PigPog

I recently wrote a post about my photo workflow – how I get photos from my camera to Flickr » [ | : UK, US], etc. I admitted in the post that it was a bit over-complicated for me, and that set me off rethinking it. I now, a week later, do something quite different.

If I was taking pics that I really thought needed more processing, or were going to be used for something special, I’d still go the old route. It has lots of redundancy, and gives the best quality results. I don’t intend to do a wedding again, but if I did, that’s how I’d do it (actually, I took even more precautions that day, but that’s another story). For day-to-day stuff, though, it was taking too much time and effort.

The first thing to reconsider was the quality of the captured data in-camera. I was only ever using RAW images, with the camera set to take RAW along with the lowest quality jpeg. I decided I could make do with just jpegs. The camera is faster that way, and I get lots more images on an SD card » [ | : UK, US]. They copy to the computer quicker, too. I decided to try an experiment. I shot roughly the same pic (of a cuddly zebra called Z9) on each of the three jpeg quality settings, then opened them all up in Aperture, zoomed in 1:1. I couldn’t see a difference. The lowest quality looked just as good as the highest, and was under 800kb rather than over 4Mb. So for most stuff now, I’ll use the lowest quality jpeg setting.

As for copying to my Mac » [ | : UK, US], I won’t create a folder, copy the pics, then import them into Aperture. I now plug in the camera with a cable sitting on my desk ready, run Aperture, turn on the camera, and import the pics directly. It means the pics are stored in the Aperture library, but I’m ok with that. I’m letting go of a bit of control for a lot of convenience and speed. They can be moved out again later if I want to. Also, because there’s no RAW conversion to do, Aperture doesn’t seem to take anywhere near as long to process the images once they’re imported.

I’m also making a bit more use of some Aperture » [ | : UK, US] presets I’ve downloaded from various sources, which gives me some of the fun of quick filter effects that I’m used to in iPhone » [ | : UK, US] apps. Exporting to Flickr still takes a while, but it’s just left to run, and the results do look good.

In the end, I’m paying almost nothing in lost image quality, at least as far as I can see; and I’m gaining a lot of time and ease. I’ve only really tried it once with a real day’s photos, so it might all change again next week, but so far it feels quite liberating.

Update: See Part 2, where this all changes a week later.

This is what I do with my photos, from originally taking the shot with my DSLR (a Nikon D90 » [ | : UK, US], though this pretty much all applies to any camera using memory cards), through copying the files to the computer (iMac » [ | : UK, US]), to importing them into my editing and cataloging software (Apple Aperture » [ | : UK, US], though much of it would probably apply in a similar way to iPhoto, Lightroom » [ | : UK, US] and others). It may not be the best way to do these things, though it works for me. I suspect, if anything, it tends towards a bit too much safety, and puts too much time and energy into doing things the ‘right’ way, making it all too time-consuming. I’m photographing as an amateur, though, and losing a day’s shooting won’t cost me in real cash. It might be too little safety if you’re shooting weddings for money.

I’m not saying anyone should copy all this, but there might be some ideas here if you’re interested in this sort of workflow geek-out.

Camera

I use 8Gb SD cards. They’re big enough to fit all I’m generally likely to shoot in a day, but still fairly cheap. I shelled out a bit more for a reasonably fast branded card this time, though I’m never entirely sure how much difference it makes. Figures from DPReview suggest it’s worth it if you value performance – my D90 can take pics faster with a faster card. I’ve only once ever filled an 8Gb card and had to move on to another, when shooting a wedding. For any normal day or outing, one card is way more than I need, even shooting RAW all the time.

I use a single card, to avoid the inconvenience of having to stop and change. My dad has always preferred to use two or three smaller cards for a day of shooting, so one accident or faulty card can’t lose everything. I’ve never had such a loss, so I don’t worry about it. I’ll probably regret that the first time I do lose a card full of images, but I used to hate having to stop and swap cards around back when cards were low-capacity and expensive.

Reading the Card

My camera mounts as a camera, not a mass storage device, which I don’t like. For that reason, I prefer to take the card out, and use a separate card reader. If the camera mounted like a card reader or USB memory stick, I’d probably just plug it in and use it that way. The card reader I use is the one built into the front of my printer. No reason: it’s just there, and it works ok.

