Category: Photography

Apple Photos to Lightroom Classic CC: Step 2 [en]

[fr] Le suite de mes misères pour revenir à Lightroom après mon passage dans Apple Photos...

Here’s where I left things in March:

  • I had a catalog of my exported Apple Photos
  • I was hoping to merge them into my Lightroom master catalog.

One little problem: importing from catalog didn’t recognize any of the photos in the temporary catalog full of photos from Apple as duplicates of those already in the master catalog. So my bright idea of using this system to update the metadata of photos in the master catalog came crashing to the ground.

I figure it has something to do with the hash Lightroom uses to identify photos. Anyway… off to find another idea.

My next hope had to do with using the Syncomatic plugin to sync metadata between files with similar names or capture times. A little scary to run on the whole catalog, and I haven’t managed to get it working predictably enough to trust it. Might still come, thought?

So I ended up looking at Photosweeper and LR/Transporter. There was my solution, though it was tedious, and the result is not perfect.

Here’s a bunch of thing I did, best I remember.

I used Photosweeper to weed out duplicates from my Apple Photos. I tried various settings and experimented quite a bit. This also allowed me to get rid of “Edited in Apple Photos” photos which were so close to the original photos it wasn’t worth importing a duplicate bloated JPG just for fun.

LR/Transporter allows you to import metadata to a photo based on a filename or a capture date.

That meant that if I could export a list of keywords of my Apple Photos (with LR/Transporter) and import it onto photos that were already in the catalog, matching the keywords to files with the same name, I could avoid importing duplicate files and having to hunt them down afterwards.

I would have to find a way, however, to flag the photos in the Apple Photos folders from which I had extracted and imported the metadata — because those that remained, “non-duplicates”, would need to be moved to the main folder. Thankfully, LR/Transporter flags photos that have last been modified by it. So once I had imported the keywords from Apple Photos, I had only to:

  • use the metadata filter on my master folders to select all photos that had just been modified by LR/Transporter
  • export a list of those filenames
  • edit it in Google Sheets and add a “delete” flag column
  • import that metadata back to the Apple Photos folders, matching the delete flag column on the “job identifier” field (for example)
  • select those photos through a filter or smart collection and delete them

I did this on the Apple “original” photos I had in my collection.

You’ll not that it’s totally uninteresting to go through this exercise with Apple Photos that don’t have keywords. As I had previously keyworded all apple photos to identify if they were master photos, edited photos, master photo of an edited version, HDR, panorama, etc, I couldn’t easily filter out photos with no “real” keywords. I started out by replacing all those “status” keywords by flags in the “job identifier” field. For exemple

  • I selected all apple edited photos
  • added “apple edited” in the job identifier field
  • removed the “apple edited” keyword
  • used the “job identifier” filter to display those photos again
  • now I could see which ones had no keywords
  • selected those and gave them a slightly different job identifier, etc.

So when doing the LR/Tranporter export above, I was able to select only the photos that actually had keywords to work with.

What about those that had a different name? I used a similar process, counting on the capture time. Her’s what I did, year by year (to avoid having unending tables to open in Google Sheets — max 10k photos, roughly).

  • I selected a year of photos with keywords both in the “master” and “Apple Photos” folders
  • I exported them with LR/Transporter. Fields: size, filename, path, keywords, capture time
  • I opened the CSV in Google Sheets and added four columns to help me “sort” them and generate for the correct file in each matching pair either the updated list of keywords or a delete flag (see example spreadsheet here)
  • I replaced the path for all the files in the Apple Photos part of my directory structure with “apple” for readability’s sake (useful when scanning to check things)
  • Ordered the photos by capture date (with Apple folder photos first, so sort them A-Z by that column first) to let the formulas do their magic
  • Duplicate the sheet, then copy-“paste special” (values only) the columns containing the formulas
  • I went through the list checking that the formulas worked correctly (this is where filename and size come in handy, as well as conditional formatting in the spreadsheet to create a visual pattern that is easy to scan for anomalies), corrected manually when necessary
  • Once that was done, used some A-Z sorting to delete the lines of all the photos that did not match anything
  • Duplicated the sheet once more (trying to be safe) and removed all unnecessary columns
  • Duplicated it one last time so I could have to clean “export” sheets: one to update the keywords, one to set the delete flags
  • Import the “keywords” metadata sheet onto the photos in the master folder
  • Import the delete flags metadata sheet onto the apple photos folder photos.

Once I had done that for each year, it meant that all the Apple Photo original photos with keywords had been processed to see if they had a “twin” already in my Lightroom photos, and keywords imported accordingly (and source file removed).

I then was able to import the remaining Apple Photos files into my main folders, knowing there should be no obvious “same time” or “same name” duplicates — except of course for edited photos. (For that, I deleted them from the main catalog and imported/moved them using the standard “import”, so that they would sit in the right monthly folders.)

The saga continues, as my reduced list (12k from 20k!) of Apple Photos is now integrated with my main catalog, but there are still duplicates in there.

Ideally, I’d get syncomatic to work how I want it to, sync keywords, then use Find Duplicates 2 to delete duplicates. But that’s not going well for the moment.

