photography – The PolyBlog

Is a photo website battle ever won?

January 24 2021

If you have archivist tendencies, combined with strong analytical props, and a digital bent, digital photo management is the field for you, my friend. As an amateur or professional, you too can find new and interesting rabbit holes to explore.

For me, I have wanted to put some of my photos online since 2005 when we bought our first digital camera. Actually, a little before that, as we had films developed and they threw in digital prints for a $1 more sometimes. And I’ve had a website since back to the dark ages before that, with the natural thought, “Could I share them on there?”.

Round 1 – Basic HTML site

Initially, round 1 of my attempt was to code my own little gallery website. I was doing all of my photos in custom FrontPage designs, and I uploaded two or three albums in HTML code. It worked, it was functional, but it wasn’t very easy to manage. More like “dump them here and you can see them”. I also wasn’t particularly sure if I had a good process behind the scenes, but when there’s only a couple of hundred, the supply side of uniformity in file management gives way to the demand side of ease of management. Throw them in a folder, call it done. Upload a few, call it done.

Eventually, I upgraded the side to a content management system, and photos were NOT an easy inclusion. Sure, I *could* include them, but it was very manual AND hard to manage all the photos on the site. They didn’t go in a subfolder, they just went in one big directory online called “media” or “images”. Not very satisfactory even with a couple of hundred images. If I uploaded another year’s worth? Meh.

Sure, I could do it through FB, but I don’t really like FB that much, and I really don’t like having all my stuff there. Plus lots of people in the family who would/could/might want to view the images aren’t ON Facebook. Or at least most of them weren’t at the time. Over time, that edge has dulled a bit, but still, it’s an issue.

Round 2 – Photo hosting site

Eventually, I decided I needed a REAL solution for online. I had enough photos that I wanted to upload that I went for an online photo site, and reviewed a bunch of sites. In the end, I went all-in on Smug Mug. It was great. I could choose a theme, I could have subdirectories. I had to manually add all my labels and descriptions, uploading my initial pics for the second time plus about 4y worth of photos, but at least I could do it. Cross-linking to my website wasn’t easy peasy, lemon squeezy, but I could do it. Sort of. More like “good enough” rather than “good”.

Except that because of the volume and use I was needing, I needed a paid account. It was only about $100 a year overall, but it was always a bit grudging payment. Here I was, paying for Smug Mug to host my pics, when I was ALREADY paying for my own site. Does that make sense to anyone? Easier than running my own photo gallery, most of the time, sure, but on principle, it annoyed me.

Round 3.1 – PolyWogg.ca

And about 6-7 years ago, the principle got to me. I wanted it on my own site. No content rules, no limitations, my own site. So I moved it to my polywogg.ca account. Great. I ran a gallery called Coppermine initially, got it going, wasn’t totally happy with it, but managed to upload a year or two. Not bad. I considered it “round 3” for online.

But it wasn’t working quite the way I wanted it to, I struggled here and there. Eventually, I decided I needed a different solution, and opted for a photo gallery called Piwigo. It had a lot of power, extra extensions, themes and plugins, like any good online community eco-system. And it handled all of my photos REALLY well. Video was still a bit of a challenge, but I could make it work. Probably.

I didn’t quite get the chance to find out. I ran into some problems about that time with an old hoster, and moved to my third hoster of my online career. I lasted about 18m with that one before they really started screwing me around. I was almost to the point where I was considering calling in a lawyer if the amounts weren’t so small. Mostly I just wanted to smack them around. Really terrible business practices and even worse support. Like them modifying my site without telling me, my finding their changes, their denying it despite the logs showing they had done it, so they deleted the logs, and my support tickets, and then deleting my complaint files (all the same support people) so the bosses wouldn’t find out what they had done. Eventually it blew up on them entirely, and a lot of people went public for awhile before the whole unit was fired and supposedly new people hired, but by that time, I was long gone.

I had moved to a medium-sized company in Canada, my current hoster, and within days of moving, I knew I felt at home. There had been a long, lingering problem on the old site, I was convinced it was a server configuration issue but had no idea how to solve it and the support people denied there were any issues. Two days after I moved to the new host, their support group reached out to me, noting the misconfiguration was likely affecting my site performance and suggesting a fix, if I was okay with it. For what I was doing, there was a small reconfiguration required, and they were proactively helping me solve it. Nice.

I reinstalled Piwigo, spent about a year getting it all up and running the way I wanted it to (after all the other changes I made to my main website were taken care of), and I consider that round 3.2. I started uploading photos. Again.

