Facing up to Facebook Photo Uploads

01/31/10 – 8:03 pm

I’ve been mas-uploading photos to Facebook recently – not really my cup of tea but its a great way of sharing the holiday snaps with the Indonesian contingent of the family who are mostly young and into facebooking etc. Considering the trials and tribulations I’ve been through I might save some of you the heart/headaches by summing up my experience for you.

I’m on a Mac, of course, so read no further if you live on the dark side.

I use Photo Mechanic and Aperture for my day-to-day handling of  photos so this is where I started. There’s no plug-in / extension for Photo Mechanic that I could find and I didn’t expect there to be one but there is one for Aperture, Facebook Exporter. On the whole I found this unreliable and tedious to use. Its only at version 0.5.2 so I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it shows more promise. Next – staying completely in Apple land – I tried using the iPhoto (‘09) Facebook uploader, even though I try to avoid having my picks in both Aperture and iPhoto. The iPhoto uploader does work seamlessly and uses the captions (titles) you give your photos on Facebook but not the faces data. In iPhoto you basically turn an existing folder into a Facebook folder so if you are an iPhoto fan this may be the solution for you. Don’t change  your mind and try to back out of using iPhoto though because if you delete a Facebook folder from iPhoto it will delete it and all the photos it contains from the Facebook site.

Not happy with iPhoto, my search continued with Google’s Picasa and the Picasa Uploader. I had some trouble installing it but got it working after a few tries. If you need to install the Facebook button (Picasa Uploader) by hand it needs to be put in the following folder: ‘/Applications/Picasa.app/Contents/Resources/buttons’. Of course now I was back at the same place I was with iPhoto. I did not want to have to use another photo organizing application just to upload to Face book even if it did do a reasonable job. If your a user and fan of  Picasa I’d recommend it but not for me. I don’t use the Picasa web site for images, and I’ve never been a fan of the Picasa application (possibly my least favorite from Google and I love most of them) which I find clumsy and unintuitive at times. In particular Picasa doesn’t have the smarts to combine the RAW and the Jpeg of the same image into one reference thumbnail. So sorry Picasa you still have not won me over.

What I thought I needed now, in the absence of a decent plug-in for Aperture, was a stand-alone application that I could use in conjunction with my chosen photo organizing application(s). There is the Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook based on the Adobe AIR platform. Not sure why they called it ‘Photo Uploader for Facebook’ as it really is a more general Facebook client. The uploaded is reasonable but has some drawbacks. You cant see images that are already uploaded to an existing album and when you tag people in photos it is blissfully unaware of your friends list it can also be painfully slow at times but then again I’ve never been impressed by Adobe AIR applications in general. So thumbs down to that one.

That just leaves one final serious contender that I could find and whilst it does have some serious bugs / annoyances it is my pick of a very average lot and that is Bloom. “Bloom is a multi platform desktop app that let you upload your photos and videos easily and efficiently to Facebook, download albums and view your friends’ photos”. Could not have put it better myself. For me this does the job. You can drag-and-drop photos from Aperture (and iPhoto for that matter) or the finder, caption photos quickly and tag your friends easily using a list that is aware of your friends (even shows you an avatar of them in case you forget names like I do). Its quick to, probably because it only uploads small size images. Which is all I really want when sharing the family snaps. Being  a Java app it can be a little flaky. I suggest always checking the albums you create with it on the Facebook site have all the correct settings. There is one major bug to look out for: If you have a photo with a caption selected and then select all the photos in an album Bloom will set the caption of all the photos to that first photo’s caption, really annoying but avoidable. So despite these few niggles Bloom is my choice today for uploading photos to Facebook.

By PSDC | Posted in Photography, Software | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Yogya Biennale

01/26/10 – 10:39 pm
Occupied

Occupied

I’ve been back from Indonesia (central Java) for about a week and a half now and I’m finally getting back into the swing of things. I had internet access at times in Indonesia but I was too engrossed in what I was doing to bother blogging so sorry for the wait (don’t suppose you were anyway). I’ve processed some of the photos I’ve taken of the Yogya Biennale as the start of a series of galleries from my trip. I was only able to see a small part of the Biennale but what I saw was fresh, fun and exciting. Grass-roots art that engaged the local community and the visitor a-like. I was very lucky to be in Yogyakarta at the time of the Biennale because not only did I get to see a lot of interesting artwork I also saw inside a few of Yogya’s colonial buildings that are not regularly open to the public as they were being used as gallery space. Another endearing feature of the Biennale was that the vast majority of it (certainly all I saw) was free – bare in mind that going to the toilet in Indonesia can cost you a few thousand Rupiah.

