on Mar 26th, 2008
Photos, design, work space and more.
In all my RSS feed reading, it never fails that I end up looking through one stream or another on Flickr. I so badly want to get all my photos organized and on the web, but nothing has satisfied my picky sense of what that tool should encase. I want something that does tagging; and I mean ICTP tagging, so that captions, keywords and other things are incorporated into the file itself, and not in a database that’s disconnected from the files. iPhoto sucks at this (although you can export your photos with the information). And so do other fantastic apps such as MemoryMiner. They all can do pretty cool stuff. But if one or all of my pictures go anywhere else except that computer, all my work and the time I took to create keywords, links, captions, titles, groups and connections go out the window.
Picasa for Windows did exactly what I would want, but being on the Mac platform now means I have to wait for them to come out with a Mac version. (Which is slated for this year)
I also find myself almost beset by Apple computers. After now living with OSX for many months and adapting to it, I love it. Especially after using Spaces with the right and left clicker on the scroll wheel. I’m really finding I could use a Macbook Pro, and I’ve started keeping up with craigslist.org to see if I can get a deal from someone who’s upgrading. I’m also finding there are quite a few scams out there. I’ve already found two sellers, one selling a 17″ Macbook Pro (worth about $4,000 with all the featuers) for $750 and another 17″ for $999. I e-mailed the first one, and sure enough; he happens to be in the UK right now; but he’ll make an e-bay auction to sell it to me so that we’re both “protected”… but the ebay account is from Florida. Why is he making a post in the houston section on craigslist?
The second one e-mailed me back about a 15″ one for $680 or something, changing the specs and the picture from the listing, and he’s also in the UK right now. PSH.
Anyway, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. I’d rather spend twice as much knowing I’m not possibly going to be sent a box of rocks.
So, I went with Pam to the library yesterday and picked up a photography book so I can finally understand how to work my dad’s digital SLR camera. So we’ll see how that goes, if I can find the time.
So hopefully this weekend or early next week I can start moving into the office space with Kelly from church. He actually moved out of the space he was in (that I was hoping to be in) and had bought a house to move his office and 4 or 5 co-workers into. He said he has a room all set aside for me, so it’ll be nice to be somewhere where other people are working too. Hoping it will motivate me to get more done in a day… but I do estimate that having a MacBook after the move will help a lot, so that when I’m home I’m not severed from work, which in my line of work I can’t be.
So, I’m happy to announce that I’m accepting donations to help me purchase a Macbook Pro for work! lol… I’ll even sell you ad space on the case!
Didn’t know you had made the switch. Spaces is nice, I have been enjoying that feature on ubuntu linux for a year or so.
Check out resourcespace for digital management. It’s php based, so you should have plenty of options for installing it.
I live and die by Adobe’s Lightroom for managing the photos on my mac though.
Hope to see a shiny macbook pro in your new office soon! Same for mine . . .
Hi Drew:
Welcome to the Mac world, and thanks for the kind words about MemoryMiner. I wanted to let you know that we’re well along in our efforts to have all metadata created in MemoryMiner to be written into the individual files as Adobe XMP data.
We already do a great job reading embedded IPTC and EXIF data and using that create to create People, Places, titles, captions, etc, which are then automatically assigned to the photos upon import. Since there are no standard schemas for dealing with selection markers (aka “photo notes” if your a Flickr fan), we’ll be developing our own which we’ll publish.
As always, the goal of MemoryMiner is that it “plays well with others.” Portable metadata, XML Export and Win/Mac compatibility are all an important part of this.
Best,
John Fox
Hi John,
Thanks for the reply and I’m definitely keeping my eye on MemoryMiner. It looks great and goes beyond what many (any?) other photo organizing tools do. Keep up the good work!
-Drew