In addition to this, somewhere in the process a pile of my photos have lost their capture date, or seen their capture date replaced by “today’s” date (the day I was obviously doing whatever caused them to lose their capture date). So I have about 2k badly dated (or undated) photos I need to find a solution for. Many of my videos seem not to be read correctly by Lightroom anymore, and have metadata/date issues. My catalog is also sprouting metadata conflicts, and Lightroom very helpfully (not) asks you whether you want to import metadata from the file or write Lightroom metadata to the file without showing you what the conflict is made of. Not much chance of troubleshooting what is going on in there.

So, what’s left to do?

  1. Identify duplicates with FD2 and figure out a way to be systematic about which versions I keep (I’m doing a test on a month of photos to see how it goes). The key seems to be smart collections, and using color labels like I remember doing in March: for example, color all the “most edited” duplicates identified by the plugin green, then go and look at the full list and figure out if that is a good criteria or not.
    But for that to work I need Syncomatic to work, or to mess around with LR/Transporter again, because many of these duplicates do not have synced keywords. *sigh*
  2. See what’s going on with those videos. Not too sure where to start, but I was pointed to this, and need to dig into it. Reminder, there are three problems: systematic metadata being flagged as up-to-date though in a smart collection it’s indicated as changed; mess-ups with capture times; unreadable videos.
  3. Look at the photos with a bad capture date (or none) and see what I can salvage. One idea is to find a back up of my master catalog before all this mess started happening, use LR/Transporter to match those “lost” photos to their “ancestors” in the old vers of the catalog, and use a process similar to the one described above to fix their capture times. But I’d still like to know what created this situation so I can avoid it in future.

    I’m not sure how understandable all this is, these are mainly notes for myself for when I pick this up again, but if it’s useful for you, all the better! Feel free to ask questions if certain parts are unclear and you would like explanations.

LR/Transporter: Renaming Files With Excess Whitespace in Lightroom CC Classic [en]

I’ve spent a large chunk of my leisurely holiday in Pune trying to continue my “return to Lightroom“. Amongst the various problems I’ve had to solve, one of them was that many of the filenames in my library had one or two leading spaces. How, why? I don’t know. But it creates problems when you want to match files by filenames to weed out duplicates (with Photosweeper for example).

Here’s how I did things, using a plugin called LR/Transporter, and messing with .csv files. Warning: don’t do this if you don’t understand what you’re doing — you can really mess things up!

Adapted from my post on the Lightroom Queen forum:

  1. I sorted my whole catalog by file name so that those with the leading spaces would be listed first, and selected them.
  2. I used LR Transporter to export File name + file name base to a file
  3. I edited this file in Numbers (Excel messed up the encoding, some of my file names have accented characters in them, Google Sheets removed the leading whitespace)
  4. Copied the column containing the base file name to another table, did a search and replace for two spaces to remove them
  5. Trickier: what about one leading whitespace? Some of my filenames have spaces in them, so I can’t just “remove spaces”. I used the “concatenate” function to add a second leading whitespace to those files, then did another search and replace for two spaces, then copied the formula results back onto the original cells.
  6. I now have a two-column spreadsheet with the filenames (whitespace included) in the first column, and the second column has the base filename with leading whitespace stripped off.
  7. I export as CSV after having removed extra columns and empty cells
  8. In Lightroom, I go back to my selected photos, and Import metadata with LR Transporter: I map the “file base name” field to a metadata field that I don’t use, but that can be used as an “ingredient” in a file renaming preset. I chose “Instructions”.
  9. After import, these files should all have their future filename base listed in the “Instructions” field.
  10. Rename the files, composing the new name with the metadata field that has been used to store the whitespace-stripped base filename (in my example, “Instructions”)
  11. After that, just empty the “Instructions” metadata field if you wish!

Hope this might come in handy to someone!

Moving From Apple Photos to Adobe Lightroom Classic CC [en]

God have mercy on me. A few months ago I decided I was coming back to Lightroom. Now is the time to actually move my stuff out of Apple Photos and into Lightroom. It’s not so much emptying Apple Photos that concerns me as transferring albums, favorites, and editing over to Lightroom.

I had foreseen the headache, and so I am documenting what I’m doing here first of all for myself (because I might end up abandoning halfway through, as usual, and picking up six months later, having forgotten everything), and also for other poor souls out there who might be in the same situation.

First, the easy part: exporting from Apple Photos.

  1. One thing I wanted to “export” was my albums. I went through each album I wanted to keep, selected all the photos in it, displayed information and added a keyword like “my cats album” to all the photos. Kludgy and a little tedious, but does the trick.
  2. When viewing photos Apple lets you display “only edited” photos. This allowed me to export both the edited photo and the unmodified original for photos I had edited in Apple Photos. I then exported the unmodified originals of photographs I hadn’t touched in Apple Photos separately.
  3. I exported these photos into three separate folders, without any subfolders: “Apple edited”, “Apple originals”, “Apple unedited”. I renamed the edited photos to avoid file name conflicts later on, but left the originals/unedited file names untouched, in the hope it would help Lightroom detect duplicates/updated photos later on.
  4. For the original files, I told Apple Photos to write IPTC to XMP. This works great for RAW files (Lightroom grabs the metadata from the XMP sidecar) but not for JPG originals (who are not supposed to have a sidecar). After fumbling around I found my solution: a simple command-line command for exiftools. The person posting had pretty much the same problem as I did, and I just used the solution offered as-is. It throws some errors (when XMP files don’t have anything interesting in them, I think) but works fine.