The Justice Goddess

The Justice Goddess

Don't play with Matches!

Don't play with Matches!

In the gallery you’ll see a few of the works I was most taken with. There’s a toilet on a very high pipe with a knot in it which, my good friend Agus told me, is a protest about the lack / condition of  public toilets in Yogyakarta. Agus was filming a documentary about the artist, Eddi Prabandono, while we were there. Another stunning sculpture which Agus called the “Justice Goddess” stood in the middle of a major intersection and an enormous box of matches positioned outside a petrol station which caught my eye as we passed by on a local bus and cased me to laugh out loud to the bemusement of the other passengers.

Some of these images represent my first attempts at HDR photography. So far I’m very please with the dramatic effects I’m getting.

By PSDC | Posted in Photography, Travel, indonesia | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

DVD to iPod (iPhone) – Trials, tribulations and recommendations

12/24/09 – 7:03 pm

I’ve been preparing for a holiday in Indonesia with my family. My better half (distinctly) being originally a native of Java (the island, not the programing language). This has meant transferring a choice selection of movies etc. from DVD to my iPhone to keep my son and I amused during the long flight and for the quite times during the holiday – my son who’s six speaks more Bahasa Indonesian than I do so having some English language entertainment to hand also helps with my sanity.

Getting from DVD to iPhone (pod, mp3 player etc) may sound simple enough and the most common of question I get about it “What tool do you uses?” belies the fact that some times it just aint that simple. For starter the Mordorian idea of one tool to do it all unfortunately does not exist. In my experience I’ve never been able to find a peice of software that allows me to put a DVD in the optical media drive and buzz, gurgle, whir the content I wish to watch as been magically copied to my iPhone. Many tools claim to be able to do this but they often get stumped by a number of DVDs in your collection. So I brake the process down into small steps. First “ripping” the DVD. In my case I aim to make a soft copy of the DVD on my hard disk. The only tool that seems totally reliable and efficient for this task, on the Mac, is Mac the Ripper.

I tend to rip content then store it to either watching on my desktop as a DVD (in DVD player etc) or converting it to another format for a portable device (iPhone). Rather then have loads of folders full of AUDIO_TS, VIDEO_TS etc. folders I like to keep things neat and tidy by bundling them up into ISO image files. For this I use DMGConverter to make UDF filesystem .iso files. You might think this is a little excessive but OS X can open and mount ISO files, like disk images, if you double click on them (not sure if all versions of OS X can do this BTW). A number of apps can handle ISO files without any additional tools including VLC Media Player, HandBrake and of course DVD burning software such as Burn and Toast. ISO (ISO 9660) is also a universally accepted standard so it makes sense as a container file.

If you have Toast, it provides another way of mounting ISO files. Open the Toast application and click Utilities in the menu bar, then Mount Disk Image, navigate to your ISO file, select it and click Choose. This  will mount the ISO file as if it was optical media (CD / DVD). I’ve searched high and low to try and find how to do this without Toast but no luck so far. The way Toast does it is via an application called ToastImageMounter which is bundled inside the Toast application bundle. Being able to mount ISO files as virtual optical media has the advantage that applications such as DVD Player and Mac the Ripper which expect optical media will not be disappointed. Of course having Toast open to just mount ISO files is a little OTT so if you prefer to keep things simple get a copy of ToastMount. Toast mount is a GUI for the ToastImageMounter application. If you keep it in the dock you can drag and drop ISO files on to it and they will mount on the desktop.

Now comes the tricky bit. There are loads of choices, free and paid for, for converting your DVD content to iPhone / media player compatible formats, AKA transcoding. Toast does a nice job as does HandBrake and my personal favorite (especially for batch conversion) VisualHub (sadly no longer available). All have their pros and cons but the one con many of them have is not being able to handle some of the more tricky DVDs. MTR rips copies of DVDs with some vagaries intact so the transcoding software needs to be able to deal with these. The one piece of software I’ve had consistent success with in this area is MPEG Streamclip. MPEG Streamclip has not skipped a beat no matter what I’ve thrown at it and its free software. Well almost, whilst MPEG Streamclip is free you cant transcode DVDs without the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component from Apple, but this is not an expensive piece of software. In my case I forgot I’d brought it a couple of years ago but when I returned to the Apple online-store and went to my account page it was still there waiting for me to download again and it “just worked.” On thing  MPEG Streamclip do is work out which clip on a DVD is the main movie, instead it presents you with a list of clips and as some DVDs can contain more then twenty clips it can be laborious trying to find the right one. In this case what I do is return to Mac the Ripper. First I mount the ISO image as a virtual optical disk using ToastMount then I use Mac the Rippers Main Feature Extraction mode to extract just the clip I want and customize the audio tract and subtitle selections (if any). Finally MPEG Streamclip does the transcoding for me. Its admittedly somewhat convoluted but I only have to do this for some of the tricky DVDs so whilst I’d not recommend MPEG Streamclip for batch conversion (as its not well designed for this) it does handle virtually any transcoding job you care to throw at it..