Folder(s) for Images

I have a Photos folder. Inside this, I create a new folder, named for the date, and a very short description of the ‘event’, in the format ‘yyyy-mm-dd ‘. If I took a few pictures whilst wandering around Tiverton today, the folder would be called ’2010-05-07 Photowalk Tiverton’. The dates mean the folders can be sorted easily by when the pics were taken, and the short description means I can have more than one folder per day, if there’s more than one ‘event’. I used to just use the date, but a few occasions came up where I did two very separate shoots, and didn’t like throwing them all in one folder.

Events

Events? I use the term in a similar way to the way iPhoto uses it – any collection of photos taken around the same time. ‘Photowalk Tiverton’ is a pretty common name, as is ‘Canal’. It isn’t usually much of an event. I’m not overly strict on dates. A trip with an overnight stay might still be one event to me, so I’d probably just use the date of the first day.

Why Folders?

I could just import photos straight into Aperture, and let Aperture store them in its library. There are a few of reasons why I don’t.

• Matches older folder structure – this is how I’ve kept images since before I started using Aperture.
• Performance – I can keep the Aperture library on the internal HD, which is faster, while the images are on a slower external USB drive. Aperture’s work is spread over two drives, on different busses, too, which may give some performance gains (I don’t know if it really does). I don’t have room to keep all the photos on my internal drive.
• I can have some of the same images imported into iPhoto. I don’t use iPhoto much now, but have at times. This way, the same images can be in more than one program, without duplicating the images themselves.

If you’re looking at a new setup, have plenty of space on your internal drive, and won’t use other software for the same images, you might want to just push the pics straight into Aperture, and let it handle them. I may yet move the Aperture library to an external drive, and bring the photos in to it, at a later date.

Time Machine (Backups)

Once they’re in the folder, Time Machine handles backing them up. I don’t wait for this, usually, but unless they’re ‘scrap’ images, I don’t wipe the card until I’ve let Time Machine do its thing.

Wiping the Card

Often doesn’t happen until later, or even the next time I use the camera. My D90 can format a card using just two buttons, so I generally format it rather than just deleting the images.

Aperture

I import the images into Aperture, choosing the option to leave the images in their current location. Generally, I try to leave this to finish, then leave Aperture alone for a while afterwards; preferably leaving the Mac pretty much alone, too. Aperture is memory-hungry. Importing takes a while, and Aperture can be busy building thumbnails and previews for quite a while after that. Trying to start working on images before it’s finished can be frustratingly slow. Check the status bar at the bottom of Aperture’s window to see if it’s busy – you can click there to get a window showing you what it’s up to, and how much it has to do.

Tagging and Rating

I’ve been far too lazy recently, and skipped tagging all but the best images. I’ll really regret this later, I know. The best way is to tag all the images with relevant keywords before starting to do anything else. Don’t edit, don’t rate, just add keywords. Doing a lot at once is quicker, as you can usually apply the same keywords to lots of images at once. If you do this, you’ll be able to find images much easier later – rate first, and tag only the best ones, and all the others are pretty much lost for good. In practice, I often only end up tagging the ones I consider good enough to use, which means I’ll have great trouble finding any lower quality shots later.

When I export the images later, the tags I’ve set get carried over, so they’re important for Flickr’s use as well as my own searching in Aperture.

I generally rate anything as ‘reject’ if it’s really bad – out of focus, badly exposed, or just generally bad. I also usually reject all but the best of a ‘set’ of the same image. If I took five shots in a row of the same duck, I pick the best of them, and reject the rest. I then base the stars-out-of-five rating on this rough idea:

1. Competent, or worth keeping for some reason, but not good enough to share. Also, I often give one star to images I’m going to use in a ‘Photo Construction‘ or panorama.
2. Nothing special, but worth sharing – will be uploaded online.
3. Good image.
4. One of my best.
5. One of my very best. Rarely used – I only have eight images with five stars currently in Aperture, though I haven’t gone back and rated all my old images (yet).

Exporting to Share

I switch Aperture to only show two stars and better. It’s easy then to select all, and export them together, creating a new ‘event’ set in Flickr at the same time. I use the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to do the exporting. For the little it cost, the ‘pro’ version of the plugin has been worthwhile. I believe the current version of Aperture exports to Flickr without needing a plugin, but I bought the plugin for a version that didn’t, so I haven’t really used Aperture’s own exporting feature.

