John Beardsworth

Phew, 14 hours straight on Monday, the same yesterday but with a break to screen share with a client, and another 8 today. But that feels like it – a WordPress front end getting pictures galleries from a multi-user Coppermine picture library application. Shame it’s for a private site, but at least 4000 pairs of eyes will feast on the results!

The main challenge was that while there are all sorts of WordPress widgets that use Coppermine-sourced images, they all seemed pretty limited – gimmicks rather than the full set of web galleries that were needed. Modifying them was an option, but these porkers would need a barrel of lipstick and they’d still have a curly tail and leave a trail of crap behind them.

The breakthrough was finding cpmFetch. It’s a PHP library that queries Coppermine and fetches images and metadata such as titles and keywords. So rather than tarting up the Coppermine gallery itself with a theme – most seem pretty ugly anyway – you can generate your own HTML and then include that in WordPress, completely hiding Coppermine from prying eyes. One small problem was that cpmFetch’s default output is as HTML tables while I wanted a straight CSS design for FancyBox to display the images. Luckily there’s a parameter that switches the output to an array, through which your PHP can loop in any way you wish:

$objCpm->cpm_setReturnType("resultset"); //output an array

Over the years my encounters with Coppermine have been sporadic, so I was learning it and cpmFetch from scratch, and while cpmFetch’s documentation isn’t wonderful, I’ve done enough of this sort of PHP coding that I could figure everything out. And while it was an effort over two days, it was so nice writing in PHP rather than Lightroom’s horrid Lua.

The funniest thing was encountering the Coppermine user community in the project’s forum. If you think things become a bit sharp in Adobe’s Lightroom forum, or over in dpReview if you still bother with it…. The sticky topics give some idea. So “Sheer lazyness not to be tolerated” (apparently bad spelling is) is a rant that tells you to read the documentation, and many of the threads are ended by equally bad tempered responses. They are probably just fed up with idiots, but it’s actually worth reading if you ever want to see how not to make an open source project attractive.

As someone puts it at this other forum (I was looking for a Lightroom to Coppermine plug-in):

If I actually still thought Coppermine was any good, I’d probably even look into coding a [Lightroom] plugin myself, but the Coppermine gallery is outdated and under-maintained, and the community is run by a bunch of fascist dictators that don’t induce much positive community involvement.

Matt Stuart is a London-based photographer with a great eye for the quirky and amusing. While he uses digital for his commercial work, he walks and shoots a couple of rolls a day on a Leica MP.

Thanks Pieter.

Nils Jorgensen‘s photography seems to be mostly round London and in streets and other public places, but he can make wonderfully-funny images in places as ordinary as this ticket machine on the Underground.

I really enjoyed looking through this site – a great eye for the hilarious.

I don’t believe for a second that Apple’s failure to support Flash on the iPad is for anything other than their own commercial self-interest. It was in their power to be so pigheaded, their apologists will always back their decisions and puff out a smokescreen of technical justifications, while all the workload and changeover costs fall on others’ shoulders. Whether that’s another greedy corporate that has to re-engineer  its video streaming technology or a photographer forced to ditch an expensively-designed Flash-based web site, it’s someone other than Apple who picks up the tab for their failings. The good thing though was that Jobs’ mendacious thoughts on Flash were delivered with such “sod you” finality that you were left in no doubt about Apple’s decision. As a belated and not-total convert to working with Flash, I shrugged and put on ice any effort to learn any more ActionScript, but I did feel sorry for the victims of Apple’s actions – not least the industry of Flash coders whose business models it imperilled.

It’s been fascinating to see the response of Flash developer SlideShowPro. For my needs the jewel in their crown hadn’t been the Flash component for which they are best-known but the Director content management system which could supply pictures and video to the Flash front end. Director meant you could readily have a site based on Flash or on HTML – or both if you’re as daft as me – and implement a very efficient workflow from Lightroom. So SlideShowPro’s Flash new alternative SSP Mobile is built on Director and is going to make it easy for those with SlideShowPro Flash-based sites to publish to iPads. As it says here:

Director 1.5 (which will be a free upgrade for all Director users) will now allow you to embed a slideshow / photo gallery of any album or gallery without requiring any other products. You simply kick-up the “Embed slideshow” window from inside an album or gallery, choose a style, enter a size, and modify some of the player’s main options. Click “Copy embed code”, paste your clipboard into an HTML document, and you’re done! Desktop users will see the Flash version, while mobile clients (including iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) will see a clickable poster that leads them to the mobile player.