Now for the real fun: importing into Lightroom.

  1. For this, I used a temporary working catalog, rather than mess up my master catalog directly. I made the working catalog by exporting some photos as a catalog from the master catalog, and then removing those photos from the temporary catalog (not the files though, beware!)
  2. I started with the edited photos, followed by their original files. I moved them into a month-based folder structure parallel to the one I use for my main library (in a folder called “Apple import”). Upon importing, I gave each batch a keyword to be able to figure out who was who later on (“appleedited” and “master of apple edited”).
  3. I ran Find Duplicates 2 on those photos and it turned out quite a pile of them. Not that surprising. I decided to have a look, and saw that there were indeed a lot of “edited” photos that were so close to the original (or unimportant) that I wasn’t going to bother importing a bloated redundant JPG of those “edits”.
  4. I proceeded to cull those “duplicates”. I started out by giving all those photos a keyword to recognise them later (see how I abuse keywords?). I then rejected all the “mess” (screenshots, photos of bank statements…) that comes with exporting photos from your phone.
  5. I then went painstakingly (but as efficiently as possible) through the unflagged photos and used a label to identify those where I was indeed going to keep both the edited version and the master. I could have skipped this but I figure less bloat is better.
  6. Amongst the unflagged and unlabeled photos with the “duplicate” keyword, I filtered for those with “edited” in the file name (remember how I renamed the edited photos upon export from Apple Photos? handy; I could also have used the keyword I attributed the edited versions upon export, come to think of it. Oh well.) I rejected all those edited photos I decided not to keep.
  7. Similarly, I selected the originals for those photos and changed their keyword to indicate they were not a master photo for an edited version anymore. I also removed the duplicate tag and then cleaned up my mess of coloured labels.
  8. I am not deleting any rejected photos until I get everybody back into my master catalog. Hopefully this will clean up a bit of the “smartphone mess”…or not.
  9. I then proceeded to import the photos from Apple Photos which hadn’t been edited. Just 20k of them. It was loooooong.

Now… how to merge all this back into the master catalog without losing any information and without multiplying photos excessively… I’m not sure I have the solution, and I’m going to err on the side of not losing data. I can always hunt for duplicates later.

I picked a year where I had only a couple of hundred Apple photos, and exported a working catalog from the Apple import catalog for only that year. I then imported those photos into my master catalog, without moving the files. To my dismay Lightroom didn’t recognize any as duplicates or updated files. After looking at things manually it’s clear there are duplicates and I was very wise to not try and move the files to their right place in the catalog yet (filenames are identical!)

I set Find Duplicates loose on all the photos for that year. As I’ve previously cleaned up my whole catalog of duplicates, and marked “fake duplicates” with a keyword that allows me to filter them out, I end up with a shortlist of duplicates between my newly imported photos and those that were already in the master catalog. The “edited” photos in the duplicates are not much of a problem, as they are strictly speaking “fake duplicates”. The master photographs are more of a problem: I’d like to retain the keywords from the new photo and whatever keywords/ratings were on the old photo. I can do that by manually synchronising metadata, but it’s super tedious.

For the time being I’ll just mark those duplicates “appledupes” until I can figure out what to do with them.

Next in line:

  • moving those photos into the “final” folders (will involve renaming the Apple photos)
  • trying a year with more photos.

Matin sans photo [fr]

Ce matin, à l’annonce d’une journée magnifique, c’est la brume qui s’échappe des champs et vallons. Elle s’installe dans les petits creux, cottoneuse, elle se prélasse devant les bois, capturant les rayons éclatés du soleil qui les traverse, au gré du passage des wagons à travers la campagne. Une touche de givre fait pâlir le paysage, et toujours, derrière, les montagnes blanches qui découpent le ciel.

Comme hier, il n’y aura pas de photo. Elle ne rendrait pas justice à ce que j’ai pu voir. La faute à mes maigres talents de photographe, au smartphone qui cherche frénétiquement un angle à travers les reflets de la vitre, au réel qui parfois refuse de se laisser capturer.

Une idée aussi qui a pris racine dans ma tête, sans crier gare, comme c’est souvent le cas, de sorte que je ne sais même plus où je l’ai croisée, cette idée, et que je vais être bien en peine de retrouver sa source: le fait de prendre des photos a un impact, pas toujours positif, sur nos souvenirs de ce que l’on voit ou vit. J’ai oublié les détails, l’explication, mais l’idée a planté ses petites racines dans mes pensées, et elle me travaille.

Je prends beaucoup de photos. Depuis… pas tout à fait toujours, mais presque. Et ça fait longtemps que je sens que prendre des photos peut être un moyen de s’éloigner de l’instant présent, de sentir moins. Ça me revient: un élément de cette idée-qui-pousse, c’était que la prise de vue nous incitait à “déléguer” la fonction souvenir à notre appareil.

Est-ce que je veux plus de souvenirs-photos que je ne consulte que rarement, ou plus de souvenirs-cerveau accessibles immédiatement (au sens premier), mais surtout, qui font partie de moi?