Sometimes, I’ll export a few separately to add to Facebook. I usually do this with any shots containing people who I know on Facebook, or for any establishments/products/etc I ‘like’ on Facebook.

Aperture Vault

At the end of all this (or sometimes before the exports, depending how paranoid I’m feeling), I update the Aperture Vault. This is a backup copy of Aperture’s database held on another drive. There isn’t really any good reason to do this when Time Machine is backing Aperture up. I’ve always done it, though, and when I lost the contents of my internal disk, and Time Machine turned out not to have been working for a while, I was glad I had. So I keep doing it.

Current Usage

I use my D90 much less now than I used to. Most of my photos are now taken with my iPhone, often using Hipstamatic. The main advantage is that it cuts all of the above out of the process. I take a photo, wait a minute for it to process, and if I like it, push it straight up to Flickr. The phone gets backed up when I plug it in to sync. Every so often, I open Aperture while the phone is plugged in, and pull the new images into one big folder in there.

It’s a lot less organisation, less backups, and lower image quality. In return, though, it’s quicker, easier, and more immediate. That counts for a lot.

The Future

Eye-Fi have just announced that their cards will soon be able to connect to an iPhone app, and push photos from a ‘real’ camera to your phone in a few seconds. That would combine the performance, flexibility and image quality of the D90 with much of the speed, convenience and immediacy of the iPhone. It could be a winning combination for most day-to-day photography.

I’ve done a bit of cutting down on what I keep running on my Mac recently.

I used to keep lots of apps running all the time – email, Tweetie, Evernote, iTunes, Transmission, Google Chrome. All running, all the time, even overnight. Chrome always had a few tabs open – PigPog’s dashboard, Facebook, Google Reader, and usually a few things that I might decide to do something with at some point. It was a land of distractions, and things ground to a halt when I tried to run Aperture.

I installed iStat Menus, after reading about it in Smoking Apples. Aperture ran, and all my RAM was used. MacOS paged furiously out to disk, but couldn’t really keep up. Aperture would hang when building previews, sometimes for hours on end.

I tried closing almost everything else, but it didn’t help much.

I finally got around to testing the two 2Gb memory modules I’d removed when one became faulty, found out which one it was, and put the other back in. My Mac now had 3Gb rather than 2Gb.

I ran Aperture. It quickly used over 2Gb RAM all on its own, finished the processing it was doing, and shrank back down to around 200Mb. Just as it should. Looks like the problem was that with 2Gb of RAM, doing that just took a lot of paging in and out, and so, a lot of time.

By then, though, I’d taken a bit of a liking to having less stuff sitting open. I do quite like to see emails when they arrive (I don’t get many at home, so it’s not much of a distraction), but I don’t always need the Tweetie window there on show. iTunes doesn’t need to be running when my iPod isn’t actually syncing. Evernote doesn’t need to be running all the time, though it’s quicker to throw things into it if it is. Mail can at least be closed overnight.

As for the browser, I’m trying to make it a habit to leave it running, but with no windows actually open. That way, it’s very quick to start if I click a URL somewhere, or want to have a quick look at Facebook. The rest of the time, though, there’s no need to keep things open. I just need to check for any spams or comments on PigPog once or twice a day, and look at Facebook occasionally. Google Reader doesn’t need to be checked obsessively – just looked at sometimes. When I want to.

So far the results are good. I’m spending less time repeatedly checking the same sites and feeds several times an hour. The only problem is staring at the relatively blank screen, and wondering what to do next. I decided to write. I’m writing this now.

Producing some sort of output, rather than staring at Facebook and Twitter for an hour – sounds like an improvement to me.

I used to use Aperture 2 for all my photos. Recently, though, I’ve taken to only using it for pics from my DSLR (Nikon D90 » [ | : UK, US]), and using iPhoto for shots from my compact (Panasonic Lumix FX-550 » [ | : UK, US]). I’ve found myself taking many more shots with the compact, and don’t normally carry the Nikon any more.

That means that for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively used iPhoto.

When Aperture 3 appeared, it seemed to mix the benefits of Aperture with those of iPhoto, so I grabbed the trial version to have a go.

First impressions were quite good. I imported my iPhoto library, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Then I imported my Aperture library.

Except I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to now for two weeks. Each attempt means leaving it to work all day, or overnight. Every time I return, Aperture has crashed part way through. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to continue from where it left off.