For the first year of photos, this was the fifth time uploading them somewhere (once in HTML, once in SmugMug, once in Coppermine, and now twice in Piwigo on two different hosters). Some metadata transferred, some did not. Sigh.

Round 4.1 – WordPress

I know I’m anal, but this decision really wasn’t mine. Not exactly.

You see, my site has unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth (within the general setup of the site for speed and servers), BUT one thing that almost all small hosting packages have in common is a small note in the fine print. A limit on “inodes”.

If you don’t know what an inode is, you’re not alone, and most people who have hosting packages never even notice it. It’s basically a “file marker” in the server that tells it where to find a folder or a file. Like an index card system in a library or your old file allocation table in Windows.

For my hosting package, I am authorized up to 200K inodes. Which sounds like a lot. I have unlimited space, but for inodes, I can have say 1 folder with 199,999 files in it, or 100K folders with only 1 file in it. Neither are likely scenarios but here’s the catch. When you install WordPress, with all its little files for the core, themes and plugins, it takes about 10K files and folders. Piwigo takes about 5K all on its own. I also run two other installations of WP on my site (for other sites), and I used to have 3. Which meant just based on “installed” software, I had 35K worth of my 200K inodes already taken up.

Still, lots of room, and I cut one installation when I merged PolyBlog with PolyWogg. Back to 25K in inodes, 175K left. Plenty of space, right? Except Piwigo has a really nasty habit of generating other sized photos. So let’s say I upload 10K photos. That’s 10K inodes. Initially.

Then Piwigo generates a thumbnal (+10K), a small image (+10K), a medium image (+10K), a large image (+10K), and the original image (~0 extra). So 10K worth of images generates 50K in inodes. Umm…that’s not good. In fact, with EVERYTHING running at one point, I was up to 145K/200K used. Yikes.

Now, I can reconfigure Piwigo not to do that, and I did. I got it down to a smaller number, but the way it does it, it will always generally be twice the number of inodes.

Okay, so I had it down to a smaller functioning site, all good, right?

Well, not exactly. I still had to keep maintaining the site for admin, including improved security, etc. Plus, it isn’t exactly the most robust of software packages. I found a few things that had to be coded manually to fix, and while we found solutions (or rather the community experts helped me figure it out), it was kind of like hacking the code to make it do what I wanted. Satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time.

Round 4.2 – New WordPress versions

In the meantime, WordPress was continually evolving. It moved forward several iterations and then finally a full version upgrade, and more and more, the Piwigo solution wasn’t really integrating very well, Which is a bit of a problem.

I am, primarily, a blogger. While I have a huge site, most of the content is in pages I wrote as blog entries like this one. And I want to include more photos. Even if it is only, “Hey, here’s this photo I took yesterday at the tulip festival” before I tell some story about the experience. Yet the more WP evolved, the harder it was to integrate the photos from the site. I did it a bit manually for awhile too, passing up on some malfunctioning automated tools, but it was far from satisfying.

What I REALLY wanted was what I had wanted from the beginning. One site, one solution.

I dug back into all the photo galleries that had existed from the dawn of time, or at least it seemed like it. I found dozens that were popular and in heavy use. Some were really cool. I limited myself to those that were still compatible with the new versions of WordPress, but it was still a long list.

And almost all of them had a recurring problem. The same one I had way back at the beginning…they all use the media library as their default save location, which means by default, all the photos are stored in the same place as where you store your site header, featured images, etc. It’s nice that it’s all in one spot, but it is kind of like throwing all your books in one room and saying you have a library. No organization, no easy searching, just a long list of images to find the one you want.

The most popular one of all is one called NextGen. It has been around for years, made by Imagely, and one of the reasons people use it, other than robustness, is that it has a totally separate file structure. That presents good and bad features, but the biggest “pro” is that all of your media is stored separately. Your core media library remains untouched. One “con” is that it doesn’t handle video.

But since none of the others can handle video either, I gave it a go. Again. Sure, I say again, because I had tried it 2-3 other times previously. I always wanted all my stuff in WP, and every time I considred Smug Mug or Piwigo, I looked to see lightly if I could find a good solution in WP, and NextGen was always on the list. I could never get it to work properly.

I don’t know exactly why, but it would NEVER work right. So I’d move on, frustrated.

This time I tried it, and it worked. Out of the box, day one, first light. It just worked. What’s different from the last time? A new version of WordPress, which is significant. And I’m on an entirely different hoster that is properly configured. Does that make the difference? I don’t know. I just know it works.

