Andy Gapin

The subject is a bit of a lie, these pictures were taken over the course of the last two weeks. There’s a mix of stuff here, but I’m just going to post them all together since I haven’t posted much recently.

Recently, I added a to-do for myself to figure out a better way to organize my photos. It’s going to be a bitch of a task, I’ve got tens of thousands of them spanning over the last decade or so. For the most part, I’ve got everything grouped into folders by event or something else like person or subject for more open-ended collections of photos that don’t really belong to a specific event. So for at least 90% of my photo collection, I can work by folder and not individual files.

But this still presents a big problem for me, one that is probably somewhat unique because of the way I have my computers set up at home. I have a file server where I store everything, but I want to access the photos from at least three different computers (my MacBook Pro which is my main machine, my Linux/Windows dual-boot desktop, and my Windows 7 netbook). I also have photos that come in from my point-and-shoot, my iPhone, my fiancée’s iPhone, my fiancée’s point-and-shoot, and my dSLR (I save RAW files and JPEGs of the processed photos). That’s a lot of devices to deal with and since I’m just a hobbyist when it comes to photography, everything is personal, I don’t feel the need or want to separate anything. I want everything to fall under the same organization.

My current workflow has been to import photos from my dSLR using Lightroom (recently, I’ve been converting the RAWs straight to DNG and will eventually convert all my existing RAWs as well). These photos go in a sub-folder called “Raw” under a folder for the event or subject. Once I do all my processing, I export JPEGs into the event folder. Photos from our point-and-shoots and iPhones just get dumped straight to the event folder. From here, I tag faces and add captions to the JPEGs in Picasa and then post select photos to Facebook or a blog of some sort. I’ve found that Picasa’s face-tagging feature is pretty great. It does a great job of detecting faces and guessing which ones belong to the same person. The user interface for it is a little clunky, but it gets the job done. It’s incredibly convenient to be able to just select a person and pull up all the pictures with them in it…or even better, all the pictures with that person and myself.

That’s been kind of it, really. It’s not terrible, but it’s a pain and it kind of ties me to one machine. I end up having to do all my Picasa related stuff on my MacBook since the face tags aren’t stored in the files, they’re stored in a local Picasa database and a separate file in the folder containing the photos. At least with Lightroom, all my edits can be stored in the DNG (or XMP file for RAWs) so they can easily be accessed from any other machine or application that supports it.

This whole process is very clunky and relies a lot on data that is stored on only one machine and is proprietary to a certain piece of software (Picasa). I can’t do anything at all with the face tags in any other application and if I even want to be able to use them in Picasa on another computer, it’s a big pain in the ass. I honestly love the feature set of Picasa, but I’d really like to ditch it altogether. It’s very slow and laggy and has a lot of odd quirks that have gotten to be too annoying to put up with. It’s great for free software, but I’m ready to move on.

The other frustration is that none of this data is tied to the original files–there is no way that I will let Picasa touch my DNG/RAW files–so if I decide to export from the original again (either because I reprocessed it or want to export as a smaller file or different file type), the face data doesn’t make it over to the new file. Essentially, the issue is that for photos from my DSLR, Picasa only gets to touch the end result, not the source. Photos from anywhere else aren’t as much of a problem because the JPEGs are the only versions, but I would like to be able to store as much data with the most original version of the file as possible.

So back to the whole wanting to reorganize my photo collection thing, I really want to clean everything up and get a good system going, I just don’t know how to do it. This is something that I’d probably continue to put off if not for realizing last night that I made a couple horrible assumptions a few months ago that are going to cause me to have to reprocess almost every shot I’ve taken with my DSLR. I totally assumed that when I imported my RAWs into Lightroom, it would automatically set the white balance to whatever setting was on the camera when it applied the presets. I mean, it has this data and there’s no reason not to default it to that. At any rate, it didn’t do this and I didn’t notice at all that it wasn’t set. You might wonder why I didn’t notice this immediately by looking at the pictures. Well, I just assumed that I wasn’t taking good pictures or using the lighting very well since I’m a complete newbie. So since I didn’t know or think to look to see if my white balance was set correctly, I adjusted as much as I could with the other settings. After I realized this last night, I went through a handful of pictures and set the correct white balance and they immediately looked better, but I had to kind of revert back to the original and remove any other changes I made first and then go from there.