And yes, if you’re already using Director, it’s a free upgrade. Nice work.

Syncomatic’s original idea was to sync the metadata of files where their names are the same but they have different file types – for example, from 123.cr2 to 123.tif.

However, by default Lightroom adds -edit to the file suffix when it sends a file to Photoshop and plenty of photographers identify different versions of a picture by adding other suffixes to the file name. For example:

• The original 100703_0123 Jones wedding.nef, 100703_0124 Jones wedding.nef, 100703_0125 Jones wedding.nef…
• A version with Photoshop layers 100703_0123 Jones wedding Layered.nef …
• A black and white version 100703_0123 Jones wedding BW.jpg …

Syncomatic 1.21 is released today at Photographer’s Toolbox and now handles these suffixes.

Tim Armes’s Lightroom plug-in site, Photographer’s Toolbox now has a blog to announce new plug-ins from Tim, me, and from Matt Dawson. There’s also a Twitter feed for quick announcements.

My latest plug-in Syncomatic is uploaded and available.  Syncomatic is not a plug-in everyone will need but is designed for circumstances where you need to copy the metadata between two groups of files and can use the filenames to match up pairs of images. So imagine you have lots of raw files with metadata, and TIFs or JPEGs whose metadata should match the raw files from which they were created. Syncomatic simply runs through the two groups of pictures and makes the metadata of 1234.jpg the same as 1234.raw, makes 6789.jpg match 6789.raw…..

This is worth hearing in full:

Coming from a police family – 3 generations – I’m not anti-police. After all, Grandad Williams always seemed a Dixon of Whittle-le-Woods, and Uncle Williams was the first member of the family to get a university degree and again someone I’ve always admired. Apparently when I was born the nurse looked at my feet and said I was going to be a policemen! So I’m not coming at this from a negative direction. Yet it’s shocking that so often the police can be so ignorant of the law that they keep spiralling into such nonsensical defence of their own authority rather than leaving alone people who are acting lawfully. And what was the photographer trying to record? A parade that’s supposedly to honour those fighting to preserve our freedoms….

Via

Dossier de Presse is a Lightroom-WordPres plug-in from Luc Renambot:

I’m using WordPress with the NextGEN gallery plugin and I used to export my images to disk and then create a gallery and upload the images. They are (better) plugins to upload to WordPress, but I couldn’t find one that supported NextGEN gallery plugin. So I wrote my first Lightroom plugin, “Dossier de Presse”:  http://luc.lakephoto.org/journal/dossier-de-presse/

It allows you to export pictures directly to your WordPress blog. It supports NextGEN gallery and WordPress Media library. You can optionally create a post including the exported photos (the post is left in draft mode, so you can edit it later).

David Riecks takes another valuable look at Aperture 3′s handling of metadata :

IPTC Extension and PLUS metadata does not survive a round-trip through Aperture 3. I had tested this previously with Photoshop CS5 beta, but as that product had not been publicly released, I decided to hold off mentioning this in the February release. Here is the situation. If I bring an image that has IPTC Core, IPTC Extension, and PLUS metadata (all schemas are stored in XMP) only the IPTC Core metadata is preserved in the TIFF and JPEG images that are exported from Aperture 3.0.3 (and yes this is after applying Apples latest 10.6.4 update). PSD files do not have IPTC Extension or PLUS metadata, and only a portion of the IPTC Core metadata (as noted above). This is the case whether viewed in Photoshop, or Bridge.

OK, so you say this stuff is new – the IPTC Extension isn’t yet a year old – so it must have come too late in the development cycle to be included. Apple are just a bit slow or, if you’re being really charitable, cautious about incorporating new metadata fields. And after all, they can’t be standards if wasn’t Apple who announced they were so….

The thing is, one expects some delay in mapping metadata fields, but what is the long-established standard is the XMP language itself. For example, you’d have a right to complain if I invented a new word and wrote it in new Chinese-style pictograms, but if I wrote it in Roman characters you’d at least recognise that it was a word, even if it’s one that you didn’t understand, and you would be perfectly able to pass it on to the next guy and leave him thinking you’ve a vocabulary that even Stephen Fry might envy. As Riecks says:

XMP metadata is supposed to be “extensible” meaning that it is flexible, and applications should preserve this information, even if they don’t necessarily know what it is about.