Back to Lightroom [en]

[fr] Retour à Lightroom après deux ans et quelques d'infidélités avec Apple Photos.

Two and a half years ago I took the plunge and started using Apple Photos “seriously”. It quickly became my main photo library, and the comfort of having photos sync seamlessly across devices became something I was not willing to do without. Lightroom was just not there yet (I tried, it was a nightmare), so Apple won.

Over my holidays I peeked back into Lightroom, which I’d neglected since then. And it clearly wins when it comes to organising and editing photos. Time has done its magic, too, and syncing across devices now works! It’s still reasonably early days, but it’s good enough for me.

Here’s what I’m looking at:

  • my main photo library is (and remains) Lightroom Classic CC — or “good old Lightroom” that we’ve known for years
  • I have the mobile version of Lightroom on my phone and tablet
  • I have created a collection called “mobile” in which I stuff the photos I want to sync with Adobe Creative Cloud and have available on phone and tablet (right now, all my 2018 photos)
  • I have set my phone to “auto-add” any new photos from the camera roll into Lightroom: this means that if I take a photo with my phone or tablet (omg), it will be added into Lightroom mobile, synced over Creative Cloud, and downloaded to the correct monthly folder on my computer (“Lightroom sync” setting in preferences in Lightroom Classic CC)
  • I have also installed Lightroom CC (desktop client built from the ground up specifically for dealing with photos stored in Creative Cloud), without making it download originals (it’s in the settings), so that I can benefit from the AI subject detection to search photos
  • I also use the web client so that I can benefit from the AI “pick my best photos” functionality — this is seriously the killer, as far as I’m concerned
  • I have a monthly “photography” subscription which includes Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC, Photoshop CC (+Spark&Portfolio), and a measly 20Gb of cloud storage
  • I’ll certainly shell out what’s needed for the 1TB plan at some point, but as I’m only syncing Smart Previews to the cloud from Lightroom Classic CC, the 1000+ photos I have in CC don’t even take up 8Gb (my library is 70k, but a few thousand photos in the cloud is enough to play with it for a bit)

I do have a few headaches:

  • RAW and JPG: I’ll let you read the thread for details, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I should be working with JPG. I’m happy to not retouch photos if I can avoid it.
  • I’ve taken a lot of “RAW+JPG” photos with my camera, which means I have the JPG handy, but there is no way in Lightroom to say (like in Apple Photos) “hey, use the JPG for this one”; either the JPG is simply there as a sidecar, or it’s a separate photo, and there is no way for Lightroom to “know” that photos A and A’ are in fact the same photo in two different formats
  • I don’t like the idea of throwing away the RAW file, but the way Lightroom deals with RAW+JPG pairs is making me consider doing JPG only
  • I’ve taken some “RAW only” photos… so I’m going to have to deal with those. My photo post-processing skills aren’t great, and it’s not something I take pleasure in. I did get a Huelight camera profile for my old Lumix G2, which seems to help a bit.
  • I have a pile of albums in Apple Photos, and retouched photos, that I’d like to import into Lightroom. Apple Photos lets you export either the originals or the edited photos of any album, which can then be imported into the Lightroom catalog, and between the Find Duplicates and the Teekelesschen Duplicate Finder plugins I can figure out which version of each photo I actually want in the catalog. I’m still fiddling with the process but it’s workable. (I discovered the use of temporary working catalogs doing this, yay!)

 

Is This Why I Stall? [en]

[fr] Peut-être j'ai besoin d'un dé pour être plus active quand j'ai trop de choix.

I am not very good at prioritising. Well, not always good at it. If there is an emergency, if we’re under pressure, if hard decisions need to be made, I can be decent to good at it, depending on the circumstances.

Ciel

I am not good at prioritising my wants and desires, actually. Here is the second edge to my sword of freedom. What do I want to do today? What should I start with? Nobody is tapping their foot waiting for something from me (except my accountant, that is), nobody is forcing me to do anything, I can choose.

And I want to do many things. Too many. It’s already noon, but here is what I’d like to do with my Sunday:

  • go for a walk
  • write blog posts
  • continue sorting/tidying clothes so I can get rid of my chest of drawers and move my third cupboard to its new place
  • cook so I have food ready for the week
  • do some accounting (!)
  • go to the cinema

I can’t do all that. And choosing one means I don’t get to do the others. Cake, having it, eating it. It sounds silly, but it’s an emotionally difficult place for me. So I put off the decision by flipping through Facebook, for example.

And if I’m not careful, it will soon be too late to do any of these things I wanted.

Feuilles 3

So today I did things differently. I figured I probably had time for two of these things. So I numbered them. And I rolled a die. Twice.

I went for a walk by the lake. I took photos there. The weather was splendid, windy and sunny and changing. I didn’t have time for accounting, but I wrote this blog post and roughly sorted my photos (FB) instead.

Octobre 2016 au bord du lac

I’ll do the accounting tomorrow.

Photo Sync: Figuring Out Lightroom Mobile and iCloud Photo Library [en]

[fr] En train de me dépatouiller avec la nouvelle application Photos d'Apple et la version mobile de Lightroom. Pas encore tout à fait là (la connexion internet un peu lente et le grand nombre de photos n'aident pas).

