Rapid Photo Downloader: making your life easier

Have you ever had a couple (or more) memory cards full of images that you quickly want to download to your hard drive while making an extra backup copy and rename all files according to a certain pattern?  And all of this as quickly as possible because you are here to take pictures, not to process your digital files? Damon Lynch has created Rapid Photo Downloader, a tool that does just that… and a bit more.

Phraymd – an image collection manager

This little thing called Real Life (TM) got in the way again so my April 1st joke stayed there much longer than planned. To the point that it isn’t funny anymore (thanks Andrew for pointing it out 🙂 ). A while ago, I received an email from Damien Moore introducing Phraymd an image manager that he is working on. Although Damien described Phraymd as “as buggy as all hell” (and the name is still temporary), the program is so interesting it deserves a mention.

Basically, Phraymd is an image collection management tool: it allows you to work on your images metadata – tags, titles, copyright, etc which is stored inside the image itself. You can then search through your image collection, modify metadata in batch, etc.

Monitor calibration: the dispcalGUI way

Mramshaw mentioned dispcalGUI in a comment – while I was keeping an eye on lprof to offer a GUI for monitor calibration. So today I decided it was time to check how dispcalGUI does its job. And it does it well. Kudos to dispcalGUI’s author: Florian Höch

The idea

ArgyllCMS (blog 1, 2) is a Linux / Windows / Mac OS X set of command line utilities for color management – including but not limited to monitor calibration. So dispcalGUI is a make-your-life-easier frontend to Argyll which allows monitor calibration. This is especially handy since creating a profile with Argyll involves several steps with quite a few command line options – “dispcal -v -q l -y c samsung” anyone?

Tags – almost there

My previous entry about tags generated quite a few comments. It is one of these areas where “things are happening”, where standards are here, libraries are usable and their integration into end user applications is on its way.

Tags are a very powerful tool to organize your images and search through them. Tags contain much more information than anything you could do with “clever filenames” so it is a very important last step in the photographic workflow.

On the other hand, tagging is a long and tedious process (to say the least). So it would be handy not to have to redo it from scratch every 3 months because we picked the wrong standard last time… Tagging should be a function offered by the image viewer / manager, but that is obviously not the only task of an image viewer.

Tagging your images for easier retrieval

Although I delete most of the images I shoot, although I put each month’s keepers in a directory, although I have taken the habit of printing a “digital contact sheet” each month, I am faced with a growing number of images and they need to be manageable somehow…

One of the main tool for that is image tagging and guess what? It is the subject of this entry.

Files: keeping them safe

In the days of film photography, you would pay money for each shutter click. So this meant you had to refrain yourself from shooting like crazy. Some argue that you had to “think before you shoot” and so end up with better images while other argue that “today you can try new things” since you don’t have to pay for each click.

That also means (and it is the subject of this entry) that we are producing files. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Gigabytes of them. And then what?

A photograph, from end to end

In our usual Sunday afternoon walk, I had the chance to further play with my brand new 35mm lens. It was an enjoyable experience, as always when trying a new toy. I see this lens as a tool to dive into street photography which is something I don’t always feel very at ease with.

Since I am quite happy with one of the pictures of the day and it required a few tricks in post-processing, I decided to do an “end-to-end” entry. I think all the aspects of this process have been dealt with before; this is just to give a sens of “how it all comes together”.

Workflow (6): looking back at the whole process

OK, now we have followed step-by-step the process work on photos from them being taken in camera as RAW or JPEG files to the production of a high-quality image file. What is commonly named “workflow”. Because things are a bit complicated and required quite a few verbose blog entries, here is a little drawing summarizing the different steps:

Workflow (5) – Quick Post Processing

OK now we are ready to take the next step in our workflow (and remove these very average photos from the top of my blog page 😐 ). Basically, when choosing the keepers, some of them need (quite a bit of) touch up, just to get a feel for their potential. This should be a 5 mins per picture job with simple tasks like:

• straighten up the horizon
• touching up the color curves
• cropping
• rough conversion to Black and White

Workflow (4b) – examples of (non) keepers

OK, we left our last post on workflow with a few bullet points about which files are worth keeping and which ones we can just throw away. Better than bullet points, here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Please note that these are just random shots from a one hour around the neighborhood trip, so don’t expect too much in terms of photographic art…