clyx software blog

Digital Photo Cataloging Software - An Update

Rohan — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 07:03:21 GMT

Earlier this year I blogged about digital photo cataloging software. The past month or so has seen a number of new releases so I thought it was time for an update.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe recently released Beta 4.1 of Lightroom. This product is really shaping up nicely as it nears launch.

Although targeted at the "professional photography community" working primarily with RAW format files, a serious hobby photographer / semipro using TIFF or even JPEG would also benefit from it. It's clearly designed as a competitor to Apple's Aperture.

There's a lot more power than Photoshop Elements, and it's a lot less complex than Photoshop CS. Metadata support is extensive with the usual EXIF and IPTC together with XMP Sidecar. It does need a reasonably powerful PC to make it feel snappy.

I'm a big fan of its user interface finding it both highly functional and attractive. It has five workspaces - Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web.

If you're interest in it, try out the latest beta while you still can. (It expires in February).

On the technical side, there's some unusual aspects to Lightoom. For instance, over 40% of has been written in the open-source language Lua. And it uses SQLite for its library database. It is a cross-platform product, having first been released for MacOSX. These factors should go some way to encouraging the development of addon software.

The likely price is not yet known but it will be more than Elements and less than Photoshop CS... and Apple's Aperture is A$449. So my guess is A$399.

I'm looking forward to its release.

Tip: try the "Lights Out" mode... press L a few times. I love it.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5

The annual update to Adobe's Photoshop Elements (and Premiere Elements) has been released. Elements has been my favorite digital photo application, particularly since Version 4. The question is - is it worth the upgrade? The upgrade brings a number of new features to the product. Some look intriguing... such as animated photo galleries, flipbooks, automatic photo stacking, and distortion and bluring correction.

The Flash-based animated galleries are actually quite cool. There are about 15 different templates, and there will probably be more once it catches on. Tagging has been enhanced with geotagging support and import/export of tags via XML. Geotagging uses Yahoo Maps so you'll need a broadband internet connection. Adobe have said this is only suitable for USA addresses, but it will actually work anywhere in the world that Yahoo Maps goes. (eg. in the pic above, I've tagged my photos with an Australian location)

Of particular interest is the reference to new services. I was hoping that we'd see a lot more integration with online sites such as Flickr and Webshots. There are a couple of new services added to the list such as SmugMug, and Adobe's own free Photoshop Showcase. Plus hidden away in the sharing options is a rather nice new feature - the ability to use FTP to transfer your creations to your own server.

The upgrade path has always been a little frustrating with only a minor discount allowed for upgrades. In fact, it's actually cheaper to buy the discounted full version (seen advertised for A$169) than the upgrade ($A189).

If you don't already own Elements, it's a highly recommended purchase. But I'm not yet convinced that it's worth paying to upgrade from Version 4. At least we can take it for a test drive before deciding.

Corel Products

Snapfire is a recent addition to Corel's range. There's a free version and a US$39.99 version, Snapfire Plus. It's a simplistic cataloging tool that is designed to be family friendly. It has very limited tagging support and seems to be more of a way for Corel to advertise its other products. If you anticipate using other Corel products later on then Snapfire may be a good choice, but I think Picasa is way ahead of Snapfire and it's free too.

Snapfire seems to have been built on the Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI platform (try saying that quickly!), which is also a new update to a product that has been around for years. Paintshop started life as a freeware and shareware product and earned wide respect. The inbuilt organiser is quite limited (eg. it doesn't read IPTC tags from JPEGs) in comparison to other products (one suspects Corel still wants its Photo Album software to have some market share), but this update adds some quite impressive photo editing capabilities.

Photo Album 6 is Corel's dedicated photo cataloging software. It's reasonably powerful and reasonably priced at US$39.99. You also get some handy bonus software such as PhotoRecovery for recovering accidentally deleted photos from memory cards. Collages, scrapbooking, backups, and organising with phototrays seem to be Photo Album's strengths.

Windows Vista Photo Gallery

It might be late, but it's a safe bet that Windows Vista will be released before the next round of Elements updates. Vista includes a new application, Windows Photo Gallery, that offers basic cataloging and image manipulation, output and network sharing options. It's likely this is based in part on the next generation of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite - if you take away the Vista gloss, it has a similar feel. (A giveaway is that the cataloging database in Digital Image Suite 2006 is Pictures.pd3 and in Vista it's Pictures.pd4)

Whilst the gallery format is not yet open and there's no API I know of, I suspect we'll see new addons and products based on the gallery.

Photo Gallery includes tagging (apparently XMP based), captions, ratings, filters, and a photos screensaver. It can output to printer, email, CD, DVD and has a basic set of image adjustments such as cropping, red eye removal, and automatic level adjustment. That's the good news. The bad news is that the photo upload / import feature isn't winning many friends.