That’s entirely my fault for being a complete idiot and not noticing that as well has just assuming that I was sucking. Not all of my photos need to be reprocessed, it’s mostly just the indoor ones, I think. But it’s still a lot. I’d really like to take care of this soon though and re-export them so I can put the whole thing behind me and not have to worry about it later on when I want to grab one of these pictures. Since I figure there are about 4,500 photos that I’ll have to sort through during this process, I might as well just reorganize my whole collection at the same time and improve my workflow. I’ll have to re-export my JPEGs anyway. Luckily, I think that Picasa stores the face tags based on the file name so as long as I export with the same name, Picasa shouldn’t even know the difference. I guess this is one plus to the fact that Picasa doesn’t store this in the file. And since Picasa also writes these tags to a text file in the folder where the pictures are, I should be able to move the whole folder around and then have Picasa re-read the tags based on that file. I’ll probably have to rebuild its database entirely though. But after all of this, I’m still stuck with the face tags being tied to the JPEGs and Picasa.

I’m thinking that the best solution will be the say screw the face tags and screw Picasa. I’d do everything in Lightroom and just add names as keywords to the metadata on the original files, along with keywords for the event/location/subject/whatever. Then just preserve this when I export to JPEG. That should at least provide keywords that will be visible in any photo application and on any computer. I think. I won’t have face tags per se, but I really don’t care much if there are names attached to the specific faces in the photo as long as there are names attached to the photo itself. I know who the people in my pictures are, I just need to be able to search easily. And as far as exporting to Picasaweb or Facebook, I’ve seen plugins for Lightroom to handle this so I could pretty safely rely on that as well.

Since this method would be storing everything with the original file (stored on my server), it will also allow me to make changes and edits to any photo from my netbook, MacBook, or desktop without worry. If I’m away for a few days and dump my photos to my netbook and process them, I can just drop the folder onto my server when I get home and then add it to my Lightroom library on my MacBook. Nice and easy.

Though after that, I’m still left figuring out a folder hierarchy for where the photos are actually stored. What I have now isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. There’s organization and I know where everything is, but it could be better. I know a lot of photographers store based mostly on date (e.g. /YYYY/MM/YYYYMMDD-filename), but since I also like to keep those open-ended collections based solely on a subject (like my cat) that don’t need to be stored by date, I have no idea what would be the best way to do this. I’d also like a clean way to deal with the fact that I’ll have multiple versions of the same photo (original, exported JPEG, differently processed versions, etc) that I would like to be tied to the same tags/keywords/etc. without looking like duplicates. I like to keep JPEGs of everything because it’s much more convenient for when I have to grab a quick photo for something. I guess I could just have a personal policy of only having the originals imported and visible to Lightroom, but then I’d probably want to dump all photos from all sources into the “raw” folder and then export everything, even photos that were originally JPEGS as well, into the main event folder when I’m done my post-processing. Maybe not a bad solution.

But anyway, I’m really curious as to whether or not other photo happy people have any of these same issues and what solutions they’ve come up with. Or even separate from these issues, how do other people effectively manage a huge collection of photos. If you’ve got anything, let me know!

Sometimes, you just have appreciate the little things. For example, on the way to work the morning, I was behind a Honda Accord that had a Superman logo in place of the Honda emblem. This totally made my day and I’m okay with that.

Last week, I took a trip to Disney World and it was absolutely amazing. It truly is the place where dreams come true! Maybe I’m just saying that because I asked my girlfriend to marry me there (more on that in a soon-to-come post) and she said yes, but that place is way too much fun.

