Zmarties

There is a new feature just appeared on the Picasa Web Albums settings page. Between the existing Public Gallery URL, and the Content Controls, there is now a section that allows you to set up an Email Digest.

It looks like Google are defaulting this to a weekly digest, to get the news out to people, and then giving them an option in the email to turn it off. The 4 choices given are no digest, or at a frequency of daily, weekly, or monthly. The description alongside explains:

What is an Email Digest?

When people you have marked as favorites create new albums, upload more photos, or comment on your photos, we send you a summary of these activities to your email address at the interval you specify.

The digest email itself is an HTML formatted email as follows:

The links in the email for changing settings are generic - they just take you to the main Picasa Web page, where you can then log in if needed. This means that you can forward the email to someone else without security issues.

The images do of course link through to the album that has changed. The thumbnails shown are embedded in the email, not just links to the Picasa Web site, so they can be seen when offline, or when external images are turned off (as is the case with most email programs these days).

I didn't have any new comments for this example to notify me about, but the source of the email indicates that they would follow after the list of changed albums.

(This should have appeared on my Documenting Picasa blog, but I'm having a few publishing issues at the moment).

Update:It did eventually make it to the Documenting Picasa Blog.

Labels: picasa

Whilst thinking about Searching Picasa Web Albums I did a bit of investigation into the most popular tags on flickr.

flickr provide a tag cloud, but that is just a visualization of the data, and I couldn't see that they provide the data in a direct form anywhere on the site. However, with the aid of the flickr API I was able to take all the words in the tag cloud, and feed them to the API, to get a count of how many matching tags there were for each word. In addition, I also fed those same words to the "free text" search API call, which looks for the word in more than just the tag field - considereing comments and descriptions for example.

The table below shows 3 columns - the tag I searched for, the number of tags of that word found, and the number of photos found using a free text search. The table is ordered by popularity of tags.

wedding	1697455	2269471
party	1475681	2350563
family	1160057	1557739
travel	1113576	1275557
friends	1093997	1649955
japan	1074281	1167494
vacation	1020423	1162147
london	927172	1100791
beach	864728	1493985
california	837012	960129
birthday	829670	1371859
trip	817324	1786838
nyc	774884	879161
summer	732387	1122946
nature	728059	816467
italy	686976	776812
france	669406	759215
me	664111	2886782
paris	662024	786996
art	643563	1104574
flowers	627830	1439335
sanfrancisco	618604	620523
europe	610237	708284
china	604334	707039
flower	596891	1439327
newyork	572049	575557
water	565749	973599
people	552582	975146
music	551493	740282
cameraphone	544369	634883
australia	543923	611789
christmas	537883	834827
usa	531563	619628
sky	527376	756538
germany	526931	595724
new	526549	2723772
canada	512067	612492
night	510466	1210035
cat	504840	852699
holiday	501819	703551
park	498178	1820673
bw	495568	514618
dog	486692	859611
food	478691	684164
snow	478068	643189
baby	463882	837637
sunset	462862	752411
city	446866	1294211
chicago	445639	529140
spain	441158	491290
taiwan	437633	461265
july	435057	1033708
blue	431367	862404
tokyo	427181	505507
england	425920	510575
mexico	406752	535804
winter	403827	579849
portrait	396759	644632
green	394571	671410
red	393719	848593
fun	392680	688356
india	386409	446473
architecture	383526	423993
garden	382303	981077
macro	380663	428872
spring	373441	759260
thailand	368331	411644
uk	362555	468979
seattle	357614	421000
festival	357137	658357
concert	350224	471579
canon	349327	580369
house	347404	1236984
berlin	343694	403534
hawaii	340744	384573
street	339503	1036943
lake	324783	937873
zoo	324442	460997
florida	322534	387322
june	321243	729667
may	316693	903231
white	313703	867135
vancouver	312657	383569
kids	312551	635702
tree	312542	1019630
clouds	307407	479446
toronto	304648	359194
barcelona	293035	341533
geotagged	292631	294655
home	291227	778635
sea	288469	546365
day	287287	2136618
texas	284851	360478
scotland	284615	309559
car	281730	788266
light	281436	909673
halloween	280515	362042
camping	279238	654077
church	273001	535265
animals	270757	542946
trees	270098	1019628
washington	266921	470046
river	266128	668903
nikon	265291	393117
april	262835	581807
boston	261935	330032
girl	258663	857847
ireland	258647	305876
graffiti	257081	283560
amsterdam	256794	307304
rock	256142	795001
landscape	254799	343825
blackandwhite	252987	253364
cats	252971	852700
newyorkcity	250213	250430
san	247739	1271943
rome	246027	286082
roadtrip	245326	255484
urban	244511	321849
honeymoon	241904	271611
ocean	240941	359337
dc	235053	363788
newzealand	232776	233573
march	231491	532229
black	231180	708269
museum	230643	562979
york	230193	868773
hiking	226067	398781
island	224110	844505
mountains	223030	759360
yellow	221515	347290
sydney	221447	278644
sun	218685	503464
hongkong	216193	222298
show	216155	850535
graduation	214681	306454
color	213967	579521
film	210509	351853
mountain	210046	759360
animal	208416	542946
losangeles	207932	208309
school	205891	550486
moblog	205613	210954
photo	205047	2308835
dogs	203610	859613

Labels: flickr, picasa

I've mentioned Picasa, the photo software from Google, a number of times on this blog.