In the background of my many days of “doing nothing” here in Kolkata, I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around how sync works for both iCloud Photo Library and Lightroom for mobile, particularly as I’m in the process of giving up on Google Photos. Agreed, it’s not exactly the same part of the workflow (getting photos onto my computer archive vs. getting them online/backing them up). But you know how my thought processes work by now, don’t you? 😉

Apple’s iCloud Photo Library seems to be working pretty well. The photos and videos sync, deleting one somewhere deletes copies elsewhere. It’s really clear they are “stored in the cloud” and you can download the full versions if you want. The copies are stored in one of these “Document Packages” which you can open like a folder (right-click!) — I’ve even created a shortcut to the 2015 folder in “Masters” so I can access the photos through Finder if needed. Added advantage, as it’s the native OSX way of doing things, photos show up in the “Photos category” when browsing for files to import into Lightroom, for example.

No Parking

So, simply using iCloud Photo Library would be a way to get my photos into Lightroom without having to physically connect my devices to the computer.

But… Lightroom has its own system for this, so if it works, wouldn’t it be even better? So far, it’s not working as seamlessly as the Apple system. First of all, because I sync everything on my iDevices with iCloud photo library, Lightroom for mobile seems to import a copy of each photo from each device. Although there is an OK plugin to find duplicates in your Lightroom library, wouldn’t a workflow that doesn’t create them in the first place be better?

Two things that I wasn’t sure about, but I now know:

  • photos from your iPad/iPhone are added to the Creative Cloud and Lightroom Desktop full-sized; photos from Lightroom Desktop shared to iPad/iPhone through Creative Cloud are shared through their smart previews
  • the photos synced from your iDevices are made available in a folder on your hard drive, so you can easily drag-and-drop them into your normal archive folders.

I’m running a few tests to see what happens to photos I delete. The photos app seems the best place for quick-and-dirty sorting (if only because when taking photos I’m directly in that app). What I am thinking of doing is turning on Lightroom syncing only from either the iPad or the iPhone, to avoid duplicates. The iPad, probably.

But does that mean I need to open Photos, wait for everything to sync, and then open Lightroom mobile to do it? So far it seems that it’s the way it works — Photos doesn’t seem to be uploading anything in the background from my iDevices, and Lightroom definitely isn’t. This is good when you want to save bandwidth, but less good when your various photo containers are up-to-date and you want things to “just work” invisibly, behind the scenes.

As I’ve been saying for a while, I’m really looking for the day this stuff “just works”.

Photos Online on Flickr, Facebook, and Google+ With Lightroom [en]

[fr] Comment je fais pour publier mes photos sur Flickr, Facebook et Google+ depuis Lightroom, avec les plugins de Jeffrey Friedl.

I like Lightroom a lot and have been using it for a few years now to manage my photos. I don’t do a lot of processing/retouching, and it fills my needs perfectly:

  • I can organize my photos on my hard drive the way I want (monthly, then “events” if needed)
  • It doesn’t touch the original photos (non-destructive editing)
  • I can retouch, crop, and do the stuff I deem necessary to improve my photos
  • I can batch-rename photos according to pretty much any template I want
  • I can upload photos to Flickr, Facebook, and Google+ directly from Lightroom.

Autour du chalet, lumière

I’ve been using Jeffrey’s Flickr plugin for a while now. The neat thing about Lightroom is that when you “publish” photos somewhere rather than “export” them, Lightroom maintains a relationship between the published photo and the one in your catalog. This means that if six months later you go over it again, crop it differently, or retouch it again, Lightroom can update the photo on Flickr for you.

Of course, you don’t have to: you can make a virtual copy of your photo in Lightroom and work on that one, without impacting the published photo; and you’re also the one who hits the publish button to update the photo on Flickr. It doesn’t happen completely automagically.

The only problem with this is for the person who has included one of the updated Flickr photos in a blog post. Updating changes the photo file name at Flickr, and breaks the insert. Thankfully, there’s a plugin for that.

I love my Flickr account and it contains pretty much all my (published) photos. I can’t deny, however, that a lot of my online social activity happens on Facebook, and that it’s a great environment for photos to circulate. Unfortunately Facebook has really crappy photo library management, so I’ve limited myself to uploading the odd album of photos every now and again. I needed a more sustainable process which didn’t involve exporting photos from Lightroom to my hard drive and uploading them manually.

Autour du chalet, coeur en dentelle

Enter Jeffrey’s Facebook plugin. As Facebook sucks, however, you shouldn’t really use the publish relationship to update photos that you’ve changed since you uploaded them to Facebook. Initially, as all I wanted to do was simplify my export-upload procedure, I used the “export” capability of the plugin. That means that instead of creating a “publish service” I created an “export preset” (File menu) to send photos directly to Facebook. Once sent, they’re sent, and live their lives on their own.

What’s nice is that I can also export photos like that directly to my pages (Tounsi and Quintus will appreciate).

Jeffrey also has a plugin for PicasaWeb, which for all practical matters pretty much means Google+ (Google Plus). Google Plus seems better at handling photo updates, so I set it up as a “publish service”.