Rather than go on and on about how much I love Disney World and how we’re already planning our next trip in just slightly less than a year, I decided to just post some of the pictures that I took while there. Overall, I took almost 1,250 pictures between my SLR, my point-and-shoot, and both of our iPhones. That was a lot to go through and I did a lot of touching up on the exposures and coloring and such. It took a few days of just sitting here on the couch with my laptop, but I’m glad I did it. I didn’t take the time to do any noise reduction or spot removal or anything fancy like that that I don’t know how to do yet, but oh well.

So here are my favorite shots from the trip. You should be able to click for a bigger version.

I saw this on the way to work today. Not only does the company name, Peeping Tom’s Window Cleaning, make me feel a little bit like they might not be professionals, but they slap it on that old ass minivan to really hammer home the perv-on-wheels vibe. There is absolutely no way that Tom is going to be cleaning your windows with his pants on. Good luck with that.

I couldn’t resist posting it to failblog.org. Please vote for it!

I took a very productive burrito trip today, I got both of these pictures out of it.

Feel free to click on this one and vote for it.

I wanted to make a fail picture for this next one, but trying to capture a picture on my phone while driving wasn’t easy (don’t tell the cops) so it didn’t come out too great. Anyway, it’s a commercial van that has a bumper sticker that says “Evolution is a lie.” Seriously, way to attach personal beliefs about science being wrong and God being right to your company’s name. That’s a great way to make sure that you don’t alienate any potential customers. Really.

The company is called ShinyCar, in case you can’t read it and would like to boycott…or give them all your car shining business…which may or may not include Jack Nicholson.

Last night, I was in NYC to hang out with some friends. We grabbed some dinner and cupcakes and then when to this bar that my friend’s friend was having a party at. The bar was called LaVa Gina. Just say it to yourself. Yup. The jokes…um…flowed all night.

Anyway, on the way back to the Penn Station, we needed to catch an F uptown so we walked over to the Second Ave. stop since we were near there. We walk down the steps to the platform and there’s an E train sitting there, just hanging out. I don’t live in NYC so I’m not an MTA expert and I know that there are often service changes, but why the hell was there an E train at Second Ave on the FV line? It was one of the newer trains that have the digital displays and the marquee said “last stop.” What the hell?!? Second Ave. isn’t even the last stop for the F or V, let alone some other subway train that was lost and on the wrong line. We ended up getting on it anyway figuring that no matter what we’d get where we needed to go. The E goes right to Penn Station and if it followed the F line, then that’s what we were planning on doing anyway so we’d be set. The train ended up heading towards West 4th and crossing over to become a real E. It was like some bastard child of the ACE and FV lines. It was weird as hell, but it all worked out.

And in other weirdness and silliness…

This was an ad that I saw in a porta-potty at the field where my friends and I play soccer. I’ve been trying to figure out if it was known ahead of time that the ad was going to be in a porta-potty or if the copy is accidentally ironic.

I submitted this next one to failblog.org, as you can see by the captioning. I saw it in the men’s room of a restaurant.

And finally, this one is a little blurry, but notice the spelling fail on the menu at Pink Pony on Ludlow in NYC. The food was very good though.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen a few photo-worthy things so I figured I’d share…

Apparently, there’s a parking garage in Manahatten that was inspired by the Gmail logo. I submitted this one to Totally Looks Like, but my iPhone wasn’t really able to get a good shot and I was too lazy to mess around with the photo to clean it up a bit. So I’m not really expecting it to go anywhere on there.

This is just a cool shot of the Empire State Building. I love the way buildings, mountains, people (?), and other things look when the top is covered by clouds.

And lastly, I stopped at my favorite bagel place this morning after the gym and noticed that they had a new sign which wasn’t too surprising since they’ve been sprucing the place up a bit over the past couple of months. What is surprising is the font and color choice that they went with. The whole dripping blood feel really appeals to a guy like me, but I’m not so sure that this is what they want to be using to represent to the masses.