Adobe needn't be worried about Windows Photo Gallery, but smaller players with low-end products like Snapfiles may now have a more limited future.

Technorati tags: Lightroom, Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Corel, Snapfire, Photo Album, Photo Albums, Photo Cataloging, Windows Vista, Windows Photo Gallery, Digital Photos

All Read 1.1 Released

Rohan — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:57:00 GMT

A new version of the All Read plugin for Omea Reader/Pro is now available.

All Read is a tiny plugin that adds one button to the main Omea toolbar that lets you mark all displayed messages as Read. You can use this button instead of the context menu or keyboard shortcut.

Version 1.1 is a minor release that adds the following features:

you can now use the All Read button with views, feed folders and web bookmarks;
All Read now works properly with Omea's Newspaper View.

Here's the download link.

My thanks to monkeyking for suggesting these updates.

Where did I put that photo of the New Years Eve fireworks?

admin — Sun, 14 May 2006 04:32:00 GMT

Holiday time brings with it memories and situations that many of us like to capture on film.... (errr, make that SD card, xD card, MMC, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, etc.)

I came back from our recent camping holiday with around 400 snaps. Not surprisingly, even my closest friends don't want to sit through that many!

When I first got my digital camera, I tried all sorts of ways of organising the files on my PC, such as storing photos in folders based on their topic, and using subfolders for different ratings (the "crud" folder was always pretty full....). I also renamed photos so they no longer had cryptic names like "DSC0198.JPG". I soon got tired of coming up with new ways of naming folders and photos. There had to be a better way...

And there is. Enter a whole new breed of software dedicated to the task of cataloging photos. There seems to be hundreds of packages available offering this ability. Indeed, your digital camera might have come with a bundled package that can help. A good list of photo cataloguing software, with links to reviews, can be found here. Professional photographers can also choose from a some very powerful tools (and a new one that's looking rather promising is Adobe/Macromedia's Lightroom).

What do I recommend? Well, if you like arranging photos into folders, but want a bit more flexibility to assign keywords and captions, then you'll find Google's Picasa easy enough to pick up and use. And it's free. But my choice for both private and business use is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. This latest version really is a powerful way to organise your collection, enhance your snaps, and produce a variety of creations. You create tags (keywords) and assign them to photos via drag and drop. You can also create collections; a group of photos (eg. "Our 2006 Holiday") that you can work on collectively. It can still be a bit of a chore to tag your photos but Elements takes a lot of the pain away and has some innovative features such as the ability to find all photos that contain faces, and it can automatically remove red eyes during import of photos from your camera. I particularly like the way it stores your touched-up photos in version sets, so you never lose the original and can keep a history of changes.

So what's wrong with it then? Well, it can take a long time to start up, but once it's running it's fast. And something that really annoys me (though to be fair, this isn't just confined to Elements) is that it only supports affiliated online photo hosting sites. This means for example, in Elements you can send photos directly to a Kodak site, but you can't send them directly to Flickr. Sure, you can export them to files and upload them via the Flickr uploader, but that's a pain and you lose all your tag and category information.

Hmm... maybe we'll have to get Clyx Studios to do something about that....

What other features would you like to see in cataloging software?

Tags: adobe, photo album, photo album software, photo cataloging software, photoshop, photoshop elements, picasa, software

So, what's this RSS thing and what does Subscribe really do?

Rohan — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:58:00 GMT

A couple of people have asked me this question. These days, RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication which basically means it’s a common format for subscribing to feeds of information such as news articles, website updates and blog postings. (Atom is a similar format and is used in the same manner as RSS).

To subscribe to an RSS service like our blog, you need some sort of feed reader. Click on a Subscribe link or RSS button without a feed reader and you'll see the raw RSS content instead.

There’s a huge number of free online services for subscribing to RSS feeds. Examples include Google Reader, myYahoo, Bloglines, Microsoft's Windows Live, and NewsGator. Once you have an account with one of these, simply copy the URL from the Subscribe link or RSS button and paste it into your subscriptions. Some provide handy bookmarks or browser addons to automate this for you.

There’s also a ridiculous number of desktop readers available. These types of readers are fast to use, and can be ideal for the road warrior that's often away from an internet connection (set the feeds to update automatically when connected, then you'll never be short of reading materials when you're on the road). Most include the ability to subscribe to feeds from within your web browser. RSS Bandit is pretty cool with its customisable newspaper views, and .NET Developers will like it even more as it's open source. Another one worth considering is the fast and lightweight (800kb) GreatNews. If you're an information junkie then Blogbridge might suit as it's cross-platform and can keep your subscriptions in synch between or laptop, desktop, PC, Mac and Linux box. Newsgator have also recently added FeedDemon (Windows) and NetNewsWire (Mac) to their stable of RSS products.

