Zooomr pro accounts for bloggers
Get a free pro account with Zooomr by blogging a photo you've uploaded. More info on the Zooomr blog. Here's my pic:
Aperture gets torn a new one by the mighty Ars
That font of supremely in-depth technical information, Ars Technica, has reviewed Aperture - Apple's new pro-photography software - and given it an absolute mauling:
Furthermore:It saddens me to say that Aperture's innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe's Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For US$500 (Photoshop itself retails for US$750), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output.
And this:The quality of Aperture's RAW converter is bad, and for an application that's selling point is iterative nondestructive RAW editing, that's like building a house on a plate of Jello.
I had previously been considering buying Aperture. Now I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, at least until these numerous fatal flaws have been fixed.They have only themselves to blame: they set themselves up for a big fall by attempting to dig themselves a chunk of the pro market by purporting to have the lossless holy grail of imaging. The trouble with that is they obviously didn't have the engineering or expertise in RAW processing to pull it off or, if they did, they chose not to include it because of speed constraints due to Core Image.
Flickr badge and XHTML validation
After recently implementing a Flickr sidebar linking to my favorite photos, I today noticed that those pages with the sidebar no longer validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Manually fixing the code resulted near-success, with the exception of an <iframe> tag. In frustration I eventually started trawling Google, and found this page. Bingo! Commenting out the javascript will fix it!
To summarise what is needed:
1. Move the Flickr <style> ... </style> code so that it is within your page's <head> block.
2. Change one instance of <br> to <br />
3. Replace <script type="text/javascript"> with <script type="text/javascript"><--
4. Replace </script> with --></script>
That's it. The badge should now validate.
P800 as a photo viewer
What a coincidence! I've had this entry on the back burner for a few days, when this hint appeared today at MacOSXHints, describing how to view your iPhoto albums on your internet-enabled mobile phone. Essentially the hint is having iPhoto generate a web page which you then view on your mobile phone. Not what I've been doing, but the end result is similar.
P800 as an iPod photo?
Rather than try to view my iPhoto albums online I've loaded several albums onto my P800 phone. Since the whole point is to view them on the phone, we can dramatically reduce the size of the image. I've found that reducing them to the size of my phone screen (320x208 ) and saving them as JPEG quality 20 results in perfectly acceptable photos for casual phone viewing (see the example at the end of this entry). And the file size drops from 1MB+ down to 15-25K! Taking 20K to be the average, that's over 6000 photos on a 128MB memory card. My entire photo library is only around 2500 photos so I could carry the whole thing around with me and still only take up 50MB of my 128MB card. I've actually chosen to carry around an album of around 200 of my best photos which only takes up 4MB.
The Mechanics
I've been using Adobe's ImageReady to resize and save my photos. ImageReady comes with a ready-made droplet (Constrain, Make JPEG 30) which only needs minor adjustment to do what I want. I just changed the Constrain to 320 pixels in each dimension and changed the Make JPEG to quality 20 instead of 30. Batch processing my 200 photos took about 10 minutes. If you don't already have ImageReady the well-regarded shareware application GraphicConverter can do all this as well.
Once you have your mini images you just need to transfer them over to the phone. You can bluetooth them all (although saving each one to the correct location is a pain), or do what I did and use a USB memory card reader to copy them all in one fell swoop. (I can't recommend these readers enough, especially since they can be had for as little as £9).
The final ingredient is an image viewer on your phone. The P800 comes with an image viewer (creatively titled Pictures), but it is a pile of crap pretty mediocre (it used to be a pile of crap that couldn't even display full screen images, but that got fixed in a firmware update). The interface is the main drawback, it requires several steps to display full screen images and cannot rotate images (which means you should rotate landscape photos prior to resizing). If that annoys you like it did me, I'd suggest using Resco Photo Viewer for UIQ, a more full-featured replacement. For non P800 users, Resco make this software for virtually every mobile platform there is.
And that's it! My P800 is now a fun little photo viewer I can bore friends and family with!
Comment
What are the pros and cons of each method?
Firstly it should be mentioned that contrary to first impressions, the MacOSXHints method doesn't provide 'live' updating of the photos, so new changes to the iPhoto album will only be available to the phone user when someone sitting at the Mac re-exports the album. That's still better than no updating at all, which is what happens with my method 
Secondly the MacOSXHints method will give you the ability to scroll around a large version of the photo (provided your phone browser supports side scrolling) while my method only shows the photo at my phone's screen resolution. Luckily for me my phone has a large screen - the image to the right is a photo resized to fit my phone shown at actual size (the photo is a 320x220 JPEG quality 20, and is 12KB in size). Meet Pilipus from the island of Siberut 
Googlemaps - one more time
I first saw this in an excellent Creative Bits post yesterday and have since been playing with it. It is truly jaw-dropping! Here's one I whipped up myself. The service isn't quite perfect, for one thing it's very hard to bring up information bubbles for buildings you recognise, and the search function itself is pretty flakey. Also after 20 minutes of fooling around with it caused Safari to start behaving strangely (clicking in the search box wouldn't make a cursor appear). But considering the satellite firm Keyhole was only acquired by Google in October, it's still pretty impressive!
Update: this site uses a similar technique, but on a 2.5 gigapixel landscape photo instead of satellite imagery.
