Tuxcomputers

From OSP Wiki

System details

Operating system: Ubuntu Linux 7.04
Primary editor: The GIMP 2.2.13

Organising the photos

I store and organise my photos using the format /photo-directory/year/month/date

The month is in the format 05-May so that when viewed in a file browser the months are in the correct order. The same reasoning is used for the date format year-month-day so it looks like this 2007-05-14. So if I need to find a photo, I drill down the system that looks like this:

• /2007
  • /04-Apr
    • /2007-04-13
    • /2007-04-21
  • /05-May
    • /2007-05-02
    • /2007-05-15
    • /2007-05-27

Transferring the photos onto the computer

I have a Dell laptop that has an SD card reader built-in, when I insert a card Ubuntu automagically mounts the card at /media/KODAK and the directory I store my photos in is /home/data/photos. To assist me I have created a bunch of shortcut commands and placed them in my ~/.bashrc file here they are:

# Static settings
PHOTODIR=/media/KODAK/DCIM/100KP850

# Variable settings
MYMONTH=`date +'%b'`
MYMONTH2=`date +'%m'`
MYYEAR=`date +'%Y'`
MYDATE=`date +'%Y-%m-%d'`
FLICKRDIR=/home/data/photos/$MYYEAR/$MYMONTH2-$MYMONTH

# Custom commands
alias imph='cd $FLICKRDIR && mkdir $MYDATE && mv -v $PHOTODIR/* $FLICKRDIR/$MYDATE && chmod 660 $FLICKRDIR/$MYDATE/*'
alias cdfl='cd $FLICKRDIR/flickr-up'
alias fla='bzip2 -v *.xcf && mv *.bz2 ../flickr-done && rm *.jpg'
alias cdph='cd $PHOTODIR'

The first line sets the directory that is on my SD card, if I ever change cameras I will just need to update that to the location the new camera stores it's photos on the SD card.

The second section of the code automatically sets the variables using the current day, month and year. The last of that section sets the FLICKRDIR variable based on the results of the previous variables.

The third section are the custom commands that do all the actual work. I will only explain the first command, it is actually several commands that run one after the other, here is what they do in order:

1. Changes to the current Flickr directory
2. Makes a new directory based on today's date in the format of YYYY-MM-DD, if it already exists then it just gives and error but keeps going.
3. Moves the photos from the SD card to the new directory
4. Changes the mode of the photos to read + write for the user and the group

Viewing the photos

I don't have a need to tag or catalogue my images (apart from the directory method I use) so I use the simple thumbnail viewer called gThumb. On the left it displays the current directory you are in and the available subdirectorys. On the right are all the images in the directory. You can view a full screen slideshow of the images by hitting F11.

I can also right click the image and tell gThumb to open the image in multiple programs, one of those is GIMP. If GIMP is not already open then it starts it up.

gThumb can show you thumbnails of XCF files but it can't display them in full screen. It does not display the thumb's of compressed XCF files. In fact if the file is not an image you get no indication that the file is even in the directory.

Working with the photos

In the current months directory I have two additional directory's, flickr-up and flickr-done. The first is for photos that I have edited or am currently working on. The other is for photos that I have already uploaded to Flickr.

When editing a photo I always save the file as an XCF file in the flickr-up directory. XCF is the native GIMP uncompressed lossless file format. JPEG images do not keep the layers or layer masks and everytime you save the image you lose quality. XCF files preserve layers, layer masks and the EXIF data without losing any quality no matter how many times the file is saved.

I will edit several photos one after the other saving them all in the flickr-up. Once I have finished my editing session I use David's Batch Processor to convert all of the XCF files in the flickr-up to JPEG images using a quality rating of 0.85

Uploading the images

To upload my photos to Flickr I use an app called kFlickr. kFlickr allows you to upload as many photos as you wish. It allows you to set several things on the photo before uploading, these include:

• The privacy setting
• The title
• The description
• The size
• The tags
• A single photoset, we all know that you can have a photo in more than one set but kFlickr can only set one.

Afterwards

This is where I use the other custom commands. The second custom command changes to the current flickr-up directory. Once there I run the third command fla which is short for "flickr archive", it too is a series of separate commands that run one after the other:

1. Compress all the XCF files using the bZip program.
2. Moves the compressed files to the flickr-done directory.
3. Deletes the JPEG files in that directory.

I compress the XCF files using bzip because GIMP is able to open and save the compressed files. I only compress them at this stage because I often come back to files several times before I am finished. I used to save and work with the files compressed as XCF.BZ2 files but what I found is that it takes longer for GIMP to open and save them.

Offline storage

My main storage location is the internal HDD of my laptop. To ensure that I don't lose everything if the it goes belly up I have several off-line and near-line storage methods. These are:

1. A 60G 2.5" hard drive in a USB enslosure, that draws it's power from the USB port. I take this with me when I travel, I sync it every couple of days.
2. My Linux server at home. I work away from home for 2 weeks at a time and will sync to this when I get back.
3. 2 x 40G 3.5" hard drives. Every month I put these into my sons XP machine and sync both to the server.
4. DVD-R's, every 6 months I burn a copy of the last 12 months of unedited and edited photos.

My hints and tips

1. Don't save your work in a lossy format, converting to a JPEG should be the very last step.
2. XCF files preserve everything with no loss in quality.
3. Make sure you have more than 1 backup.