Tag Archives: free

Down with Duplication – And How I Backup My Images

So, you’ve probably heard this before, but your duplicates are showing… Well, mine are at least. Which reminds me of one of the signs I spotted on our Cross Country Travels.

Spotted in a shop in Cambria, California

Managing and backing up large photo files is not particularly easy. But I recently whacked my head on a problem that perplexed me.

To set some background, it may help to know that I use DropBox to BACKUP, SHARE, and DISTRIBUTE my image files both to clients AND among my various computers. I have the 2 Terrabyte Plan at $99 a year.

Let me briefly explain how and why I do it, so what I communicate next won’t look like my crazy is showing.

Image Organization

The Watchful Warrior and the Eagle

My file organizational structure looks something like this on all my machines. Most of my work is in Windows, by the way, but I do use a Mac sometimes. I keep the same structure across multiple machines for several reasons including consistency and the ability to work the same on each machine. My folder/file structure looks like this:

  • Images
    • 2011
    • 2012 …
    • 2019
      • 2019-05
        • 2019-05-29
          • RAW
          • JPEG
          • Export
          • Processed
          • Video
      • 2019-06
        • 2019-06-03
          • (same as 2019-05-29)
      • Android
        • Phone
        • Card
      • IPhone
    • Work In Progress
  • Audio (e.g. Itunes and purchased music)
  • Business Records
  • Business Public
  • LightRoom Catalog(s) (Good luck, Lightroom doesn’t much like shared drives or volumes, so I’ve had to trick Lightroom into thinking it’s writing to a regular volume)

That’s important because you’ll notice that I do not really have a good organization system for Android and Iphone photos and videos … just a year by year copy. I also break down my images by year, month, and year-month-day. Again, not ideal, but that’s the pattern Lightroom follows and it mostly works for me.

Lightroom does not know how to separate JPEG and RAW images into separate folders. I usually shoot BOTH image types. The fast load time of the JPEGs allows me to breeze through them first, and I sometimes use the small JPEGS (which are still plenty big) for web purposes. Usually once I’m done with my photo processing sessions of the RAW images, I no longer have a need for the JPEGs – or even the RAWs. But of course I do back them up. All of them in fact except the absolute stinkers.

My Exported images are Processed images that have been downsized and watermarked ready for publication on e.g. Flickr or Facebook, etc. Processed images are those where I’ve done more than just Camera Raw adjustments or Lightroom adjustments. That is, composites or extensive masking and adjusting that I have done in Photoshop. By the way, I always create side-car files (the .xmp files) that keep track of the changes you make with Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. I keep the Export(ed) and Processed images locally until I need space at which point I remove them from my LOCAL computer and just leave them in DropBox should I need them again.

Since Lightroom does not import things the way I want, you might be interested to know that I do the importing with a primitive Windows Batch file. I copy all the content into a pre-created directory and then run this in that directory to move the files to the respective sub-folders.

 @ECHO OFF 
 REM Can optionally specify the source folder name e.g. .\OtherDirectory
 REM cd %USERPROFILE%\Pictures\ImportFolder
 REM mkdir NEWIMPORT
 REM cd NEWIMPORT
 REM COPY all files from the card to this folder

 mkdir RAW
 mkdir Processed
 mkdir JPEG
 mkdir Video
 mkdir Export
 @echo ON

 move %1.J* JPEG
 move %1.NEF RAW 
 move %1.CR2 RAW
 @REM This should copy MOV and MP4 ... but might copy something you don't expect
 move %1.M* VIDEO
 move %1.

DropBox “Smart Sync” is nifty: and so is “Selective Sync”

One relatively new feature of DropBox is the SmartSync option which behaves a bit like Lightroom – you can have a file that is indexed, but not local. There are three ways to use Dropbox for managing backups:

A. Use selective sync to synchronize specific directories (e.g. 2019-05-29) on a computer by computer basis. Be careful, if you do it wrong, you can wipe out a whole directory at once including your backup! That is, do NOT delete a local copy of a DropBox folder until after you turn OFF selective sync. Indeed, until Smart Sync, if you turned off selective sync, DropBox will delete the whole folder LOCALLY.

B. Use the new Smart Sync feature to distinguish Local and Online copies. Local copies the same as the synced version that is in DropBox. While “Online” means DropBox preserves the file structure and names on your local computer, but doesn’t download the content unless you try to open the file. This behavior doesn’t play with with all programs, mind you.