You can even add RSS to software you are using already - for instance, if you love Microsoft Outlook, then take a look at BlogBot, or the Newsgator Outlook plugin. If you'd prefer to use your browser, then try Pluck for Internet Explorer. Microsoft have also recently bought OnFolio and you can get it for free from Windows Live. Firefox, Safari and Opera browsers already have inbuilt RSS support.

If you can't decide on which one to use then why not try a few and use OPML to keep your subscription list in synch.

My personal favourite though is Jetbrains Omea Reader. It’s got all the features you need in a feed reading tool, is quite fast and responsive, and adds some powerful information management capabilities like alerts, grouping, categories, and rules (eg. "Popup a warning whenever a post from one of my friends appears on any of these blogs"). Plus it's not just for feed reading - you can use it for downloading podcasts, newsgroup reading and posting, web bookmarks, etc. It supports any format of RSS or Atom feed. I like it enough to use the paid Omea Pro version which adds File and Outlook features and has its own desktop search capability. But a word of warning - it's not for everyone; it can be complex and a little quirky.

Here at Clyx Studios as part of our making IT matter service we encourage our clients to incorporate RSS across their applications, and assist them by developing integration software. It's amazing where RSS can help. For example, it's ideal as an adjunct for many types of collaborative and workflow software. Rather than launching the software and logging in etc. just to see if you have any new mail or tasks, you can tell at a glance whether any updates that affect you have been made, and you can set your own alerts. We've also used it for application monitoring purposes - whenever an application error or other event occurs, anyone who's interested gets notified via their feed reader.

Anyway, what's your favourite news reader?

Technorati : Aggregators, Blogbot, Blogging, Feeds, Omea, Omea Pro, RSS, RssBandit

Free plugins for JetBrains Omea Reader / Pro

Rohan — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 22:19:00 GMT

In a previous post I talked about how I really like Omea software. Well, I like it so much I bought the company...no wait!! I didn't do that (couldn't afford it!). But I did write a couple of plugins for it. (One of the things I didn't mention last time is how great Omea is for .NET developers - there is a very rich API that's pretty easy to figure out and use).

Three plugins are available. Here are the details...

AllRead is a tiny plugin that adds one button to the main Omea toolbar that lets you mark all displayed messages as Read. You can use this button instead of the context menu. Yeah, I'm too lazy to right-click....

MediaPreview lets you play video, audio, flash and other media files (and view the contents of zip files) directly inside the Omea preview pane without needing to launch their associated applications. It's particularly useful with Omea Pro, where you can view email attachments without needing to save them to disk first.

SendToOneNote adds the ability to send or copy across messages, feed posts, articles, etc. into Microsoft OneNote 2003. If you've seen or used the SendToOneNote plugins for IE or Outlook, then you'll know what to expect. Otherwise, take a look at the screenshot below to get an idea of what it does. One feature I've really come to depend on is the ability to define rules in Omea to automatically send content of your choosing to OneNote. You can use this to automatically build up a portfolio in OneNote of, for example, everything that is being published about your company. Note that this plugin comes with its own installer or you can download a zip file and install it yourself if you prefer. (It also requires OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1 or later, and it wouldn't have been possible without the Microsoft OneNote DataImport Utility Classes)

Installing the Plugins
SendToOneNote has its own installer but to install the others, simply unzip into your Omea folder (usually C:\Program Files\JetBrains\Omea Reader, or use a dedicated a plugins folder if you prefer) and use the Omea Options / Plugins window to add them to Omea. You'll need to restart Omea once you've done this.

More Info
General information about Omea plugins (as well as some posts relating to these plugins) can be found at the JetBrains newsgroup: news://news.jetbrains.com/jetbrains.omea.plugins and a list of plugins is available on their Confluence page: http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/OMEA/Third-party+Plugins

A side note...(pun intended)
Omea's note taking capabilities are currently limited, which is why I've been using Microsoft OneNote 2003. You might think OneNote is only for Tablet PCs (it tends to get attention mainly for its handwriting and drawing support) but it's actually a cool way of organising random notes and jottings on any type of PC. Using Omea and OneNote together you can automatically gather images and text from feeds, websites, emails, etc. An alternative to OneNote that I also recommend is EverNote - very impressive, and free. Unfortunately it doesn't yet support any form of plugin so there's no integration with Omea possible at present.

Technorati : Omea, Omea Pro, Omea Reader, OneNote, Plugin, Plugins, Software