There’s been an update from Apple, which addresses just the sort of problems I’ve been having, but it hasn’t helped matters for me.

I even decided to give up on that, and just import the original images again from scratch, losing all the metadata and edits. That crashed somewhere in the middle, too.

This morning, I wanted to post a picture of my breakfast. I opened Aperture 3. It decided it had to process some images and face data in the background, and wasn’t usable while it was doing that. I opened iPhoto and imported the images. Aperture finished it’s background jobs, so I told it to close. I was most of the way through editing and posting the images in iPhoto before Aperture actually got around to closing.

I gather there are some really nice improvements in Aperture 3, but so far, I can’t get to the point where I might care.

This post is part of a series of posts about switching to a Mac – here are links to all the posts:

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing this post, but here it is at last.

When I last posted about switching, I’d just got the machine unboxed and started up. I was impressed with the experience so far, but hadn’t really started using Mac OS yet.

How did I find the machine to use? Did it just work?

Generally good, and yes and no.

The User Interface

The new interface didn’t take as much getting used to as I’d expected. The Dock is quite a nice thing to use, and I even quite liked the animated effects. I switched the interface to grey, getting rid of the blue highlights – the less colour involved in the basic interface, the better you can judge colours when fiddling with photos.

Having the menu bar fixed to the top of the screen, when it relates to the window you’re using at the time, seemed a little odd, but again, it wasn’t as difficult to get used to as I’d expected. The location of it doesn’t entirely make sense, but you always know where it is, and it’s very quick to get to.

The strangest part was finding myself having no idea how to do some quite simple tasks. I already knew that Mac apps usually arrive bundled in a .dmg file – a Disk iMaGe. It was no surprise to double-click one, and find it mounted itself on the desktop, and auto-ran the contents. I knew I had to drag it to the trash can to unmount the image. I had no idea what I had to do with the contents to install the application, though. I had to Google. Just to find out how to install an app.

It turned out to be quite straightforward. For most apps, the window that opens up contains the app itself, and sometimes a shortcut to your Applications folder. You just need to drag the app into your Applications folder, and that’s it installed. Some apps actually do need to run an installer, though, so it isn’t entirely consistent. Uninstalling an app is usually just a matter of taking the app back out of the Applications folder. If it needed an installer, though, there isn’t always a straightforward way of uninstalling. As far as I can tell, though, even these apps only commonly add a few bits to a folder of their own under one of the ‘Library’ folders.

An app is just a single ‘.app’ file. Except it isn’t really. I guessed what they really were, as it’s the same as the old Acorn Archimedes used. The .app ‘file’ is really a folder, which the OS makes look like a file. Double-clicking on it lauches the application, by running a file or script from inside the folder. Under normal circumstances, you don’t need to know or care that the app is a folder. If you need or want to, though, you can open the folder by right-clicking and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’. Probably best not to fiddle with the innards of your apps, though, unless you know what you’re doing.

Speaking of the Archimedes, the dock has its similarities to the old Archimedes bar – apps live there when they’re running, and can stay running there even when their last window is closed. Unlike the Archimedes, though, you can get any app to stay there, even when closed.

The only part of the interface I still find frustrating is creating new documents. I was in the habit of using the ‘New…’ right-click menu in Windows, and it had always made sense to me. Go to where I want the document, create a document of the type I want, then open it and start working. Many people have never worked that way, and would find the Mac way of doing things perfectly natural – run the application you want to use, start working, then save the document through the application when you’re ready, using the Save dialog to put it where you want it.

I’ve always found that an awkward way of working – the Save As dialog isn’t a nice way to get around the filesystem on any platform, and until you get around to saving the document, you have a load of data sitting there with no home. The first save is harder to do, so you put it off longer than you should, and have the risk of losing unsaved work. I’ve found a couple of neat work-arounds for this whole issue, though, which I’ll post about another time.

The Hardware

The hardware is beautiful. It all feels wonderfully solid and well-made, too. I get on surprisingly well with the tiny wireless keyboard. I mostly love the Mighty Mouse. The little scroll ball on the top of the mouse, though, gums up fairly often. Apple, it seems, forgot that there was a reason we all gave up on mice with balls. The same thing on a smaller scale, being rubbed around by your finger all day, with no way of opening it up to clean it, is a bit of a bad move. I’ve always been able to get it going again with a bit of firm rubbing with the mouse upside-down, but it feels like a bit of a design fault. On an Apple product. That’s just wrong.

