Year: 2012

More on Dropbox as a photo management app

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Since posting yesterday about my new Dropbox-based photo management system, I’ve gotten several repsonses like this one from @sgo on App.net:

The one thing I don’t like about managing photos that way is you’re paying for storage twice…Dropbox and your backup service.

I pay $10/month for a 100 GB Dropbox Pro account. My photos currently take up just shy of 38 GB of that space (which is actually 118 GB thanks to referrals). If I ever need to pay for the 200 GB plan, I have no problem doing so.

Thanks to Dropbox, my photos are now on both of my Macs and their separate Time Machine drives, on Dropbox’s servers as well as being on my rotating backup drives and Backblaze.

Storage is cheap. Memories aren’t. I can’t replace photos of my kids. I can always buy more hard drive space.

Endeavour moving to new home →

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Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR:

Space shuttle Endeavour begins a kind of farewell tour this week. The shuttle will set off on a cross-country trip to its retirement home, flying from Florida to Los Angeles on the back of a modified jumbo jet.

[…]

Then, after processing at the airport, the shuttle will have to make a long, unprecedented trip through city streets. The giant spaceship will ride on top of a special transporter for about 12 miles.

That two-day, 1-mile-per-hour trip is scheduled for mid-October, and the planning for it has rivaled the amount of preparation it used to take to launch Endeavour into space.

I’d love to see Endeavour getting pulled through Los Angeles.

Some quick thoughts on Apple’s new EarPods

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I’m an over-the-ear kinda guy — my Sennheiser HD–280 PRO headphones are never far away.

The older Apple earbuds simply don’t fit well in my ears, leaving me with a distaste for earbuds in general. When I do use earbuds, I use a pair of the original high-end Apple ones, with the smallest fitting.

I might have girly inner-ears. Don’t judge.

The EarPods are a huge improvement for me. They are comfortable and fit in my ears quite comfortably.
Sound-wise, they seem on-par with my nice Apple ‘buds, and a good bit better than Apple’s previous built-ins. Mids and bass sound far more distinct than before, and highs sound less tinny.

The volume rocker is far bigger and sturdier, which is a great improvement. Likewise, the stems and buds are made of hard plastic, with the rubber to be found being the cables. That — coupled with the cool acrylic case they come with — makes these seem like a more premium product than they really are.

The EarPods aren’t going to stand up very well with more expensive hardware, like my 280s, but for free, built-in earbuds, they’re not shabby at all. Apple’s three years of work seems to have paid off.

How to import images from Photo Stream to Dropbox folder with AppleScript

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Update: Turns out, this too can be done with Hazel. My script isn’t necessary.

Earlier today, I wrote about how I’m using Dropbox as my photo management app. I closed with this:

This setup doesn’t harness PhotoStream, however, so I still have iPhoto setup to catch those images, just in case I don’t import something by mistake.

Turns out, importing images from Photo Stream into the folder Hazel watches to rename them can be automated, too. Here’s how I did it:

OS X Mountain Lion stores a copy of your Photo Steam in this folder:

/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub/

In that sub folder, an sub-folder is created for each image in your Photo Stream. Dumb, but that’s how it works. With a little AppleScript, we can grab the photos and move them to another folder.

Here’s the script:

(You can download the script as a .txt file here.)

You will obviously need to rename those folder paths to for your own use. You can change the “move” command to “copy” if you wish to leave the originals in place, but each time you run the script, you’ll get all the photos in sub again.

Moving the images out of the local copy of your Photo Stream doesn’t remove them from your iOS devices, so you can still see your last 1,000 images on your iPhone or iPad. In other words, this script just affects the local copy of the image, not the copy on iCloud itself.

This does seem to require having Photo Stream setup in iPhoto, but not necessarily setup to import:

Now, any time I want to process photos, I can either import photos via USB or trigger this script and go to work.

(As with other scripts, etc. I post, I don’t offer support on this. If you’re the type to want to do this, I assume you’re bright enough to know this could blow up.)

Dropbox: My New Photo Management App

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Viticci just wrote up a nice post outlining his move from iPhoto to Dropbox.

After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over iPhoto just for the organization in to projects.

So, I’ve made the jump to join Mr. Smooth Hands on Dropbox.

I used Automator to export my library into a folder, with a sub-folder for each project. Automator named each file with the following scheme, based on file creation time:

YYYY-MM-DD at HH-MM-SS-AM/PM

For new photos, I’m using a Hazel rule to do the same thing:

Now, I have a “Photo Library” folder in my Dropbox folder, arranged by project, with a bunch of photos in chronological order. It’s really quite wonderful.

The upload is rough, but once it is done, I’ll have version history, undelete and all of Dropbox’s other goodies working their magic on my photos.

Thanks to iTunes’ ability to sync and iOS device with a folder of photos, I can still get my photos over to my iPhone and iPad easily:

This setup doesn’t harness PhotoStream, however, so I still have iPhoto setup to catch those images, just in case I don’t import something by mistake. All photos get imported into that Hazel watch folder, so my naming gets applied automatically, leaving me to manually sort photos in to their folders at my lesiure.

I can even import from Photo Stream via a nice little piece of AppleScript.