Holy crap. It worked. I could integrate my GALLERY within my MAIN SITE. Holy snicker doodles.

I started uploading. I got 2005-2008 uploaded, and I hit a small wall. My site design wasn’t quite right.

Round 5 – PolyWogg 5.0

I redesigned major parts of my site in the last year. Fixed a bunch of inconsistencies, tweaked some other settings, added whole new sections. And each time I made a change, I kind of said, “Okay, I’ll figure out later how my photos fit into this new site.” I kept pushing it off.

I needed the “words” to work before I figured out how the photo and videos would work. Or if they even would.

That’s no small issue. While there are huge advantages to having everything in one site, my site has grown. It’s quite large. It has a LOT of moving parts. And the more I push in certain areas, the more I expand my content, the less functional it seemed having everything together.

A few weeks ago, I had to bite the bullet and decide. Was it going back to having two (or more) sites for PolyWogg content, maybe one for my HR guide, a separate one for regular blogging, a separate one perhaps for photos? In the end, I reframed the question. What were the REAL obstacles in having it all on one site?

The final analysis brought me to two pain points:

Navigation
Branding

Content management wasn’t the real issue. It was that I have a lot of content that I want to group together but branding it doesn’t really work with my standard “PolyWogg” headers. And navigation amongst the sub areas is too hard when you only have one pull-down menu for that category with a lot of sub-sub-sub-menus.

Again, as with all things in web developer, there was another option besides a separate site. I could, in theory, have separate headers for my different content as well as separate menus. There would be one master menu for the site, but once you got into more granular areas, you would move to a wholly different menu too.

Except I had tried this on multiple occasions, my theme is SUPPOSED to be able to do this, and I’ve never been able to get it to work. I’ve tried other plugins, nada. But this is what I WANTED. Maybe I could bang my head for a few weeks and see if I could cobble together a solution.

Okay, step 1, reach out for theme support. See if they had suggestions as to which other plugins would work well with the theme to do exactly what I wanted. Or tell me how to make it work with the theme. I’ve had some luck with them in the last year tweaking my theme, so I was willing to give it a go. I posted my question, aaaaand I crashed their site.

I’m not kidding. I literally crashed their support site. They fixed it and went, “Huh, what happened?”. I told them I had been posting a question, they double-checked the log, and sure enough, it was my account that killed it. My account is somehow corrupted (they don’t know how or why), and my posting killed them. They’ve tweaked it so that I can’t do it again, but my acct is still messed up somehow. I can use it, but well, I get some weird screens that others don’t get. No worries, I’ll survive.

Except in the meantime I figured I would see how far I could get on my own down this rabbit hole. I went to my theme. I enabled the features. I went to my test page, switched the header to the proper one, no change. Yep, I remember that outcome. Went back to another sub-page, made some more tweaks, misread an option, set it, reset, now NO header. WTF? Oh. Oops, misread it. Okay, reset that option, found two others that seemed to make sense that I haven’t noticed before, might be new, retested. And my header changed. All of my branding changed for that one sub-page with 2 minutes worth of work. Holy smokes.

Okay, don’t get cocky, I thought. I went to the menu area. I tried to create a new menu, copying over my old one. Told it not to put it ANYWHERE, just a dummy menu. Went in and deleted some stuff just so I could see that it was different. Went to the page that had the new header and told it to show the new menu on that page, not the regular menu. Reloaded. BAM! All of my navigation was changed for that one sub-page with 2 minutes more work.

OMG.

I did it. Exactly the way it is supposed to work, and I’m 95% sure, exactly the way I had tried it on previous occasions. But I don’t care now. It works.

Which meant I could keep my single site. Which means no separate setup. Nothing to stop me from using my existing site. All I had to do was decide on a consistent format to my layout and design for that sub-area that wouldn’t bite me in the butt later.

Because I’m not talking some small site. The average site in WordPress for people using other galleries is maybe 1000 photos. Sites that run full WooCommerce and sell products frequently don’t have more than 1000 items in their site. For me? We average 2000 photos a year, of which I post about a third. We broke a thousand mid-way into year 2, I’m over 2000 by the end of year 4, and I haven’t even included all the photos from our wedding events that year. Including the honeymoon section which is huge.

Long term, I’m estimating somewhere around 20K photos just to get caught up to now, although that may top 25K. I know professional photographers who don’t have that many. AND I haven’t even got to what I want to do for astrophotography images.