Of all the Google services, this is perhaps the worst documented (with no API, and a tendency from Google of making the old forum / groups support postings unavailable), so I'm looking to do something about that. I've created a website called Documenting Picasa, together with the Documenting Picasa blog, which both look to cover the downloadable Picasa client software, and also Picasa Web Albums.

Labels: picasa

The beta versions of Google Earth 4 and Picasa 2.5 have been refreshed.

Picasa moves from build 31.99 to 32.01, though its unclear what fixes have gone into this.

Google Earth moves from build 1565 to 1657 on the PC, (1658 for Mac, 1660 for Linux), and the changes are listed on the release notes that is installed with it, and available via the Help menu. Google Earth Blog has a post summarizing the changes.

Labels: picasa

I've mentioned before that Picasa is one of the few Google offerings without a (published) API. However, although unpublished, there are a number of integration points with Picasa that form a sort of unofficial API.

Specifically, Picasa offers the following

• upload to a Web Album (new in the Picasa 2.5 beta version)
• upload to Joga (in the customized version of Picasa available at Joga.com)
• upload to Blogger

This uploading interface is undocumented, but has been reverse engineered by tabblo, who use it to offer a way to upload to the tabblo photo service direct from Picasa. They offer few clues as to how they did it, beyond this comment on a flickr forum, to the effect that

"we had to spend a couple of days reverse-engineering a complicated desktop application/server-based protocol, then more time debugging it, and as of late, more time bringing it up to date for the 2.5 release of Picasa."

Picasa has some other potentially useful integration points

• the oem.xml file is used by the Joga customized variant to supply the customization of the title bar
• Picasa 2.5 uses kml files to interact with Google Earth, with the communication in the reverse direction acomplished by Picasa acting as a web server
• Picasa also shows a webserver interface when you use the Ctrl-L shortcut, which gives a close approximation to the Picasa UI within a web browser
• Picasa Web Albums offer a "download to Picasa" link that works by using a url of the form "picasa://downloadfeed/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Flh%2FrssAlbum" so Picasa must register a url handler for the "picasa://" protocol.

Whilst the above are all undocumented, there is documentation provided for another integration point. If you look in the web directory under your Picasa installation, there is a documentation directory, and within that is a index.html file which documents the Picasa Web Templating System. This describes the templating system used when doing an export as web page from Picasa. In addition, you can also export as xml, which provides another fairly easy way to extract data from the Picasa system, for use in other programs.

Labels: picasa

Picasa is a great tool from Google for organizing your photos.

However, its documentation is a bit sparse, and hard to find (and from a developers point of view it's one of the few Google offerings without an API).

Certainly underdocumented are the many keyboard shortcuts that the program offers, which both serve to make using the program easier and faster, and in some cases offer facilities that are not available with the mouse, or via the menus.

My favourites are:

• CTRL + ALT - displays the image the mouse is over at full screen size
  
• CTRL L - brings up a web browser view of the whole Picasa interface

See also

• Google's official list of keyboard controls for Picasa
• An expanded unofficial list helpfully given in alphabetical order
  

Labels: picasa

For the best possible output from a digital camera, most people capture the data in the camera's RAW format, then process it later. This has the advantage of

• capturing at the camera's full colour depth - which is often much larger than the 8bpp per colour channel that JPEG supports
• no lossy conversion to JPEG at all - so no data is lost
• the ability to adjust the colour temperature of the image
• the ability to apply more computing power to the image

The range of RAW formats is large - even within a camera manufacturer, different models produce different formats of data, and support within image viewing and photo applications is patchy.

I'm pleased to report that IrfanView, one of my favourite image viewers, has just released version 3.97 of formats.dll, which is the plugin for RAW image support. There is no readme to accompany the update, but it does now allow IrfanView to display Minolta RAW files, as produced by the Dynax 7d (aka Maxxum 7d or Alpha 7d). Previously these just caused the program to enter an infinite loop, taking up 100% of the CPU. The bad news is that the support is attrocious! A single preview view of a RAW image takes 8 seconds on my powerful desktop PC, and this is the same time to load the full image - whereupon it is displayed with a horrendous colour cast.