I realized that I could use “smart publish collections” to make things simpler. My sets are already defined on Flickr. For example, I have this set of chalet photos, and I just want to reproduce it on Google+ (and Facebook). With a smart album or collection, I can tell Lightroom to “just publish those photos which are in that Flickr set”. Easy! This made me set up Facebook as a publish service too.

Autour du chalet, vue matinale du balcon

I love Jeffrey’s plugins because they are very well-maintained (up-to-date). There is some clunkiness in places because he really pushes beyond the limits of what Lightroom was designed for, but if you’re willing to see the odd error message or use the odd workaround, that should bother you too much. The clunkiness is amply made up for by the extensive documentation you will find both on Jeffrey’s site and in the plugins.

One such workaround is required to create a smart publish collection: because of a Lightroom bug, you have to edit the publish service and add the collection from there. But thankfully Jeffrey is really good at documenting stuff and telling you what to do and how, so you just have to follow the instructions on the screen. Basically you create a smart album or set in the “edit publish service” screen, then once it’s done edit that album to set your “smart” criteria.

Two useful things to know:

Finally, Jeffrey’s plugins are donationware. He spends a lot of time on them, and if you find them useful, you should definitely chip in.

Autour du chalet, crocus sous la neige

Life in Pictures [en]

[fr] Photos et commentaires.

This is a lazy post. Posts have to be lazy most of the time, or they don’t happen. I have hundreds of photographs waiting to be sorted and uploaded. But I have other things to do like fight fungus on my cherry tomato plants, cuddle kitties, earn money, and prepare for a couple of week-ends abroad.

Anyway. What I did is I picked a bunch of photos from the last month or so that I liked, and dumped them together in a set. They tell bits of my life — the parts I’ve photographed. Lots of cats and plants 🙂

I almost just embedded the slideshow here. But you’re lucky, here are the photos, with comments underneath.

Smelly Bus Stop

I was waiting for the bus to go to my audiologist’s (who is lovely but works quite far out for somebody travelling by public transport like me) and was really disturbed by the smell of rubbish. I was grumbling about people who throw rubbish on the railway tracks or something, when I turned around and noticed the train that was parked right behind us: a garbage train. That kind of explained the smell.

My balcony, early July, with Quintus

When I came back from England with Quintus I was amazed at how much my tomatoes had grown. Here’s what the balcony looked like back then, early July. Not much compared to today. You can see Quintus peeking out.

Stormy Lake

I love the lake, and find it particularly beautiful when it’s stormy. I’ve been sailing a fair number of times this summer, but haven’t taken many photos. I have a facebook group for people interested in going sailing on the Farrniente. (Not my only active facebook group as you’ll soon discover.)

Quintus in Love With Corinne the Cat-Sitter

Corinne is in Switzerland these days, so she’s been over regularly to visit, and agreed to cat-sit for me while I was in France end July. It was love at first sight between her and Quintus. Corinne has recently redesigned my professional site. I’m very happy with the result and just need to write a little content (hah!) before it can go live. I’m quite excited to have an up-to-date professional site again, particularly as I’m now clearer about what aspects of my work I want to develop (hint: blogging/freelancers).

Nails done professionally for the first time in my life

A couple of months ago I met Claire. I first noticed her on Twitter (@CBertol) — she was nice, a blogger and a cat person (meet @LoupiCat and his blog). She came to Bloggy Friday (yes, there’s a facebook group for that!) and I immediately noticed her nails. Turns out she’s a part-time nail artist. My brother’s wedding was coming up, and I figured it would be a good excuse to use her services.

So anyway, a few weeks later, I trekked to the other end of the canton and had my nails done. I suck at taking hand photos, I do.

Nails done professionally for the first time in my life -- toes

I don’t think my foot photos are much better :-p

Quintus and Tounsi in the garden

Here’s Quintus exploring the garden, with Tounsi not far behind. Did I mention they both have facebook pages? Follow the links.

At my brother's wedding

There we are, here I am at my brother’s wedding. That white jacket is the most expensive item of clothing I’ve ever bought, but it was worth it. Now I need to wear it 🙂

The wedding was a really nice wedding. All weddings are nice (well, hopefully), but this one was nice in the sense that it was relaxed, sprinkled with a few nice Ukrainian traditions, there wasn’t any drama, and suddenly it was 1am and neither me nor my grandparents (who are well in their eighties!) had seen time go by.

Quintus and Tounsi cohabitating

Here are the cats again. They don’t love each other, but they tolerate each other quite well. I don’t often see them this close though, and it usually doesn’t last long, so I take a photo when it happens. Quintus started out by actively impressing Tounsi with low menacing meows when he arrived. End result: Tounsi started being afraid of Quintus — I’d actually never seen Tounsi be afraid of anything or anybody before!

Things are calming down now. Tounsi has realized that Quintus is mostly talk and not much walk, so he’s starting to stand up to him more. But Quintus is still clearly top cat.

Quintus lounging outside eclau

The top cat in question, lounging on the window sill at eclau. Quintus prefers to stay in the flat, but I’m encouraging him to spend time at eclau and outside. Outside, he has his favourite spot hidden under the concrete path. It’s hollow underneath and there are two neat cat-entrances. He usually makes a beeline for it when he’s outside, and would rather be outside than hang out at eclau.