Locktastic is now available through Photographer’s Toolbox. This simple plug-in for Lightroom 2 or 3 is designed for photographers who lock or tag files while shooting events, and once they’re in Lightroom it marks those thumbnails with the red label.

At the time of writing England are (just) in the World Cup. Argentina versus Greece is on and who’s the co-commentator offering his professional insight? Mick “master of the bleeding obvious” McCarthy. Ex of Ireland. And who else do we get on British airwaves? Andy “he’s got to hit the goal” Townshend? Another ex Ireland. ITV also have Jim “who’s he” Beglin? Ireland. Mark Lawrenson’s about as Irish as me, but another green shirted joker. Robbie “400 tickets” Earle graced the football field for Jamaica, I think, and is now destined for Bush Tucker trials. How about Robbie “I once played with David Beckham” Savage? He played for Wales, another giant of the joga bonito. Emanuel Adebayor? Togo’s most famous footballing export. Mark Bright? Crystal Palace and a dozen other small clubs who’ll never pass through FIFA’s revolting doors. OK, none of them is quite as unable to convey any expertise as Jamie “pace, the boy’s got pace” Redknapp (who somehow played for England), but what are all these ex Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Togo and Jamaica journeymen doing commentating on a World Cup?

There are exceptions. Alan “unbelievable” Hanson – ex of Scotland – is as miserable as ever, as you would be if you were being paid a king’s ransom to spend a month in one of the world’s best golfing countries and have to talk football for 30 minutes a day. At least the BBC have had the sense to hire Lee “Giggs did me twice” Dixon and Roy Hodgson (oh heck, Gabby “daughter of Terry” Logan is on now). But the nadir has got to be former England no 9 Alan “killer elbows” Shearer. Unable to go in studs-up on the sofa, somehow they let him loose in a township and found some old freedom fighter he could interview: “When you were segregated, what did it feel like?” Gutted, I presume.

I used to enjoy Jeremy Clarkson’s playful articles in the Times, and when the football journalist Patrick Barclay moved there, his writing was another reason to visit the Times’s web site. Then last week paywall went up, so that’s that. Too bad.

So I was really struck to read former Independent photographer Jeremy Nicholl‘s discussion of recent copyright infringements We Stole Your Pictures, Now We’re Going To Hide Them:

Contrary to the Mail’s assertion in the BJP it’s clear that as circulations tumble and photo budgets approach near zero the policy of many newspapers is to trawl social media sites, grab all they can and hope they don’t get caught. Realistically it’s not a bad business plan: for the few times when the culprit is forced to pay up there will be many more occasions when the photographer doesn’t pursue the issue, or is not even aware of the theft.
Awareness of such incidents may be about to become even more difficult. Publishers are watching closely the paywall experiment for the Times and Sunday Times, and if Rupert Murdoch’s plan succeeds it is certain that many of his rivals will follow suit. And as the paywalls go up the chances of discovering copyright infringements will go down: it’s unlikely that any of the above incidents would have been noticed if the publications concerned had paywalls in place.

Radio 4′s In Our Time is one of the wonders of British broadcasting. I can take or leave some of the more philosophical subjects, but this programme on Neaderthals is fascinating. “There must have been some sort of interbreeding” between Neaderthalsand humans, but were they “rape or lakeside dalliances”? Who knows, but every so often I’m sure one recognises their descendents.

I’m pleased to announce that Search Replace Transfer is now available for sale at Tim Armes’ site Photographer’s Toolbox.

Search Replace Transfer is a Lightroom 2 and 3 plug-in designed for bulk changes to text in Metadata Panel fields:

1. Searches and replaces text like a word processor
2. Appends text before or after existing text
3. Transfers text between fields
4. Transfers metadata from iView/Expression Media to 18 custom fields
5. Audits title, caption and keyword entry

I’m already working on extending the plug-in:

• Include the IPTC Extension fields (LR3 users only)
• Presets and menus for frequently-used settings (eg filename to title)

Why Photographer’s Toolbox rather than here? Well, Tim is already using Photographer’s Toolbox to distribute his popular plug-ins LRTransporter, LRMogrify and LREnfuse, so we’re working alongside each other to make the site the obvious place to look for high quality plug-ins. Secondly, it means I can take advantage of his tried and tested licensing and distribution mechanism. That helps me offer trial versions of plug-ins, and provide the possibility for automatic updating of the plug-ins (based on code from Jeffrey Friedl). My other plug-ins will soon follow – probably Lockstatic, Syncomatic, and Open Directly in that order. And new ones too.

