Pablo Averbuj

Lightroom Follow-Up

This is probably the first time I’ve ever posted twice in one day, so I think my excitement about Lightroom shows. In the introductory video on the Adobe Labs site the demonstrator mentions that Lightroom’s backend is a relational database, I figured (based on the PSA history) that he was referring to MS Access. Then as I was digging around reading release notes, at the bottom there is a copyright notice for SQLite. So I downloaded the SQLite command line utility and sure enough the “preferences” files are SQLite databases. Here’s a screenshot of me doing some joins to get the image < -> tag relationships.

There is also a copyright notice for Lua in the release notes. It’s really encouraging to see large companies starting to take advantage of open source/public domain software in their commercial products. As a company they win by saving development time and using tested software. As a user I win because I (theoretically) get the software cheaper as a result and I’m not locked in.

Photoshop Album and Lightroom

A posting on Sree Kotay‘s blog alerted me to a product I had never heard of: Adobe Lightroom, and look!, a free beta. I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop Album (aka, PSA) for years now and it’s nice and all, but noticeably outdated and semi-abandoned. I watched the video on their site and decided that it was something that really appealed to me. It’s fairly slick and a little clumsy on my desktop. I only imported 6 images into it and it was using 250mb of memory (finally, a worthy memory hog worthy of competing with Firefox!). It is beta so maybe the memory footprint will shrink, but I really like it so far. One thing that appeals to me is that it doesn’t modify the underlying image. It *feels* like when you make a modification it applies it as a filter over the original image (non-destructive editing). I actually don’t mind PSA’s way of doing this; it makes a copy of the image called IMAGENAME_edited.jpg, but the Lightroom way seems to have some advantages. The in-program editing is really good, mostly obviating the need to take it into GIMP or Photoshop to do edits.

One feature that’s missing is importing from PSA (or heck, *anything*). I checked the feature request forum and fortunately I’m not the only heavy PSA user, there are many clamoring for an import feature. The most important data is the tags/labels associated with the images. This got me worried: was I stuck with PSA? Would the Anna graduate highschool while I’m still using software from 2002 to catalog her pictures? I started to search to see if I anyone had bothered to import PSA catalogs into their software. Along the way I found sweet relief. The PSA catalog is merely an MS Access database! Just to confirm, I made a copy of my catalog named test.mdb, and it opened right up in Access. Whew, dodged a bullet. I’ll just need to figure out how to get the data into Lightroom, and at first glance, not sure how easy that will be.

Adjusting the WordPress thumbnail threshhold

Long title for a simple problem. If you are using WordPress and are annoyed that it won’t generate thumbnails for pictures larger than 3 megapixels, the place to change this is wp-admin/inline-uploading.php . The line in question reads (line 87 in my copy):

if ( $imagedata['width'] * $imagedata['height'] < 3 * 1024 * 1024 ) {

Change the 3 to 4 or 5 or what have you. You don’t want to go too crazy since there are some valid concerns about memory consumption and speed. PHP has some configuration for how much memory a script my use (“memory_limit” in my php.ini) so you might have to raise this as well. Currently I’m resizing 4 megapixel images with the default 8mb memory limit without any problems.

Google Reader

I might be more habitual than the average person – some friends even suggest I have some minor OCD – so I tend to get stuck in ruts with certain tools. It took me a long time to switch from Mozilla to Firefox (in fact, I still run it on the laptop and a workstation at work). For ages I was using Trillian as my RSS reader. It worked OK until I started following a lot of blogs and then it got unwieldly. About then I discovered Google Reader and I’ve been hooked ever since. And remember that entry about I *heart* Outlook, well I’m working on switching to Google Calendar. I even added my Reader starred items to the sidebar that you’ve probably hidden because it’s annoying. I wanted to express some interesting uses of these tools.

With calendar I intend for Leigha and I to have views of each other’s calendars. The interesting use will be adding her XML feeds to my Google Reader subscriptions, so I’ll be notified when she creates new events.

I have a label in my Reader configuration called “fast”. The idea is that only a couple of my feeds (Slashdot and MakeBlog) are high volume. All the others are fairly low traffic, so I want to read those first (especially if I have a few minutes before a meeting). The trick I learned today is using Firefox’s live bookmarks in conjuntion with my shared “fast”-labeled feed.

Some other things I’ve been wanting to get off my chest: Firefox’s memory leaking is completely annoying (I don’t think Mozilla ever got quite as large as Firefox seems to get). The other thing is that WordPress’s arbitrary decision to NOT thumbnail images greater than 3 megapixels is arbitrary, stupid, and not configurable. They seem to think this is not a problem. Finally, DilbertBlog is probably the funniest and most interesting subscription I have. I stay up late at nights just reading old posts.