Things are changing though. He’s starting to nap at eclau and get to know the coworkers, and I’m spending a bit of time with him (and treats!) outside to encourage him to explore.

Which reminds me (I should have blogged about this already, but I haven’t, of course): we had an emergency photo shoot the other day at eclau to illustrate an article in the Financial Times I had given Ian Sanders an interview for. (That is one ugly sentence, sorry.) The photo ended up not illustrating a little feature about eclau alongside other coworking spaces, each with its little photograph, but being the main photo for the article! The link above to the article is behind a registerwall, se here’s the PDF of the article if you want to see what it looks like. Yay eclau and thanks Ian!

Quintus and Tounsi closer than usual

Back to the kitties, sharing the bed in an almost symmetrical manner.

After three kitty photos in a row, it’s no use hiding that I’m a crazy cat lady (not too old for the moment), and that there is a (francophone) facebook group for crazy cat ladies (and guys), and that I’m pretty active there posting photos of Quintus and Tounsi and liking photos of the cats responsible for the other 200 or so humans in the group.

Overgrown balcony

Back to the balcony: that’s more like it! Sharing my balcony plant photos on facebook led me to create a group for people into growing stuff. Yes, another facebook group. And it’s not finished.

Beautiful sunflowers in the garden

These sunflowers are not from my balcony, but in the garden just below. They grew to about 3 meters — I kid you not. The concierge himself was amazed — told me he’d never seen them grow that tall. I guess they liked the combination of good soil (on the compost heap) and lots of sun.

A yummy meal with veggies I don't normally buy

This was a yummy yummy meal I made, with green beans, which I never buy. I ended up with green beans because I signed up for a weekly basket of veggies while somebody from the coop was on holiday. And ended up with a bunch of veggies I never buy — which was exactly the point for me!

I’ve also changed the way I eat, eating a full “normal” meal at breakfast (fat + carbs, mainly), another good meal at lunch (less carbs), and a light meal in the evening (salad or the like + protein). I started doing it after being advised by a naturopath friend of mine (he’s the director of the EPSN in Lausanne). I was having trouble going to bed at night and getting up in the morning (sound familiar?). Swapping my meals around has helped a lot: I’m waking up earlier and going to bed earlier without much effort.

And when you think of it, it makes sense: you do not need huge piles of energy at night when you’re sleeping. Why eat your main meal just before going to bed? You need energy in the morning and the afternoon. Skipping breakfast or having a light breakfast doesn’t make much sense physiologically. In addition to that, it seems we have a peak of something in the morning that helps us digest fat. So, sausages and pasta in the morning, here we come!

As a perpetually hungry person, I’ve also found that I’m less hungry this way. I have a better morning because my tummy is full, I do not start starving at 10:30 am, but reach noon quite content, happy to eat again but not too hungry. And in the evening, instead of being (again) starving-waiting-for-my-main-meal, I’m barely hungry. What a change!

First balcony cucumber -- tasty!

In addition to cherry tomatoes, I’m growing cucumbers on my balcony. This is the first one. They are absolutely delicious. They actually taste of cucumber. (Not cucumber-flavoured water. Proper cucumber.)

I have two cucumber plants. Since they started producing fruit, I’m having trouble keeping up. Good thing I love cucumber, because it’s close to one a day!

Basket of veggies, delivery -- a lot for one person

Ah, here’s one of my veggie baskets from Le jardin potager. The closest delivery point is just across the road.

This is the second one. Note the beetroots? I hate the red stuff they try and put in your salad every now and again. I thought I didn’t like beetroot. I never ever buy beetroot. I tried this dead simple recipe and discovered that I actually love beetroots. I’ll be buying more!

Tounsi in Quintus's basket, holding his ground

The round basket is Quintus’s place. He sleeps there most of the time. Tounsi snuck in at some point, and stood his ground as Quintus tried to tell him off.

Khaly, my stepmom's adorable puppy

This cute baby is my stepmom’s new puppy, Khaly. Isn’t she a darling?

Basel

I went to Basel last week-end to visit a friend who has been there for the last four months or so. I have a pile of photos to sort and put online of course, so here’s already one which I particularly like.

Very classy

I stole this pic of a guy in the tram in front of us. I thought the cigarettes behind both ears were nearly as classy as the unlit dangling cigarette some addicts tend to have permanently glued to their mouth.

Balcony, mid-August

My balcony seen from outside, mid-August. It’s nice and shady on my balcony-couch.

Tounsi at eclau being silly

Tounsi, at eclau. 🙂

Quintus in the garden

Quintus relaxing in the garden.

3rd and last basket of veggies for the summer

My third basket of veggies. Help!

Tounsi and his "look"

Tounsi giving me his “OMG you found me!” look.

Tounsi curled up in his tight new spot

Curled up in his new spot — I didn’t think he’d fit in there.

Quintus basking in the sunshine

Cute nose contest.

Quintus light and dark

Basking in the sunshine.

Pallet garden, end of August version (too much had died)

I bought some new plants yesterday for my pallet garden. It’s been through various stages since the beginning: some plants died, some were happier elsewhere, some were simply bad choices (dangly plants kill those beneath them because they cover them up). My pallet has been looking a bit drab lately, so I bought some heather and pansies and a few other plants to fill in the gaps. Fingers crossed. Watering a pallet garden is definitely a challenge — if I were starting a pallet from scratch I would build irrigation in.

