All Change

After a year of hard work by all, and a couple of bits of bad luck on certain things, it has been decided to stop the Barcelona Photography project what I'm involved in, take a sit back and a breather and have a look what's happening and where to take things with a clean pair of eyes...

Sure, it feels a bit tough for the amount of work, the free time that hasn't been free and all the hours doing things that now won't see the light of day; but probably a lot easier than banging the head against the wall...

At least it will give us some more time to concentrate in other things and do what we are doing but a little differently and more efficiently...

The next big thing is to look through the system and see how much we can recuperate of the coding, the systems we have built and see if all the programming hasn't been in vain. I don't think that will be the case as I'm quite taken with the GPS class and integration that I built in to the photoblog system that hasn't seen the light of day... Yet.

Adobe Lightroom 4

So it dropped this morning, LR 4…

And being inclined to shiny and geeky I dropped on it as well… Well, saying that, I have been working the Beta since that came out, and seeing what the differences would be in my work flow, in what I needed to do to my many plugins that I use (usually about 7 of them), to see what I'd need to do further down the line.

So what's it like over the Beta? Well… Faster, it feels a lot more responsive and the memory handling seems a lot better than it did, then there's the reverse geo-encode function that seems to work now (didn't notice this in the Beta, it may have been there, may have not) which is scroll to point on the map in the new Map Module, then just drag the image(s) off the film strip on to the map at that point and… That's it. Saying that, the whole map module is a good thing, and worth the upgrade cost for me alone, for the simple fact that all my kit isn't gps enabled and I end up with a log track on some of the kit from an external, and then it's open up another program before Lightroom import, match the log to the photos, import and then work on the photos.

Now with Lightroom 4, I can do that and make fine adjustments right there in the programme, so that's a few minutes saved a week, and when minutes translate to hours, and then hours translate to double figures it soon adds up that the upgrade was a no brainer…

Also a few other things that I like about it, is that the interface seems a tad darker than LR 3, also there's the soft proof tool, the book creator for Blurb (I wish I had that last year!), the new 2012 standard processing, and… Auto Chromatic Aberration removal in the lens palette.

Upgrading to something like this isn't a two minute snap fingers and done, it requires a bit of time, as to move and test the presets, write new up loaders if need be, modify bits and bobs to make them compatible, drop in other tools that could come in handy… So now, when I get time from doing other things, the next bit is to shoot a sequence on each camera, make a default import preset for each camera, add in the bits that may help like the C/A removal, probably do a profile for each lens to nail the correction right… Then upgrade the catalogues, copy and upgrade the LR 3 catalogues on the backup disks… Just a tad more than clicking install, following on screen steps and that's it (and perhaps the cure of a lot of the times I hear "This new programme doesn't work as well as the older version…").

So, best guess with it, I'll probably roll it in to my full production cycle at the end of the month, when I've got all the bits sorted for it, and I've found out what may trip me up with it.

And for other things, because this is running on Adobe Camera Raw 7, I wouldn't be surprised if more of Adobe Photoshop CS6 starts to leak out or it becomes available on the market in close time, because of the rendering differences between the CS5/ACR 6 and LR4/ACR7…

Rain stopped play...

The plan for this afternoon was to enjoy the afternoon off, ignore work type things and other mountains of stuff that have piled up and can't be sorted until next week; and take a walk over the mountains with the camera and explore another bit of the region that I've not seen yet… But, there's always one of them isn't there… Rain had been forecast and the sky seems to back the weather forecasters up for a change.

That either left me with the choice of going to visit the in-laws for the afternoon (and when I say visiting, go and sit round watching the TV as they watch the TV) or do something involving acronyms and gibberish (as one of my friends puts it). What I'm working through is trying to generate KML, parse that through jQuery and output it as an embedded 3D system on a web page.

The idea behind it, is simply to grab the EXIF out of the images at upload time (or by parsing a directory later on), checking whether these images have Geotags, and if they have, include them in the KML file. The first option of grabbing them at upload time would be preferable as the EXIF can be written off to SQL and when called later on, things like descriptions, titles, etc can be drawn out of the database, placed alongside the images that have the GPS co-ordinates, and then these all fed in to the output system and loaded on to the Google Maps plugin for jQuery.

One plugin I have found that I like the look of, but it's probably a bit cumbersome for most applications, is the kmltree extension for jQuery, which brings up a Google Earth window in the page (assuming that the browser has got Google Earth Plugin installed for it), and then from there in creates a list of the images, so click and you're away to the location, click the link therein, and up pops an image window with the images in there for that location, and the good thing about it… The images don't require sending up to Panoramio to appear within Google Maps for you to show off; so you can maintain and manage what you want folk to see directly through a website.

With working through it this afternoon, whilst the rain was belting down, and me sat here really wishing I could scoot off up the mountains and enjoy my afternoon, the hardest thing I found was to build the actual KML template… Sure, it's just an extension of XML, but just to show a set of images, that was quite atrocious to work through… The template has more lines of echo'd PHP in there than the actual class that builds out the EXIF data has in it.

Sometime, maybe soon, maybe later, I may get round to sharing the PHP and also the KML generation templates, so you could build this in to your own web application should you so need it (that's when I've actually tested it and made sure that it doesn't actually kill kittens or something when it's used!)