Rebooting the gallery

Since I had already uploaded the photos for 2005-2008, I didn’t have to do much to “fix” those galleries. I renamed a bunch, I changed the look and feel from an old template being deprecated to a new one, tweaked some inconsistencies here and there, and added a new video section that works really well, so I’m generally “good to go”.

Previously when I played with the first 4 years worth of gallery, I had to spend a lot of time getting them up and running. Maybe one gallery a day. I just did 32 galleries in about four days, one year per day, generally about 2 hours work while I was editing other things.

I’ve even managed to get past my previous point of progress (2005-2008), completed all the old galleries for the wedding, and I’m finally back into the truly “new” ones for being part of WordPress. I had reached 2011 at one point with SmugMug, I think, but I’m pretty happy with my early rebuild. I have a full workflow figured out, complete with Mylio as my software, and it is giving me the confidence that I have finally “turned the corner” on my go to solution. Four years down, thirteen to go, albeit the next thirteen won’t be anywhere near as fast. And alas, 2009-2011 is redoing old work. At least I’m doing it properly now.

Just don’t ask me about astrophotography yet. I don’t know HOW I’m going to organize that stuff.

Overall though, apparently the “seventh time was the charm”…I have won a decisive battle, but the war rages on.

Today I choose to encourage my son’s creativity (TIC00037d)

August 27 2020

Jacob is good at certain things like chess and not as good at other things like team sports. That’s not a normative statement, nor a complaint, just a note that he won’t be joining a lot of obvious group activities that a lot of kids do and that are easily part of elementary and high school. He enjoys them, but not so much for competition. Finding activities that he likes to do more frequently, beyond board games with the parents, will always be a work in progress for him, as it has been for his parents.

Andrea has already guest-posted some time ago about hobbies (Guest blog: Horton hatches a hobby – Part 1 and Guest blog: Horton hatches a hobby – Part 2) and I post regularly about mine. Many of them are individual pursuits.

For Jacob, I have tried to encourage his writing, but since he doesn’t seem have a natural outlet or desire for his stories, it goes in spurts. I suggested that perhaps he could do book reviews, however brief, since he loves reading so much, and to be candid, I wish I had a record of everything I have read in my life. Obviously we won’t capture J’s early years very accurately, but he started a list this year and I think he is over 100 so far. Not a bad start. I’m thinking of doing it up as some sort of certificate or something he can put on his wall, but it too is a work in progress.

He likes designing board games, and has done two camps for it, and I need to get back to helping him actually create a solid quality prototype (we did one a few years ago called Jacob’s neighbourhood that we all enjoy playing now and again, mostly for some of the humour we put in it but it was rudimentary compared to a couple of his other games). I’m hoping to nail some stuff in the next few weeks and give him a version for Christmas somehow “secretly”.

So those are two areas that I would like to build on. He’s assembled some stuff, he’s done a few crafts with Andrea, a few courses here and there.

But a few months ago, he got a new iPhone for his birthday, and I’ve encouraged him to take some photos with it. He is willing to do some on his telescope at some point, which will be an interesting outlet for him, I hope, yet I was pleasantly surprised when he was at the cottage recently that he took some good shots of sunsets. No prompting from me, he just took some decent shots and sent them to us by text.

So, we’ve been chatting here and there about what to do with his photos, in part to encourage him, and in part just to display them, and tonight we doubled down together, sorted some 100+ photos by date, and then upon review, chose 4 that he quite liked. We uploaded them to CostCo, chose one for high-end canvas printing to see how it turns out, and three more as prints, and sent them off. The canvas one will take just over a week, maybe ten days; the prints are ready tomorrow afternoon. And he wants the prints as soon as they are ready (actually, I suspect he wants to take the prints with us to the cottage to show to people). Are they the BEST SHOTS EVER? Hardly. But they’re decent and HE took them himself.

I need to tweak some of the settings on his phone for higher-end images if he’s going to be enlarging some of them, but they were decent first starts. I’m hoping the tangible prints will encourage his ongoing interest. I would LOVE to see Jacob take a strong interest in photography over the next few years, even if only a hobby for the future. If he chooses not to, no problem, but in the meantime, I’ll reward his budding interest with some printing costs to help encourage him along the way.

Today I choose to encourage my son’s creativity for photography.

What choices are you making today?

Photo organizers

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

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.

#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course

October 10 2018

Back in 2016, I decided to “up my game” for photography, and I thought I would start with a class or two. Henry’s courses are popular, but there are also courses through the city’s annual learning catalog, and even through Algonquin College if I want to get really serious. But I wanted to keep it simple, so I started watching The Great Course’s “Fundamentals of Photography” series (Fundamentals of Photography – Class 01 – Making Great Pictures).