By PSDC | Posted in OS X, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Google Chrome for Mac Ofically Launched Today

12/09/09 – 8:47 am

The Google Chrome team has officially launched Google Chrome for Mac today. With a nice little Easter egg for all of us who already had chrome but were waiting with bated breath to be able to officially down load and use it. ;-)

By PSDC | Posted in Software | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Lorem slipsum?

11/29/09 – 6:03 pm

Near where I live is a NQR (not quite right) style supermarket. The kind of place where end of line, shop soiled etc. goods get sold off cheaply. Its a great place for a bargain and it can be fun trying to work out why the goods are there. Or why I’m shopping there – its next to the big hardware store. Some time ago I thought I’d worked out one product the company’s name was “Loral Ipsum Pty Ltd”. I thought, eye, eye the printers have stuffed up and left the Lorem Ipsum (fake Latin used as place-holder text in graphic/web etc. design) on the packaging. But no! Much to my bemusement I’ve found that the company actually exists and their even on the web. So smart marketing or bad Latin?

Loral Ipsum package
Loral Ipsum package back
By PSDC | Posted in Odd Spot | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Housekeeping

11/29/09 – 5:30 pm

Finally had a chance to do some work on the blog after the recent turmoil at work. I’ve fixed the gallery images bug and the top navigation – still a work in progress is a work in progress.

By PSDC | Posted in PSDC Updates | Comments (0)

Boss-an-over

11/24/09 – 10:02 pm

“Moving on, is a simple thing, what it leaves behind is hard.”

Dave Mustaine

As the actress said to the bishop…

In my working life I have had many bosses, but the boss I’ve had for the past seven and a half years was pretty special (or possibly clinically insane). He was not cut from the same cloth as other bosses I’ve had. He believed in enjoying work on his own terms and taking anyone who wanted along for the ride. I’ll miss him as a boss but I hope to always count him as a fiend [sic].

Tim @ Sea World
Tim @ Independance Day
Tim @ Mexican Independance Day
Tim @ Xmas
By PSDC | Posted in Personal | Comments (1)

Come fly with me lets fly, lets fly away

11/01/09 – 4:56 pm
Jet Engine

Jet Engine

The boy and I visited the Australian National Aviation Museum today. They have a considerable amount of aviation history packed into a fairly small amount of space. I tend to whip round things like this taking photos but it still took me two hours. If aviation is your thing its worth the price of entry.

The title for this post of course comes from a Frank Sinatra song. Franky always had a way with lyrics but what we’re they on when they wrote:

“Fly with me lets float down to peru
in lamaland theres a one man band and he’ll toot his flute for you
fly with me lets take off in the blue.”

By PSDC | Posted in Exhibition, Travel | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

AstroBoy, AstroBoy, He is brave and gentle and wise and CGIed!

10/30/09 – 10:50 pm

After the Wachowski Brothers frightful anemic technicolor yawn version of Speed Racer I’ve been wary of move versions of classic kids anime action series. Thankfully the brothers had nothing to do with Astro Boy. The latest movie of the classic series I watched as a kid has stayed true to the style and spirit of the original kids series. The whole package comes together nicely animation, plot, style etc. Some python-esk touches provided by the Robot Revolutionary Front (RRF) will keep any accompanying grown-ups amused. And you cant go passed lines like “I got machine guns…in my butt”, to keep young boys amused. My only criticism would be that I was not 100% convinced by some of the voice talent, too use to the original I guess.

By PSDC | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Star Wars Where Science Meets Imagination

10/30/09 – 10:15 pm
Stormtrooper costume - Star Wars exhibition

Stormtrooper costume - Star Wars exhibition

Developed at the Museum of Science, Boston, U.S.A. and currently touring Australia; his lordship and I visited this enthralling exhibition today at Scienceworks in Spotswood (Melbourne) today. The way this exhibition is put together is excellent. A great mix of educational scientific theory, behind the scenes making of info and a large collection of costumes, props and especially robots from the George Lucas group of companies and associates. If you’ve got kids, whether your a fan or not, its a fun and educational day out.

By PSDC | Posted in Exhibition | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)