Maciej Dakowicz is a Polish guy who ended up in Cardiff doing a PhD and started photographing the local night life in his wonderful Cardiff after Dark series.

It’s great stuff – a bit like Weegee meets Graham Smith’s Middlesbrough pub in colour – and I imagine not easy to photograph without getting your head kicked in (always a good objective). I’m not sure it makes you proud to be British, though.

World in Motion was a classic of one type, while Three Lions on Your Chest was another (at least until the German fans started singing “football’s coming home” back at us), but for this year the outstanding England World Cup song has got to be Mike Barfield’s “Don’t Set Your Sights Too High“.

If it’s not England, then as a United fan I’m supporting Ronaldo and Portugal. It’s a bit like you’re still in love with someone, and though you wish she’d never gone, you can still think “wow”.

CNET’s Lightroom 3 review includes some interesting comments from Tom Hogarty, Adobe’s product manager

The time was not yet ripe for Adobe to add face recognition into Lightroom, Hogarty said. “There’s a lot of interest in that area, especially as more consumer-grade applications such as Photoshop Elements have added facial recognition. I think the bar is higher for pro-level applications,” where misidentified faces are more of a problem and where integration with a photographer’s work flow must be handled more carefully. “It’s obviously of interest to photographers and of great utility, we just want to make sure it’s going to be a professional-grade solution.”

Geotagging is “a heavily requested feature,” he added. “Each (Lightroom development) cycle is fraught with difficult tradeoff decisions. Performance and image quality needed to come first in this cycle, especially given that (GPS support) is still not native functionality in cameras at this point in terms of collecting information.”

Yes, I know the post’s title is well over the top, but the Lightroom team isn’t as big as it should be, and the noise reduction and lens corrections are huge steps forward. And one way you can read Adobe’s strategy is that Lightroom 3′s improvements – such as better image quality, higher ISO performance, and above all lens corrections – hold great value to all segments of photographers, not just a few.

Had LR3 introduced geotagging, some of us would have been delighted – but I can think of one friend who only photographs in about a dozen, well known indoor locations and has absolutely no need for such a feature. Face recognition would be similar – of interest to some segments, but utterly useless for the wildlife snapper – and bewildering for my friend with his quarter of a million pictures in Lightroom. And you know, I’d have no hesitation in extending the same argument to soft proofing too.

Radio 4′s Law in Action‘s a good listen this week – the law and photography.

Here’s a simple little plug-in for Lightroom 2 or 3 that marks read-only files with the red label. The idea is that it’s common for photographers to “lock” certain pictures in the camera, making it that little bit harder to delete a good shot. Some do this much more extensively to identify pictures they particularly want to work on when they get back to their desks. This plug-in helps identify those images once they’re in Lightroom.

1. Get the photos onto your hard drive using something like PhotoMechanic, ImageIngester, or Explorer – not Lightroom because it removes the read-only status
2. Import the pictures into Lightroom
3. Select them
4. Run the menu command “Library > Plug-In Extras > Locktastic > Label read-only files”.
5. The plug-in tests if the file is read-only and changes its label to red.

Now available

One of the less obvious changes between the beta and Lightroom 3 is the inclusion of the “IPTC Extensions“,the extra metadata fields agreed last year (specification here – PDF). Great to see Adobe’s keeping up with publicly-agreed standards rather than doing what the competitor does and pretending they don’t exist!

Some of the fields could prove immediately useful, so for instance the Person Shown (which is where Aperture should have written some of its Faces data) can be used right away. You won’t need to pollute your keywords with the names of your nearest and dearest. However, the new panel does highlight a problem of the standard creating duplicate fields – in this case the British newsreader Katie Derham is a well known person, so her name would also belong as a keyword. In the case of the location fields, these will often be the same as the traditional IPTC locations. Given that it’ll take years for search engines and other programs to start using the Extensions, you may decide that putting much effort into them is overkill.

It may help if some of this duplicate data entry can be automated, and I’m on the verge of making my Search Replace Transfer plug-in available for purchase. The licensing code is finally integrated and it should be just a matter of days. Initially, the plug-in will not write to the IPTC Extension fields, but that shouldn’t take long to add. It’s a firm plan.