Recently, as part of my lingering 50by50 commitments, I wanted to get back into photography learning, but even in the last two years, my approach has changed. I have a decent camera — a Canon Rebel T5i aka the 700D — and it works well for me. It is considered a high-value entry level DSLR, but my needs are relatively modest, with just a couple of quirks.

My primary need is outdoors photography … waterfalls, landscapes, flora and fauna, hiking through nature, and friends and family doing both active and passive activities.

My secondary need, like most people, is indoor photography … birthdays, parties, events, holidays.

My quirky needs are both related to astrophotography — first, attached to the scope (body only) or second, straight Milky Way sky shots (with and without zooms).

The T5i came in a couple of configured bundles, and I went with the one that included two lenses — 18-55mm, and 55-250mm. It also has a whack of pre-set modes:

Portrait (blurred backgrounds);
Landscape (wide depth of field so both foreground and background are in focus);
Close-up (aka a software macro option for flowers and things);
Sports (continuous shooting, high speed capture, rapid focus);
Scene mode (several sub-options);
Creative auto (simple mode for quick setting of common features);
Flash off (can’t fire, no matter what the camera thinks is right or not); and,
Scene-intelligent auto (the computer takes its best guess on all the settings, useful if you keep changing setting)

It then has four semi-manual modes:

Program mode (P) — This is a bit misleading, as it is semi-auto (aperture and shutter speed) but you control the rest;
Shutter priority mode (Tv) — You control how fast the shutter is, the computer does the rest;
Aperture priority mode (Av) — You control how wide the aperture is, the computer does the rest;
Manual mode (M) — The full power of the camera is at your fingertips.

For me, I spend almost all my time in pre-set modes, and truth be told, I don’t even do that well.

I have managed to get what I think are some great shots — birds in flight, cousins doing various water sports, flora around various hiking trails in Ottawa. But while I pointed the camera, chose the mode (sports, for example) and captured the shot (cousin waterskiing and spraying up water), I didn’t really know what the camera was doing. I wanted to know how and why it worked, not just the what of the shot or settings. Part of my reasoning is that if I can understand the basics for my primary needs (basic outdoors and indoors), I have a better shot at understanding how to approach astrophotography.

So I signed up in September for a course with Henry’s, the local photography store. I wanted a bit of hands-on experience to get me out of pre-set modes and into manual, but I also wanted to know what the camera was doing. Part of that experience is going back to look at previous photos that turned out well and figuring out, “OH! So THAT’S how I / my camera did that…”. There were a few options available including both “learn about your Canon camera” as well as “photography 101”. With timing and location, I opted for the photography basics course in Kanata.

The course was divided into four classroom sessions, plus one practical session, with each session designed to dive into the key aspects of what you control in photography. I’m going to write separate blog posts about each week, but the overview is show below, although the titles/descriptions are mine, not the official ones:

Camera fundamentals — I hesitate to call this “meet your camera” but it pretty much is what it was about. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands on walking various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with.
Understanding aperture — Looking at depth of field, aperture and f/stops, and fast lenses.
Understanding shutter speed — Looking at motion for capture, blurring, and panning techniques;
Planning the photo — Looking at a combination of different lenses, perspectives, sensors, and then the creative side (composition, tips).

It was an interesting experience. For week 1 and 2, I went to the Kanata course on Wednesday nights, and there were about 10 of us in the class. A wide range of interest — older for hobby, younger with dreams of entrepreneurship, a few unique interests. However, the instructor noted he was also teaching on Friday nights nearer my house (earlier time, and on a Friday?), and if we missed Wed, we could catch Friday at the other site. Week 3 & 4, I did just that, because there was only 1 person over there, meaning it was almost like a hands-on class. We asked questions constantly, at least I did, and stopped him regularly when something wasn’t clear. Way more “aha” moments than if we had been in a larger group because it was the follow-up questions that really crystallized things for me. When I do the four blogs for the weeks, I really want to see if I can re-create some of the examples.

I have the practical session tonight, but it isn’t as “practical” as it sounds — we’ll be over by a park in the relative dark. The Friday night class would be great for me, but it’s at a bad time for me this week. so not sure what I’m doing yet.

Am I ready to go full manual now? No, but I achieved my true goal — learning and feeling much more comfortable with making my camera do more of what I want it to and less of what I don’t. Part of a multi-year plan to get me fully conversant before retirement. And a welcome addition to my list of 50 things.

The PolyBlog

My view from the lilypads

Tag Archives: photography