I think my daily picture taking process should get a bit easier now. Up until now I've been ejecting the compact flash, SD or XD card from the camera and then putting it in the card reader. However tonight I plugged the Canon into the usb cable and saw it come up as a mobile device in Windows Explorer. By right clicking on the device and choosing properties I was then able to select an action on inserting the camera. One of the options is to copy the pictures to a specified directory on the disk AND put them in a subdirectory of todays date, another option is to delete the pictures off the camera afterwards. Seeing as though this is a process I do manually at the moment, this should be really helpful. As the camera has a really good battery life (I've just swapped the batteries over for the first time) I'm not too concerned about draining the battery whilst the data is being copied across. I might use the card reader process on Saturday when I get back from the Columbus Ohio Flickr meet at the Southern Theatre. Seeing as though this trick has saved me some time, I thought it was appropriate that the photo for today was Time.
Recently in Flickr Category
I was going to upload some photos tonight to Flickr using Windows Live Photo Gallery and the flickr plugin that I find very useful for uploading my picoftheday photo. Tonight however every time that it tried to connect it crashed. Initially I thought that it was a problem with the size of the files as I hadn't uploaded the full size photos before so I switched to the web interface and then realised that Flickr had been taken offline for some maintenance work - unfortunately this broke the flickr plugin. You'll have to wait until tomorrow for todays picoftheday. I have three photos that I can't decide between so I'm probably going to start a 365 rejects set too.
As part of my effort in trying to improve my photography skills I have set up a PicADay set in Flickr. The most efficient way to view these photos is with an RSS reader but unfortunately Flickr doesn't easily provide the links for the RSS feed. However by installing the Flickr RSS greasemonkey script you get one click access. Alternatively you can create an RSS feed using the Yahoo Pipes interface and a nice web page builder kindly provided by alto maltés. The end result is my PicADay RSS feed. I have include these pics automatically on Absoblogginlutely! - IRL but for this I used the Flickr Widget (unfortunately the authors website is broken so there is no point in linking to it).
I got an invite to Photophlow this morning. Photophlow is like IRC with flickr pics, all on steroids. A nice interface but be warned that it will suck up time when you start using it! I had an issue with firefox trying to get to the chat rooms - the system would just sit there and never connect into the room.
This turned out to be an issue with flashblock - if you use flashblock you need to go to the tools menu, Addons, Select Flashblock and choose options. Then add www.photophlow.com. Restart firefox and you should be able to connect. For some reason this didn't work first time for me - only after I totally disabled Flashblock, logged in and then re-enabled it, would I be able to connect.
I have some invites available if anyone wants to try it.
I uploaded a couple of pictures to the Geotagged Ohio flickr group and then got a comment on the photo requesting me to geocode the photo. This was a surprise to me as I'd already encoded the photos with wwmx so was expecting Flickr to have already coded the pictures. It turns out that you have to enable exif data import before you upload photos. Afterwards, any new pictures will automatically get uploaded.
Update See also my post on locr that is a new alternative for geotagging your photos prior to uploading to flickr.
You can unmerge your id's from flickr and yahoo by sending an email from the link on the group posting. I've done this as it is a right pain having to login every time I open a new browser window.
From the bbc I found a link to Google Talk - their latest beta product enabling free voip for computer to computer chat.
What I can't understand is the need for yet another im/voice chat running on yet another protocol. Surely all these conflicting services mean people end up with too many ways of communicating so they need to buy faster machines and bigger screens to cope with all the icons in their system tray (I have 19 at the moment!). This also seems to be moving away from the "one number gets me anywhere" philosophy that people would like. Now to get hold of me you can send me an email, ring me on the home phone, the mobile, send me an sms, yahoo, google, msn, aol message me (and you used to be able to contact me via irc but I don't do that anymore).
The big drawback of this app is that it doesn't do talk to landlines.
Update I've added my systray picture to flickr tagged with systray - what does yours look like?
If you use Flickr Importr and merge your flickr id with your yahoo id then the importr program will stop working. This will be due to the authentication progress failing behind the scenes. Last time this happened the patch came out pretty quickly. Flickr does warn that this might happen - I guess what they should have said is it will happen.
I must admit I am a bit surprised that they've launched this capability without publicly testing it or confirming it works with the more popular tools. After all a lot of the tools like flickrimportr are promoted on the flickr blogs so they do know about the big ones.
Update And this is my 2500'th post on this blog. When I started this I never knew I'd be that prolific!
From Rhyley.org are some more flickr greasemonkey scripts. I've added flickrPhotoPageEnhancer.user.js and FlickrThumbnailsEnhancer.user.js
Note that you will need to edit these scripts (and others) to include the www*.flickr domains as flickr have broken a lot of scripts by hosting some pages at www-us.flickr.com after their servers were moved.
flickr.comments.toggle enables you to view the comments on the right hand side of the screen whilst viewing the photostream. Saves having to open each picture individually.
Just tagging the Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed. multitagsearch.flickr.mrjoro.user.js
Just tagging the Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed. flickr.title desc.batch.user.js
Just tagging the Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed. geotag.flickr.user.js and geotag.gmaps.user.js
Just tagging the Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed.
geocache2flickr.user.js
Just tagging the Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed.
flickr.gmap.user.js
The Flickr Importr blog is long overdue but will now contain release information as this excellent flickr tool is updated (which seems to be about every other day at the moment). Its now my favourite interface to flickr uploads although don't point it at your entire photo directory as your pc WILL crash as it tries to read all the pictures.
I created my first greasemonkey script that will add a link to flickr in a geocaching web page for pictures tagged with the geocache name. For example GCMAG6. The experience of coding was a bit of a headache as I didn't know what greasemonkey was expecting and I don't know much about javascript (it's VERY case sensitive!). The tutorial/book at Dive Into Greasemonkey was very helpful for the former problem and using the javascript console solved the latter problem.
I can now upload images in firefox again. (see this post for when it failed).
I ran firefox in safe mode using firefox -safe-mode and I was able to upload an image to flickr ok. This meant that the problem was a conflicting/corrupt/flakey extension. I went through my list of extensions and deleted some that were duplicate in other extensions and tidied up the ones I no longer needed. I removed informeter, livelines,tab clicking options, undoclosetab, sitebar and evernote extensions and the problem went away. I reinstalled sitebar and evernote (as I use these) and the browser doesn't crash.
I've changed my RSS feed this morning due to a couple of new features that Feedburner have released. They spent thursday adding new features to Feedburner to celebrate to their last day in their old office (most people would have spent the day moving furniture!) One of the features is the ability to geotag an RSS feed so the absoblogginlutely feedburner feed now has the general location from my zipcode added. I'm not sure which rss readers will use this information but I'm sure it won't be long before aggregators start to add this functionality in. I've also removed my flickr feed from automatically being included as I don't always want my flickr photos included in this website feed so you may want to subscribe to my flickr photos here
Theres a nice tool to make mosaics out of pictures uploaded to flickr sets. It will make mosaics out of other pictures but its quickest with sets. Here's one I made earlier from Angela's photos of Mike's Birthday party
1. clay group, 2. Working, 3. surprise_mary, 4. surprise_howardbowl, 5. surprise_group2, 6. surprise_group, 7. surprise_chat, 8. suprise_sherry, 9. surprise_andykristen, 10. surprise_mikemug, 11. surprise_myplate, 12. surpriseak, 13. surprisebrsh, 14. surprisemike, 15. surpriseworking, 16. surprisemike1