My best recommendation for viewing RAW format files is RawShooter Essentials from Pixmantec. The program has a very strange UI which takes a bit of getting used to (for example it gets rid of the menu bar), but does do the job more than adequately. The unusable 1.0 release was fortunately followed up with a 1.1 release very quickly, which fixed a lot of bugs, and added support for many RAW formats that were claimed for the 1.0 version, but which failed to work reliably.

It's worth noting that Picasa 2 from Google also claims to support RAW images, but it also simply hangs when presented with any examples I've come up with.

Labels: picasa

Without any fanfare, Picasa is now offering build 18.84 for download, instead of the build 18.77 which was originally released. This release is not (yet) being rolled out via Picasa's inbuilt automatic check for updates - if you are running build 18.77 then the update check reports that no updates are available, but if you go to the site and redownload, you will get the new version.

Apparently the new release went out to some beta testers with a readme detailing the changes from the previous build, but there is no such file provided with the download. As far as I can tell, mostly through moderator posts in Picasa's support forums, this build has the following changes:

• a fix for the severe database corruption that occurs when you set Picasa to scan a whole disk for images - the symptoms of this were that after scanning the disk, Picasa would then report that no images were found. Note: This seems to have fixed my particular database corruption, though I have seen reports of some others still having corrupted databases with the new build
• a number of fixes to do with the inability to write CDs
  
• a fix for the deletion of pre-existing pal files
• a fix for an export issue that was causing Gimp and eBay to not like some exported pictures
• addition of 16 bit PSD support
  

Labels: picasa

I've held off talking about Picasa2 for a few days, in order to give me time to investigate it fairly thoroughly.

First off I should say that when it works, I'm quite impressed with it. A lot of work has been put into the look and feel of the program, and its underlying features and capabilities are impressive, and a huge step up from the previous version.

Things I particularly like about it include:

• search as you type
• it doesn't mess with my images on disk - merely recording what transformations to apply once the image has been loaded
• virtual folders, so images can be labelled to appear in multiple folders
• very fast display of thumbnails - filling in detail later as time permits
• good support of mouse wheel and 5 button mice
  

The showstopping bugs

However, you may have seen the qualification I made of "when it works". Unlike many recent tool releases from Google, or indeed many of the other search vendors, Picasa2 does not carry the "beta" designation, but is supposedly fully finished. However, my experience has been that this is far from the case, and I have had considerable problems running the program.

On my machine I have thousands of images - mainly a combination of digital camera images, scanned images, and web sourced images. The first two of these categories mean I have large groups of very similar format images, but the latter group means I have images that have been produced in many different ways, by different producers using different software packages.


No pictures found when scanning has completed

When Picasa scans my disk to find these images, it spends hours processing, at then end of which it reports "No pictures found"! Whilst it's doing this scanning I can of course still use the program, and it does indeed show me many images it has found, but if I leave it long enough to complete the scan, it somehow forgets all the images it has already discovered. My guess is that somewhere in the web sourced images is an image it does not understand, and that it manages to corrupt its image database in such a way that it can no longer use it to access any images. (Database corruption seems to be an issue of which the Picasa developers are well aware since they provide several answers about it in the Picasa knowledge base). This was not a one off occurrence - I ran the program until it completed its scan a number of times, clearing the database between each run, and the result was always the same - a report of no pictures found.

The only way I have been able to continue to use the program is to change from a "scan all my disk" way of working, to one that only runs the program on selected directories - but that's not what I need this program for. The digital camera images are generally already fairly well organized, whereas the miscellaneous other images are not.

It's not simply the number of files I have - the reviewers guide claims to have tested on 250,000 photos so my 10,000+ images is a mere stroll in the park in comparison.


Program hangs on RAW files

One of the improvements in this release is the support of RAW files. Unforunately if I turn on this option, the program on encountering my RAW images (Minolta format) simply hangs - taking 100% CPU. Whilst the Minolta RAW format is perhaps less well reverse engineered than some of the other RAW formats, other programs do cope, and I would have expected testing at Google to have included images from all currently available cameras. Even if this were not possible, the program should have been coded in such a way that it could detect that it has got stuck on a particular image, perhaps popping up a dialog box after 20 seconds spent on an image (time adjusted for image size and CPU power) to say "I seem to be having problems decoding this image - would you like me to continue?" (or offering a preference to automatically give up on such images).

To make matters worse, when I killed off and restarted Picasa, it put up a dialog to say that it had had a problem with the raw image, but when I went to the disk to confirm that it was a valid image that other programs could handle, I could not find the image. I thought initially that Picasa had deleted the image, but fortunately that was not the case - all it had apparently done was to give the image the hidden attribute, presumably so that a subsequent scan would ignore it. However that means that none of the other programs I use can see it either, which is unacceptable.

