- Photostream: a new concept unlike the rigid directory-like album structure in pbase.
- Square thumbnails and the ability to put same image into multiple sets without duplication.
- The community feel, groups, and explore galleries.

I have since accumulated more than 6000 photos in flickr and it is an irreplaceable memory lane for me.

Few weeks ago I started wondering about the future of flickr. After acquisition by yahoo in 2005, it has not added any significant feature besides collections (only one level deep hierarchy) and some other cosmetic changes. Given the abysmal track record of companies/products under yahoo, I figured it was time to really check out picasaweb, the other viable alternative I ignored for a long time.

In two days of fiddling with picasaweb, picasa desktop app, and photograbbr I think this is the way to go. This blog post also sold me to the idea. Here are my observations regarding the switch:

- If I let my pro flickr account lapse, I will still have the photos forever, only that the last 200 will be visible in photostream. Any link to photos from old blog posts will continue to work. I have not much to lose. Besides my 6000 photos are all web sized, taking under 2GB of space. In flickr I paid $25/yr for unlimited, but in picasaweb I will have to pay $5/yr for 20GB (1GB is free).

- I am not sure I like the photostream of flickr anymore. Sometimes I think twice before uploading less-than-best photos since friends will see the latest photos. At this point the rigid album feature makes more sense. I will miss having album-inside-album, but I can live with that, since tags can help.

- One big gripe with flickr is filename preservation. It would make the filename as default title, and I have to manually copy it to the description area if I have to change the title. Flickr gives each photo an unique id and there is no other place where the filename is preserved. With picasa this is no more a problem, the photos get uploaded in picasa with empty caption by default, and filename is untouched. For the migration part, PhotoGrabbr is an excellent app. It lets me download flickr photos with flickr filename, plus an xml document which has all the details about the photo including title and description, one of which has the original filename. The migration should be easy and fast.

- The other major pain-in-the-ass with flickr is its image organizer. I cringe everytime I have to use it.

- I really loved the way picasa works, especially the sync with picasaweb. Photo caption syncs both ways. Super easy to delete the online album and re-upload after major changes in the album. Once an album (basically a folder) is in sync with the online version, I can upload more by simple drag and drop to the album folder. So my workflow is like this: work in Lightroom, export processed photos from RAW to 900×600 jpg, and just drop them in a folder under picasa. The tags stay intact from the time I imported photos in LR. Sweet.

- The integration of picasaweb with G+ android app took me by surprise. Very fast browsing of my online photos over 3G. WIN.

I am kind of sad to no longer renew my flickr pro, but I am sure it would have been 10 times more awesome from its 2005 version had it not gone under Yahoo.

Update: here is my new picasaweb public gallery: https://picasaweb.google.com/107557198667490360767

But see, a real life product differs from a software in a very critical part of the build process – the safety inspection. Even the worst software bug can’t come close to the damage caused by a physical injury from a nasty oversight. When the foldable table-cum-cabinet I was building got almost finished, I suddenly discovered a potential finger-smashing pinch hazard from what I imagined as a cool design. The table part on the right side is foldable, so that also means nearly 29 inches of leg folds back and it is hinged close to the right end of the table, right where a person might keep the right fingers when unfolding the plank. Now if the legs have no retention mechanism, they will just open with a smash as soon as the clearance is available in the unfolding process. So I need to do two things:

1. Prevention of the hazard: I added a small retention clip so that the legs will be in its place until the user is ready to unhook it.
2. Protection in case #1 above is forgotten: Added a barrier next to the hinge at the underside near the right end of the table top. This will ensure the fingers stay out of the way of the pinch zone.

Without photos, none of my words make any sense, so here they are: http://therider.posterous.com/sewing-machine-cabinet

I still have to explain the mechanisms to my friend when I hand it over to her. I will possibly make a printout to ensure anyone using it follows right procedures.

I am ready to take the jump. Looking forward to solving difficult and interesting problems.

My resume: PDF
My linked-in profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joydutta
Email is the best way to reach me: j d u t t a AT gmail DOT com

For example, all the host names you have ssh’d to before are stored in a file ~/.ssh/known_hosts, so we can leverage that. Similarly available screen names can be seen using “screen -ls” but it is much nicer to have the list available for expansion while invoking a screen.

So here is a project on github to build an extension script which offers as many useful autocomplete features as possible without interfering with the default filename expansion.

Examples:

Context: screen

$ screen -r [TAB][TAB]
photo debug bashautoc
joyd@shield ~/configs $ screen -r ba[TAB]
joyd@shield ~/configs $ screen -r bashautoc

Thanks to Doyle Yoder from a Luminous Landscape forum thread (reply #18), finally I can print right again from PS CS3. The steps are:

1. Convert to printer/paper profile.
2. Assign sRGB profile, ignore the color shift as it shows on the monitor.
3. In the print dialog, choose “Printer manages color”.
4. Because of above choice, “Color matching” in driver dialog will show “Epson color controls” automatically chosen and grayed out. Now choose NCA in the settings.

Voila. Perfect print.

