dm93 * home FilmKiller

They say that opposites attract; Mary and I bear that out when it comes to photos. When we met, I owned perhaps 5 photos of myself, including my driver's license. In her world, if there were no photos, it didn't happen.

We have kids now, and I'm learning to appreciate her way of looking at things. But I don't think I'll ever put up with the sort of maintenance that traditional cameras required: take the pictures, get them developed, surface-mail copies to your friends, and so on.

philg's photo.net is one of those sites that I found at random and didn't realize how long I'd been there until hours later. (He had some harsh but well made criticism of the W3C web site too.)

Digital photography promises to eliminate all the hassles of getting photos developed and such, but we're not there yet. Printing photos is a pain. When SAM's will print them for 19 cents apiece, why bother?

Current Camera: Sony Cybershot DSCP200

Purchased March 24, 2006. See photo bookmarks.

Older Camera: HP PhotoSmart? 720

I was looking for a digital camera with...

We got an HP Photosmart 720 (UPACode 808736266178. other barcodes: 1PQ2164A 30PABA SCN33B57519) from microcenter #191 for $299 (price tag barcode: 67334357fk) on 9 Jun 2003. It uses secure digital rather than compact flash; close enough. And the shot-to-shot time isn't great. But the picture quality is really good. Bright colors, crisp.

We took over 200 photos on our August 2003 RoadTrip? with it. Mary didn't even bring her film camera. That's a landmark!

We brought the video camera, but didn't use it; the camera takes video clips up to 30 seconds. We'll see how they turn out.

On 9 Apr 2004, I called HP support because the camera stopped working. Woohoo! It's under warrantee, and they sent a replacement, no charge. Yay HP!

I visited my brother Paul in Pheonix in Sep 2002; he had an Olympus Camedia C-700, with 10x optical zoom. Kinda pricey, but yahoo shopping helps me find a refurb for under $300.

cheap camera at officemax didn't cut it; see ArgusCameraReview.

Film camera, scanning services

Picture CD is great! colorado ski trip pictures and justin's paintball party photos were taken with Mary's normal 35mm camera and developed using one-hour service at Sam's. For just $3 more (as of Apr 2003), they included a CD with reasonable quality scans.

Photo Library Software

We use iPhoto on mmac in MaJoStudio.

Getting the photos out of the camera is no trouble: the 256MB secure digital card works great with a USB-based reader (SanDisk SDDR-86). I moved them to SonyVaioJammer a few times during the trip, then bulk-uploaded to mmac in MaJoStudio for editing (rotating, captioning, red-eye, cropping).

5 Oct 2003: how to fix these confused photo dates? iPhoto is scriptable... Automating iPhoto 2 with AppleScript explains how... ah iPhoto Library Manager looks cool.

Linux was kinda fidgety... gPhoto supported cameras didn't include the HP Photosmart 720, and usb port permissions are a nightmare. (are there any standard digital camera USB protocols? yes: ptp )

Photo Sharing on the Web

iPhoto works pretty well with Zope via webdav, but I started to feel the lack of filesystem access for stuff like rsync and CVS/SVN when I had 200 photos to manage, especially since iPhoto is export only; after you export, if you edit in iPhoto, there's no easy way to resync.

I hesitate to publish them here on dm93.org because I'm not sure I'm done editing them, and I'm not sure how to update exported photos.

I'm becoming disenchanted with Zope. I'm considering moving to apache+subversion (cf AmayaZopeNotes). 15Aug2003

HP offered 100 megs of free web space at hpphoto.com. Haven't taken them up on it.

Sam's photo club is no FilmKiller... javascript and cookies everywhere (as of 25Apr2002)... just give me links to my friggin photos, would ya? 7Jan2004 update: Mary was able to send photos for developing online, rather than burning a CD. They took a $0.77 order!

In a #zope discussion 13Oct2001, fUD recommended Photo and Photo Folder .

Further Reading

(hmm... move this to del.ici.ous? supplement?)


comments:

gotta give flickr a try --connolly, Mon, 27 Dec 2004 17:15:23 +0000 reply
As reluctant as I am to trust any publisher but myself, I can see that hosted services like flickr are compelling. I can barely manage to administer basic functionality at the Zope site. The admin/user ratio is 1. Waaaay too high.

flickr tools includes iPhoto plug-in and Mac OS X upload tool.

not sold on flickr --connolly, Tue, 28 Dec 2004 23:39:57 +0000 reply
After getting all jazzed up about flickr's APIs? (via Clay via Mark B), access control, tags, community and stuff, I find that uploading just a handful of photos used up 89% of the monthly 10MB allowance for a free account. I'd pay maybe $25/year for this service, but not $60 or even $42.

a flickr moment? --connolly, Thu, 30 Dec 2004 07:09:49 +0000 reply
Destructo-Dog! is an attempt to capture a moment with flickr and my WearableGizmo's crappy phone. Not compelling.

morten's faceted photo browser --connolly, Fri, 31 Dec 2004 21:33:11 +0000 reply
morten's photo browser is cool. I think I've seen it before; found it via http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/12/31/redesign-retrospective-and-resolutions">31Dec blarticle, via planetrdf.

new camera from ALDI --connolly, Fri, 06 May 2005 13:20:06 +0000 reply
see notes

reconsidering flicker --connolly, Sat, 14 May 2005 17:59:51 +0000 reply
idea: use iPhoto keywords to mark photos as world-readable. use applescript to export a list of world-readable photos; rsync them to dm93.org.

But before I could find my notes on iphoto and python or applescript, I got distracted by flickr. Maybe I'll try that for a while. can't be worse that what I'm doing now. badge looks cool.

traveller camera produces wierd video files --connolly, Sun, 29 May 2005 22:55:17 +0000 reply
problem report: trouble converting ASF from Traveler camera Wed, 18 May 2005 22:52:13 -0500; ,a20.txt attachment

flickr limits free photo sets --connolly, Mon, 18 Jul 2005 16:50:55 +0000 reply
I ran into a limitation of my free flickr account: just 3 photo sets allowed.