Other bugs

The feature where rough thumbnails are displayed then as time permits filled in with better thumbnails fails to interact with the fact that the image may have been rotated between the time the rough thumbnail was shown, and the finer image was created. Many times I ended up with the image shown in one orientation, but the drop shadow around it in the other rotated orientation.

When using the program whilst it is still scanning for images, the mouse cursor flashes most distractingly. It appears as if the scanning routine is trying to set the cursor shape to the hourglass, but the main UI is resetting it.

You can't move the scanning status window off of the main monitor on a multiple monitor system - it responds to being moved vertically, but not to being moved horizontally.

One of the program's big advantages is that it does not change your images on disk - merely recording what transformations to apply to the image between reading it off disk, and displaying it on the screen. However this regard for the integrity of the original images does not extend to all exported images. I processed a lot of images which I "exported as web page", electing to use the original size images. All the unrotated images were exported as their original files as expected, but all the images whose only transformation was a rotation by 90 degrees were horribly degraded - it turns out that instead of applying the rotation transformation to the JPEG file directly (a lossless operation offered by the IJG software which Picasa uses), the images are being decompressed, rotated, and then recompressed at the current quality settings. Again unacceptable behaviour. I regard this as a bug since the unrotated images are not being recompressed, but the rotated ones are - if all images were being recompressed then it might just be justifyable as a feature (but a poor one at that!) Note that the "Export to folder" option does not does not suffer from the same problem - so Picasa does know how to do lossless rotation, but is not applying it in all places that it should.

As a further point to note, when Picasa writes JPG files out to disk (generally as a result of some export feature), it is not writing them in optimized form. This is merely a case of not setting the correct parameters when calling the IJG library that the program uses. Writing the files in optimized form saves up to 10% of disk space, especially on thumbnail images.

A trivial point, but one that maybe indicates that testing was no so thorough, the help page for the Gift CD feature is in a different font to the rest of the help. Perhaps this was a feature that was slipped in late in the development cycle.

Features than could be much improved

Marking a number of digital camera images then pressing the rotate button takes an incredibly long time. It looks as if the program may be returning to the original images on disk, and producing new thunbnails, whereas it could and should simply be rotating the existing thumbnails - an operation that is orders of magnitude faster (and since rotation of jpegs is a lossless operation) just as accurate.

When browsing to select a folder (say to export to), this must always be done by navigating through a graphical directory tree. If only the dialog allowed for an entry box into which I could type the name of the folder to use, then this would be much quicker.

The histogram overlays the image, using transparency. Why not simply move the histogram to the unused space on the left of the screen, under the effects chooser?

Similarly for the 1:1 zoom feature - why does this overlay the image, when there is plenty of space for it on the left of the screen. In its current arrangement, it is impossible to zoom view the bottom right of an image, since it is always hidden behind the zoom window itself.

When viewing the properties of an image, the popup window that displays them is not resizable, and is far too small to show the necessary information. In addition, it does not seem to be possible to select the information, so that it can be pasted into another application. Just as with the histogram and zoom windows, this information would be much better if it were displayed continuously, using that large blank space on the left of the screen.

I cannot find how to select multiple thumbnails at once, when they are in different folders. Pressing control when selecting an image adds it to the images already in the tray, as long as you are in the same folder as all the existing images, but as soon as you select an image in another folder the tray contents are reset without warning. You can choose to hold images that are in the tray by selecting them in the tray and marking them as hold, but I need a mode where I can quickly select many images from different folders to work on.

On a related area, I ran a search which finds a load of images. I then want to do some operation on all the found images - perhaps to add a label to them, or to export them. I can't see how to do this - all commands seem to operate either on a single folder, or on the contents of the picture tray.

The defocus the UI when there is a choice to be made (such as when abandoning an effect to switch to the tuning tab) gives me a headache. There is a perfectly standard method of greying out things when they are not available which is a much better effect than turning all of the controls out of focus - but even that is unnecessary in this case - the popup dialog is modal, so I am already prevented from using the controls, without needing to have them visually distinguished. Photographers spend a lot of effort in ensuring pin-sharp focus, so its a spectacularly poor choice of UI design to make them stare at deliberatly out of focus controls.

I run with multiple monitors, which offers me a very widescreen display, and is incredibly productive in many situations. In particular it is ideal for photo work, where I can have one screen showing a screen of thumbnails, where the other screen shows me the particular individual image I am working on. Unfortunately Picasa does not work in this mode - it only has a single window which shows either thumbnails or a single image - which is far less productive. Please allow me to have the thumbnail view and the detail view in different windows, and even better allow me to have multiple detail view windows open at once, so I can do side by side comparisons of images.

Labels: picasa