Tomatoes after pruning (had fungus)

I spent all afternoon yesterday removing fungus-ridden leaves from my tomatoes. I’d bunched them up way too tightly, and hadn’t pruned them enough, and the fungus loved it. Oh well, first-time tomato-grower — I’m learning. You can now see through the tomato plants.

Tomatoes

Here’s one of the little plants. (The pot is too small, but I had extra plants, so I thought “better a small pot than kill the plant”).

Cucumbers

Close-up of my cucumbers.

More Tomatoes

More tomatoes.

Indoor Jungle

I still have an indoor jungle. I have too many plants. I think I may be a bit of a hoarder. Anybody want to adopt some of my excess plants? Let me know if you’re around Lausanne and can come and pick them up.

I’ve had a hard time putting the plants where Tounsi won’t get at them (he’s improved, but the yucca for example is irresistible for his claws) and still leave enough space for the cats to walk around on the furniture (giving them a bit of a 3D indoor space).

Fallen tomatoes

The tomatoes that fell off while I was pruning and reattaching the plants yesterday. Have been looking for ideas for a small quantity of green cherry tomatoes. Fried?

Quintus cuddling in the morning

Quintus cuddling this morning. He likes to sleep curled up next to my ear, so I go to sleep to the music of purring kitty, which is nice. Less nice is that he makes noises when he sleeps. Voice noises. “Mmmh” each time he breathes. Some squeaky snore? A closed-mouth meow? I don’t now, but it wakes me up. So I pet him to try and get the purring started again, but as soon as I stop he drifts off again and starts squeaking.

Tounsi at the top of the bookcase

Tounsi taking advantage of some 3D-space I set up.

Reorganising the kitchen -- all useful stuff

One thing I finally got around to doing today is I started reorganizing my kitchen. Wow, if my memory serves me right, the kitchen cupboard space was last allocated in 2003, when I wrote “Living Space as User Interface“! I’ve added shelves and stuff since then, and cleaned out cupboards, but the kitchen is way overdue for a spring-clean and a complete re-think.

This is the cupboard above my sink, reorganized.

Reorganizing the kitchen -- not quite done yet

These are the shelves next to the sink. Not final, but at least I have somewhere for the great set of pans I brought back from Aleika’s.

Reorganizing the kitchen -- stuff I never use

Here’s a box filled with things I removed from the cupboard. Most of them have been outside the cupboard today for the first time in years. Need to sort through them, see what I get rid of, what I keep, and where I put what I keep.

Writing this last bit about the kitchen, I realize I’ve been quite good at keeping my weekends for “house stuff” (or leisure). In the Going Solo group (yup, another facebook one, remember the Going Solo conference?) we were talking the other day about setting time aside for one’s own projects. Half a day, for example.

I fear that if I do that I will quite quickly either let that half-day be taken over by work (if I’m stressed), or by “I don’t want to do anything, let me put my feet up”. I manage to not let work encroach on my week-end even when I’m “normally” stressed (I make exceptions in crisis situations of course). How can I recreate that level of “protection” for a slice of my time, but during the week? Food for thought.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the pictures and the snippets of news. Have a nice week!

Comment j'organise mes photos sur mon disque dur [fr]

[en] I organize my photos into yearly and monthly folders. Inside the monthly folders, I create "shoot" folders with a name that'll help me identify what they are about easily. For my trip to India, I've had to add say folders too, as I'm taking many photos nearly every day.

OK, ce n’est pas de la grande science, mais si ça peut être utile à quelqu’un, voici le système que j’utilise depuis de nombreuses années pour ranger mes photos sur mon disque dur. C’est assez simple mais ça marche pour moi.

Bangalore 041 Gandhi Bazaar.jpgJ’ai un dossier “photos” dans lequel je crée un dossier par année (2006, 2007, 2008, etc.). Dans chaque dossier “année” je crée douze dossiers “mois” (01, 02, 03, etc.). Au début, je rangeais simplement toutes les photos d’un mois donné dans le dossier du mois, mais suivant quand, ça fait vite beaucoup de photos.

Donc habituellement, je groupe mes photos par “gros paquets” à l’intérieur d’un mois donné en créant des répertoires comme “Promenade au bord du lac”, “Apéro de l’eclau”, “Sortie bateau”. Ça m’aide à facilement retrouver mes photos.

Je ne suis pas très systématique ni soigneuse dans ma façon de nommer mes photos. A nouveau, je fais des gros paquets, je choisis un nom générique (Bangalore) et je numérote automatiquement (impensable de faire ça à la main). Après, des fois, je rajoute des précisions, soit sur mon ordinateur, soit sur Flickr. Ça dépend de mon humeur!

Maintenant que je commence à utiliser sérieusement Lightroom, je cherche à tâtons comment mieux nommer mes photos. Pour ce voyage en Inde, par exemple, j’ai trop de photos chaque jour pour utiliser mon système de classement habituel, donc j’ai créé encore des répertoires par jour à l’interieur des dossiers “mois” — et je suis en train de nommer mes photos “Ville ### Série de photos” (exemple: Bangalore 041 Gandhi Bazaar). On verra si je continue comme ça!