2 posts tagged “photoshop”

When Adobe first launched Photoshop Express (from hereon in, PX) a month and a half or so ago, it featured integration with three online sites: Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa. Unfortunately, I don't use any of those for photos. So when I saw that there was an update to add Flickr support, I dug out my old registration - the one that required me to claim I was living in the US, sigh - and had a very quick look.

Flickr appears under the "Other Sites" heading on the left nav - or is it a palette? - of the main window. Clicking the "Flickr" item asks you to authenticate, although somewhat oddly it uses desktop-style auth, so instead of using a nice redirect, PX instead uses a pop up window, which was naturally blocked. It also means you manually have to click about three more buttons than you would with web based auth. Perhaps this is explained by the amount of client-side code, but it still jarred for me. I expect users who don't have to wrangle API auth code would probably cope, though.

Once logged in, Px starts fetching images from Flickr. This is done pretty nicely- pulling each image is slow, so it will carry on if you're not doing anything else, and present the images it's already found for you. Images are sorted by date taken, which is odd if you're used to Flickr's photostream order, which is by date uploaded. (Dates are, naturally, in American format, which annoys me no end, but let's try and ignore that for now.) However, for me it stopped after just over 550 images, which is only about a tenth of the total. I'm not sure why, or how to get it to look for the rest.

Once the images are listed in the Flickr album, they're editable just like any other image available to PX. The tools aren't as sophisticated as those in the main desktop version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or even iPhoto: there's no "levels" tool, and minimal highlight and shadow controls, for example. However, the white balance editor is pretty good, and there's a "Pop Color" effect for those images where you want a red London bus in a monochrome city. Beyond desktop apps, I'd also say that it compares fairly shabbily to Picnik, which is also web-based, but manages a much richer set of tools. Handily, Picnik's integrated into Flickr, making it even more likely to be used.

After editing my image, I wondered where the "save" dialog was, and where I'd get to choose whether the original image was replaced, or who'd get permissions on the new image. It turns out that this is all done automatically. An edited image gets uploaded as a new photo, with your default permissions. The title and description are preserved, but tags and date metadata aren't. To me, this is a killer flaw. Firstly, I want the option to replace an existing image. Secondly, throwing away image metadata is something Photoshop hasn't done since about version 7; it's appalling that PX does this today. Thirdly, I want the option to set privacy levels.

Once again, Picnik's Flickr integration gets all of these things right - in fact, it even seems to have an option to bump images up your photostream with comments intact, which is a very clever trick indeed. In contrast, PX looks like it's hardly trying.

One place that Photoshop Express does try very hard - for publicity - is with images that are copied from its library to Flickr. You can explicitly copy an image into the internal library, create an "album" on Flickr (what's more usually called a set, there), and then copy it back to Flickr in that set. Doing this creates a description that lets everyone know you're using Photoshop Express, and, hey, would you like to use it too? I know everyone is after viral exposure these days, but please let me know you're doing it first and let me set something more sensible.

On the subject of albums, PX loads your Flickr sets as a list of albums, although for some reason this didn't happen the first time I tried it. They're listed in alphabetical order, which, like the "date taken" ordering, is a little odd - Flickr preserves set ordering, and it would be nice if PX would honour that, at least as an option. Opening an album, unfortunately, shows an empty screen, even if there are images in the set. I assume the photo download process is linear. Hopefully a later release will change this, and let the UI take priority, as well as adding caching - each time you open the web app, it has to fetch the list of photos and sets from Flickr afresh.

For all this criticism, I do recognise that Adobe's product is just a beta. On the other hand, given how slick Picnik is, and how nicely it's integrated, it's hard to see how Photoshop Express has much to offer Flickr users, other than a brand name.

As I've already said, I've moved a bunch of my old photos across to Flickr. I've also picked off another of the scripting chores mentioned there: I went back to the files on disk, looked up the ordering, and applied it within the sets. I've also ordered the sets by reverse date, and I have a bunch of handy .flickr files so that I can find the ID on Flickr given just the filename on husk.org.

You'd think I'd be done, but my quest for perfect organisation (which will be apparent to anyone who's seen my music collection's metadata- although I have to admit there are niggling holes there too) means that I have further problems.

Replicating heirarchy: sets vs tags

On stem, my old photo album, there was a heirarchy of directories, although I didn't really use it that much. Mainly, sets fell into five categories: "trips", "walks/wanders", "walks/crisps", "people" and "random".

Flickr doesn't (yet?) have a feature that allows you to put sets into other sets, so I can see three ways of retaining this information:

• set titles - at the moment things are called eg "Trips - New York"
• multiple sets - add all photos that were in Trips to a huge "Trips" set, so that the heirarchy is visible in what Flickr calls "context"
• tags - as well as my existing "stem" tag, use a psuedo-triple* like "stem:random"

I think I'm probably going to use the latter, since it feels most Flickr-y, but it does mean I'm going to have to do a bit more scripting to apply the tag across.

Re-uploading

In my previous post I mentioned that a lot of my photos are overcompressed. They also generally have had the EXIF stripped (because I edited them using Photoshop 5.5 - how retro).

In theory, finding the photos which do have EXIF is straightforward- find the photo (using the .flickr files above, that's easy), find its date, and then find it either on the filesystem (reasonably easy) or with iPhoto (which is proving annoyingly hard**). This is also useful for photos I've uploaded in the last year- I don't always have a record of which local file I uploaded to Flickr, and I may want to replace images with their full-res version at some point for printing.

However, for those with no EXIF data, the problem is much harder. One sensible thing I did with stem was to put the date in every folder name, and I've copied this across to Flickr's photo date properties, but it only gives me day resolution. This means that I may have 40 photos on Flickr, and another 400 at home, and have to find the smaller set in the larger. Even worse, the photos on Flickr may be cropped or colour-corrected (again, in Photoshop).

I suspect the only solution is to take the local files, and the original iPhoto images for that day, and use a script based on something like Image::Seek, a Perl library based on imgSeek, to try and find similarites and save me doing so. I haven't really started poking at code, though, so this might all fail horribly. We'll see.

Organising ... and is it worth it?

Finally, there's tidying up the photos before publication; fixing titles (which were previously limited in both length and by what's sensible in filenames), maybe adding descriptions, and definitely adding tags

However, by this point I'm wondering if it's even worth going through all this faff. Is it worth bothering will all this coding and organising? Already, just with day resolution and the old title metadata, I'm finding it easy to look for images. Perhaps I should just call it a day, make everything public, and change my attention to another app - sourcing stem from Flickr.

If anybody has any thoughts, though, I'd love to hear them.

* Inspired, I think, by the geotaggers, I use tags like "lens:50mm" rather than the (much) more common pair of "lenstagged canonef50f1.8". I'm well aware that Flickr doesn't really do anything useful with the colon to turn them into real triples, but I still think I might do some time, and if pressed I'll argue that the tags are for my use, not yours, so I stick with them. If I ever really care I'll batch change them.

** Unfortunately I've come to expect that from scriptable applications. In theory iPhoto (and iTunes) should be able to be fast object databases, queryable on anything you like, including date, name, artist and so on. In practice, sadly, they're not; the timeouts I was getting from iPhoto last night either mean I'm doing something horribly wrong or that it's doing linear searches for date properties. Oh well. I must admit this is a niche activity.