I followed the standard process. Photoshop manages colors, with Bill Atkinson’s 9600 Premium Luster paper profile (9600PLU1), with Relative Colorimetric intent and Black point compensation turned on. Also NCA (no color adjustment) in the printer driver. Each and every print came out darker as if shadows quickly rushed to blackness. Also the black and white images seemed warm.

From numerous sources on the web I found out that the root cause is “double profiling” due to a bug in the print workflow. What happens exactly is that when we apply a profile in the print dialog in PS, and then go to printer driver dialog, the “Color Matching” section shows that “ColorSync” is automatically selected and is grayed out. This is not desired because ColorSync itself applies another profile depending on the paper, in my case, 7600-Premium-Luster-PK. the NCA option is also grayed out. This double profiling screws up the prints.

Many people have fixed it by pointing the default ColorSync profiles to “Generic RGB” as if it is a null profile. But it did not work for me.

Another source said to convert the image to the paper profile, then choose “Printer manages colors”, and NCA in printer driver. Very strangely, the printer just won’t print anything with this configuration.

Then I found out a very interesting fact that in Lightroom the application print dialog and the print driver dialog are on separate buttons. I had to choose the NCA on the driver dialog first (clicking “Print Settings…”), making sure that Color Matching is “Epson color controls”, the only alternative to “ColorSync”. Then I chose the paper profile on the right side pane before clicking “Print one”, and not “Print…”. If you click the latter, the color matching will be reset to “ColorSync” and you have to undo it by choosing “Printer manages color” instead of the paper profile and click “Print…” again.

The print finally showed shadow details as desired and perfectly neutral black and white.

It will still be a PITA to prepare images in PS and print via LR, but at least the prints will be right. CS4 or CS5 might have this particular bug fixed, but not sure.

—————–
Various Epson 7600 related links:
1. Lesson: Printing Images Using an EPSON Pro Stylus 7600 / 9600 Large Format Printer and Adobe Photoshop
2. Lessons from using an Epson 7600 printer

Test prints:
1. On-sight
2. Bill’s downloads

Update: After getting the 7600 working right, the 2200 driver started giving problems. It won’t print and the utility app will not launch. After lots of research the solution that worked was to install the 2200 driver in uninstall mode before re-installing it. Then I tricked the 2200 the same way as 7600 to get it to print using paper profile and “Epson color controls”. The result came out better than what I was doing all along with “Printer manages colors” workflow. The grays are more neutral than the distinct magenta I used to get. It is still a little warm so I might still be using QTR for b/w but the color prints are gonna be better from now on.

1. Linux daemon in C
2. Linux daemon HOWTO

Very recently, I came across a specific requirement. A favorite photo had abrupt vignetting and the color of the sky in the upper corners were different in hue from the rest. I would normally use the clone stamp tool with low opacity, but I had one problem, there were some power lines that went right through the corner. Then I tried using clone stamping in a new transparent layer with blending mode set to color instead of normal. That gave me exactly what I needed, the color mismatch was fixed without doing anything funky with the power lines. The photos below illustrate this technique.

Original with color shift in corner

Problem with clone stamp tool using normal blend mode

Clone stamp tool using color blend mode

Using color blend mode in photoshop

Lets consider how a photoblog is browsed most of the time. A visitor typically lands on a home page showing the latest image and goes through the previous images sequentially, spending a few seconds on each image. Leveraging this fact, if the “previous” image is downloaded in the background using javascript right after the current image, it will be almost if not completely ready for viewing when the visitor is on the “previous” image page. The same can be done for the “next” image, but in most of the cases that image will already be in the browser cache.

This is a very simple change for a tangible usability benefit. Below are my tweaks:

index.php:

// expose the previous image name through tags, so previous images can be
// pre-downloaded in the background for faster browsing experience
$tpl = ereg_replace("<IMAGE_PREVIOUS_NAME>",$image_previous_name,$tpl);

templates/theworldin35mm/image_template.html:

window.onload = function() {
  ...
  var prevImg = new Image(); // for downloading prev image in background

  img.onload = function(evt) {
    ...
    // after current image load, load previous image in the background
    if('<IMAGE_PREVIOUS_NAME>' != '') {
      prevImg.src = '<SITE_URL>images/<IMAGE_PREVIOUS_NAME>';
    }
  }
  ...
};

To verify that this extra javascript is actually doing its job, look at the Net section in Firebug (in Firefox browser, ofcourse). Clear the cache first. On first page load it will show several items getting downloaded. On left arrow, the previous image page will load, and then you can see that an extra image got downloaded at the bottom. Compare with and without my code. Here is a screenshot:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.
Apache/2.0.59 (Unix) PHP/5.2.6 DAV/2 Server at localhost Port 8888

Figured out the solution by a little search but it is useful enough to share.

1. Quit MAMP or stop servers.
2. Open /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf file in vim or any text editor.
3. Find this section of code:

<Directory />
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

4. Change “AllowOverride All” to “AllowOverride None”.
5. Save the httpd.conf file.
6. Launch MAMP or start servers, then open up the start page.

It works !