Software

There’s very little software I miss. TrackMania would be nice to have back, but it’s not worth dual-booting or running a VM for.

Oddly, for a machine so rooted in design and photography, image editing software is the one area I haven’t quite got settled on yet. On Windows, I used to use The GIMP. It’s available for the Mac, but it isn’t a pleasant experience. It runs under X11, so it doesn’t get its own menu bar, and doesn’t act like a Mac app. There are a few decent independent attempts at making image editors native to the Mac, so I tried pretty much everything I could find. Once I had a few options, I tried making the same set of simple edits to the same source image in them all. Photoshop Elements stood out as being much quicker and easier than the others. Making a selection was much easier, and making changes to the selection ended up with something that looked right, while the others ended up looking a mess.

I haven’t quite taken the plunge and bought it yet, but I probably will soon.

I actually do very little editing of the sort that needs a real image editor, though. On Windows, I’d been trying out Adobe Lightroom, but really didn’t get on with it. It felt slow and awkward, and seemed to have real performance problems when dealing with the number of images I had. I could get around it by splitting into multiple libraries, but switching between them would be more hassle than I wanted. I bought Aperture at the same time as my Mac, and loved it from the start. I still do. Almost everything I want to do with my photos can be done without leaving Aperture, and with a neat little plugin, I can export directly to my Flickr account.

The Result

I’m glad I made the switch. I still use Windows at work, and switching between the two every day makes things a little harder, but there are far more things I miss from the Mac when I’m using Windows than the other way around.

A colleague told me he’d bought a Mac because he hates computers. I told him I bought one because I love computers.

This post is part of a series of posts about switching to a Mac – here are links to all the posts:

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

I’ve used Windows PCs for a lot of years now – since the days of Windows 3.0. My first PC ran MS-DOS 4.01. The last time I bought a new computer, I considered the idea of getting a Mac, but ended up with a Tablet PC instead. That little tablet has done me quite nicely since, although I never really used it as a tablet any more. It was starting to show the strain, though, when processing RAW files from new 12-megapixel cameras.

We’d decided a while ago that when we sold our house, we’d both be buying new computers. I considered a Mac again then, but decided to spend the money on a new camera kit instead.

I started speccing up a new PC, and it started to get quite pricey to get the sort of machine I wanted. Still cheaper than a decent Mac, but not as cheap as I’d been hoping. On a wander around PC World, I came face-to-face with the 24″ iMac screen. Wow. Big, bright, clear. I started to consider spending the extra to get a Mac again.

• I’d tried out Adobe Lightroom, and liked it, but it didn’t really fit well for me. I wanted everything in one catalog, so I could search all my photos. That seemed a pretty basic thing to want to do, and Picasa could manage it just fine. Lightroom seemed to start having serious performance issues with a big catalog, though. My photos folder comes to just over 30,000 files. Aperture may be better, but I had no way of trying it out without having a Mac.
• I started doing a bit of searching around online to see what people thought was best for a photographer to use. Some people didn’t think it made a lot of difference, but a lot through a Mac was much better. There don’t seem to be many people who think Windows is actually better for photography.
• Big screens are expensive, especially if you want quality. I could find a PC much cheaper, but adding a good quality 24″ screen soon pushed the price way up.
• I’d changed phones recently, and was now using a Nokia. Before that, I used Windows Mobile, which was a bit limited when syncing with a Mac.
• They’re way prettier than almost any PC. When looking at PCs, I was considering a Sony Vaio, mainly because it looked so nice. If I was willing to pay extra for Sony’s design, Apple’s design was certainly worth a bit.

The one thing that was stopping me was the thought that if it turned out I really didn’t get on with MacOS, it would be a very expensive mistake. Then, I woke up at around 04:00 in the morning thinking “Bootcamp and Parallels! Idiot!”. Of course, if I didn’t get on with MacOS, I could buy a copy of Windows Vista, and use the Mac as a PC. OK, I’d have over-payed somewhat for a very pretty PC, but I’d still have a good quick PC with a great screen.

So, off we went to the Apple store in Exeter to hand over a whole lot of money. But that’s for Part 2.