Archive for the 'technology' Category

Under the “random cool shit that can be done with scripting in IMatch” category:

A script to import Google Earth coordinates into IMatch to be associated with a particular image.

Someone then took that script and made it go the other way, so once you have an image with associated coordinates, you can launch Google Earth from within IMatch and “fly” to that location.

Mario, the guy who writes the iMatch photo management software, has posted the release notes for the soon-to-be-posted and eagerly-awaited update. This isn’t a boring service pack, but a major update addressing some of the most-wanted feature requests and changes.

I’m excited. Go read the notes yourself here.

When Jennifer finds a charge to iMatch on our credit card statement, hopefully she doesn’t think I joined some computer dating service. Despite the name which to me sounds like a dating service or Apple’s latest entry in their iLife suite, I’ve found iMatch to be a quite capable photo management and organization solution on my Windows PC.

A couple months ago, I reached a frustration point with Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0, which I’ve used for cataloging my photos for the past couple years. The program was just getting slower and slower. I only had around 2,500 images in the system… it needed to scale. The Fisher-Price-esque GUI had always bothered me, and I found it slightly disappointing that the only way to add metadata to the photos for later filtering and searching was through the use of categories. The fact that Photoshop Album limited me to how many levels of categories I could have had also been a sticky point.

A few weeks ago I started searching to find a better management program. I looked at a few online, downloaded a couple demos, and considered the very steep price (hundreds of dollars) for some of the software packages. I decided the one I was going to give a full workout was iMatch. I started by working on my category taxonomy, figuring out how I was going to want to search. When I setup my Photoshop Album categories I was working purely on guesswork. Now I was able to set the categories up based on my real-world experiences of the past couple years.

After setting up the categories I started out by importing one DVD (about 4.5GB) of photos and I went about adding them to the appropriate categories. I also set up a custom image property called RoadNumber to note the lead locomotive in the railroad shots. Later on, I can go back and search and see if I have photos of a certain unit. Overall the tagging into categories I think went just a tad faster than with Photoshop Album, probably due to the less-graphical interface which let me get to more categories faster. iMatch also includes the ability to set up “Category Splashers” which are shortcuts that assign a set of categories to a group of images in one action. These can be placed on a shortcut toolbar or assigned keyboard shortcuts.

The geeky side of me likes the ability to create any sort of custom properties for the images in my collection, and then being able to filter or sort on those properties using regular expressions.

iMatch handles all common image formats as well as the RAW image formats from major manufacturers. It manages images on removable media (CD/DVD, etc) by using the disc’s internal serial number so that a large library of offline storage can be managed with ease.

Overall I have found that I can get my images into iMatch faster than with Photoshop Album, and that iMatch should scale well to my growing database of photos. The ability to perform detailed, flexible queries far exceeds the limited point-and-click, AND-only query abilities of Photoshop Album. Is the improved speed, flexible keyword organization, and scalability enough to make me recatalog all of my existing collection? Given that Photoshop Album is a dead product, I just plunked down the $60 to purchase iMatch from Photools.com.

I got home last night, took my 512mb compact flash card out of my EOS-300D and put it on our kitchen counter while I moved a few things around. In the process of moving Brooklyn’s sippy cup, I managed to knock the memory card off the counter, and it landed directly into a dog’s water dish.

Shit.

I got the card out of the water in about 2 or 3 seconds. I shook it several times to get drops to stop coming out, then placed it in the office which tends to be the warmest room in our house.

Tonight I took the card, popped it into my reader and was able to copy all of the images off of the card, and I’m able to open them in Photoshop.

Whew.

I’ve configured a new service which will automatically post my bookmarks I’ve saved on del.icio.us to this blog. This will be an easy way to automatically share new railroad or photo-related links here without having to manually post each one, plus it will consolidate several links for one day into one post. The only downside is an occasional off-topic link might show up (one I’ve posted, but not related to railroads or photography) but I’ll clean that up as soon as I can.

Brought to you by the “random things to occupy more time on the intarweb” department

Grumpysworld.com now works in Firefox. Yay!

The monitor on my main PC at home (the one I use for photo editing) is dying, and in the process of dying it’s botching the colors and contrast. Photos which I edit and look great at home look like crap when viewed on a correctly-functioning monitor. As a result, you’ll likely see a few less photos posted here for a week or two until I can come up with a better monitor at home.

I use del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks… which means if anyone wants to know what I’ve tagged, you can see. My railroad-related bookmarks can be found at http://del.icio.us/ahockley/railroad

Some of you are probably aware of Wikipedia. Some of you probably aren’t. It’s a community-authored and edited online encyclopedia process. Anyone can edit the pages, and the community process helps to ensure that someone doesn’t go do something stupid with the resulting documents.

I decided that it couldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes and share some of my railroad knowledge with the word. I went over to Wikipedia, looked at a couple topics for which I could make an intelligent contribution, and did so.

So far I have created two articles: Mount Hood Railroad and Lewis and Clark Railway

I’ve begun putting together my presentation for a slideshow being hosted by a friend next month.

For me, putting together a show is usually a frustrating process. I think I’m too much of a perfectionist with my shows, always trying to find the “perfect” music to complement the subject and mood. I’m considering doing a hybrid music/narration show, with pre-recorded narration corresponding to parts of the show.

So far, I’ve narrowed it down to which photos I want to show. I have no idea on the music. The general theme is the Alaska Railroad… I had one song picked out but it’s being used by another presenter. Time for Plan B. I wish I knew what Plan B was.

I think Plan B is going to be a pre-recorded narration as I share a bit of history and give a brief tour through the Anchorage shops, then move onto a music background for the scenery shots. We’ll see…

http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/excurs/trace.cfm

I think everyone is chasing but me…