second, to get into batch mode, it has a great menu offering you the chance to add a bunch of scripts to run and add a list of files to process. But there’s no indication of where to find the scripts or how to create them (like a macro). Some decent tools, and since it’s free, I’m tempted to leave it installed.

Saving the big boy for last

For anyone who has ever looked at free photo software, the big boy on the block is Gimp. Short for Gnu Image Manipulation Program, Gimp has been around a long time. And I have never liked it.

Too complicated, too bloated, didn’t like the interface. I’ve downloaded it in Linux versions, Windows versions, you name it, I’ve tried it and despite being free, I have ALWAYS uninstalled it. But someone whose methods I’m trying to emulate often tweaks his final astro photos in Gimp, so I thought I would give it a try again.

As soon as I open it, I remember why I don’t like it. The User Interface is ugly and unfriendly. But I digress.

The stain on the shirt? Able to be removed with the healing brush. Took me a second to find it, but just layout issues, not a design flaw.

The dark slide shot? I couldn’t figure out to easily make the changes. I could make some, but beyond that, not so much.

Stacking? Not really relevant, but sure, I could do it as layers, manually.

And no “batch” processing mode to flip a bunch of photos horizontally. Sigh.

I wish I liked Gimp, I really do wish it. But I just plain don’t.

A backup question

So, if one of the things I want to do is batch process some images, like flipping them horizontally, is a photo editor even what I’m looking for? I do have XNView installed, which is a viewer and organizer. And it will let me select multiple images, convert them even to other formats (I have a bunch of GIF comics that I flip into JPGs before sharing on FB, for instance), and while I have only used the program for conversions, I realized that it does let me do a series of basic tweaks, like flipping. Through lossless JPGs. Which makes me wonder about some of the other processing? Should I have been looking for a better view and organizer rather than an editor?

And the XN group have other tools…like XNConvert which does even more than the viewer does, and also free. XNRetro adjusts lighting. And for no reason that I need, XNSketch will convert your photo into a cartoon version. Me thinks I have another category to look through before moving on to Astro processing tools.