4.4GB photographs
Gadget Lounge picked up a truly amazing Wired story (try and ignore the hideously annoying audible flash adverts) 
. The photos are actually taken with 4000 dpi film and then scanned with a 4000 dpi scanner to produce a 4 gigapixel image. Each photo fills up an entire DVD!
Keyword Assistant updated!
I mentioned in this entry that Keyword Assistant, an indispensable iPhoto plugin, was broken by the upgrade to iPhoto 5. Have no fear, life is good again - author yesterday released an update which works with iPhoto 5. Phew! 
Movies from the Minolta DiMage X50
I went to a Pop Will Eat Itself concert recently, and for the first time had a reason to test out the video-recording abilities of the new camera. Given the camera's minimal dimensions and tiny lens, I wasn't expecting great results. However, despite the gloominess of the venue, I was (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the results!
As you can see, the picture quality was fairly good. I had the camera set to record at the maximum settings (320x240 resolution, 30fps). Watching it on the camera was fairly uninspiring, but once I had copied it over to my Mac the apparent quality improved dramatically.
I was however surprised by the size of the video clip. A 2 minute 30 second clip recorded on the camera turned out to be 86.5MB in size. I was curious as to why it was so huge, so I set about doing some investigation. Opening the file in QuickTime Player revealed that the video component was recorded in the Photo-JPEG format! I can only presume that the limited CPU power of the camera limits it to recording in largely uncompressed video and totally uncompressed audio.
The actual settings were:
Photo JPEG video, 320x240, 4700 kbps (!!!!)
PCM audio, 8 bit, mono, 7875Hz, 60 kbps
4700kbps
! That's a higher bitrate than some DVDs for an image less than a quarter of the size! And then to top it all off the audio component is of a ridiculously low quality.
I wanted to save the clip, but in a more efficient way. I also wanted to contrast it to a more modern way of storing video, so I fired up ffmpegX and ran a few conversions:
Converting the clip to an xvid/mp3 of equal dimensions and very similar visual quality resulted in a 10.6MB file comprising an 8.1MB 320x240 30fps 450kbps xvid video stream and a 2.2MB 144kbps mp3 audio stream! Given that 160kbps mp3 is generally considered to be sufficient for virtually CD-quality, you can see how much the Minolta's capabilities could be improved.
Purely out of interest I also used ffmpegX to convert the clip to DVD specifications. My 320x240 86.5MB photo-JPEG clip turned into a 720x480 75.2MB mpeg2 clip. Definitely bloated!
iPhoto 5, hero and zero
My copy of iLife '05 has arrived! The app I was looking forward to most was iPhoto 5, in particular the long-awaited addition of folders to help you organise your albums. However there are apparently numerous problems: MacOSXHints, MacInTouch, Accelerate Your Mac, and MaxFixIt have all had reports. The MacOSXHints article in particular specifically concerns a problem with folders. This problem did not affect me for some reason - although MacOSXHints has included a solution if it does start to occur.
My own experiences so far have been generally good, with the one glaring exception of exporting photo galleries for the web. Don't get me wrong, iPhoto's web export works pretty much as it always has (pretty well, but not great), but neither of my preferred web-export plugins, BetterHTMLExport and PhotoToWeb, work with iPhoto 5. They look like they're working, but no images get exported. BetterHTMLExport's webpage states that the developer is aware of the problem.
Also a concern is that iPhoto 5 seems to be noticeably slower than iPhoto 4. In particular opening images used to be instantaneous. Now you have to sit and wait while iPhoto displays your selected thumbnail for a second or two in the centre of a large empty black box before the full-size image fills the window. I've also heard that it is almost useless on a Mac with a G3 processor - most of the editing functions do not work and navigation is painfully slow.
26/1/05 - Update: At some point in the last few hours BetterHTMLExport was updated to version 2.1 and is now compatible with iPhoto 5!
27/1/05 - Further update: Ack! I just noticed that Keyword Assistant has vanished! I refuse to even attempt to assign keywords without this wonderful piece of software. Luckily it appears that there is an iPhoto 5 version going through beta-testing right now.
Automatically copy Bluetoothed images into iPhoto
While searching for some iPhoto information, I found this interesting tutorial on how to set up folder actions to automatically copy images into iPhoto after they've been bluetoothed to your Mac.
Stop iphoto from importing images
After spending more time using my new Dimage X50, the major annoyance is rapidly becoming iPhoto launching itself and glacially preparing to import images every time I connect the camera. After a fruitless visit to iPhoto's preference window, I resorted to Google and found this. The option to launch iPhoto when you connect a camera is controlled in the preferences of the Image Capture application. Obviously. 
One. Slick. Camera.
While I was in Hong Kong I picked up a Konica Minolta DiMAGE X50. This was largely due to the DiMAGE Xt we use at work, and also Janet's thoughts on the X50 and its competitors. I'm very pleased with it so far, the thing is tiny and takes great photos! The one possible gripe is slightly sub-optimal performance in low light situations but even that is a pretty minor quibble. I got a nice dawn shot during my stopover in Paris's Charles de Gaul airport:
Site update
Updated the website and added fancier galleries courtesy of iPhoto4 and BetterHTMLExport.
Sponsors