C. Use both – that is what I do. On my under-sized laptop drive, I selectively synchronize a small handful of things (Business Records, Work In Progress and perhaps a few days worth of photos). While on my workhorse desktop machine, I keep many more photos local on a huge hard drive.

If you’re wondering why I don’t just pay Adobe for cloud storage… never mind, you’ve probably already figured out why I don’t want to pay twice, and MORE for what I already am using.

Stormy Weather predicted in Photo Organization Efforts

iPhone and Android folder structures are not consistent – Why?

The organizational structure on both the iPhone and Android are a bit messy, mysterious, and … change over time, so I have not had much success trying to duplicate the structure I use for my DSLR real photography in the cell phone space. And yet, like many of you, my cell phones are doing more and more of the lifting for illustrative things. One way my Android gets twisted up is that it has both phone memory and card memory. The problem is that there are lots of places where pictures occur, on say the Android. For example:

Galaxy S9+\Phone\DCIM\Camera
Galaxy S9+\Phone\Pictures (which has many subfolders)
Galaxy S9+\Card\DCIM\Camera
Galaxy S9+\Phone\WDisk\Photos
and more!

Trying to extricate files from those many locations sometimes means I goof and recreate the same structure multiple times. To make matters more complicated, I also record images and videos with a Mavic drone.

Another Organizational Failure

I may copy May 29 files into May 28th for my big camera images. But I never intentionally duplicate images even if it sometimes happens by accident.

Sometimes I get ahead of myself. I simultaneously copy e.g. Android stuff on one machine while copying iPhone stuff on another. When I do that, Dropbox can get confused. And that’s on top of the pain that Lightroom imparts… so I find myself using less and less of Lightroom for importing photos (too slow and cumbersome), and instead I get the structure in place and then tell Lightroom where to look. Indeed, I admit I now prefer to use Adobe Bridge, or some much simpler programs like Image Glass for quickly viewing photos. Image Glass is very quick to load and use, something like Windows Photos, and Image Photo Viewer, but more nimble (and less powerful).

After the cross country trip, I found myself with apparently MANY copies of the same cellphone and camera images… but with thousands of images it is not easy to identify which are really duplicates. Some duplicates are the result of doing in-phone photo editing. Obviously those I want to keep. However the accidental duplicate copies I do NOT want to keep.

And the duplicate situation differs by cell phone, too. Android often tags -001 to files you edit on phone, while iOS creates an .aae file.

Deduplication To the Rescue

Is there software that will do a good job cleaning up duplicates on a Windows machine? Yes and No. Yes there is, but WHAT IS A DUPLICATE? I mean I know when what I look at is a duplicate, but that doesn’t mean software is particularly good at it. I was grievously frustrated when trying to trial some of the photo/file de-duplication tools that exist. I thought, CCleaner did a pretty good job, until I realized IT DOESN’T understand images very well.

I then went on to try Easy Duplicate Finder, Duplicate Photo Cleaner, and a few others. Unfortunately my tests were against a real directory with thousands of files and these “tools” would only let you do 10 removals unless you paid the $30, $40 or $50 to activate them. Well that’s NO TEST! And more, none of them bother to tell you up front that the many minutes you spend reviewing its scan is a waste of your time – or what the charge will be to license the software. One of the tools begged to not be uninstalled and offered a significant pricing break, which brings me to a tip:

When trialing software, it’s always a good idea to try to uninstall it before you even think about purchasing it. Crafty programs (and marketers) realize that offering a discount is their only defense against losing a sale to you. The discount may be substantial!

Duplicate Photo Cleaner Irked Me

Evil minds created this!

Not only did DPC NOT tell you what the charge was, it asked you to register (you give it your email address) before it ever mentions the price ($39.90). It does seem to have some smarts to pick photos by appearance but it lumped together three different screenshots from the phone as duplicates that were NOTHING alike. Suspiciously, Duplicate Photo Cleaner and Easy Duplicate Finder are both Webmind products and use the same shameful sales tactics.

I suppose there may be instances where you want it to figure out if one image is merely a smaller version (or only “slightly different” from another), but the inspection, took a long time and decided that not only were the screenshots identical, but two quite different sunset shots were marked as duplicates. If your goal is to toss out all but the first image of your daughter, the default behavior of this tool might be what you want. You *can* adjust the settings, but the slimy marketing and the out of the box behavior had me saying No Thanks in a jiffy.

Duplicates Cleaner by kaeros < Works!

The $6 solution does the trick. Even the $0 solution works just fine.

The good news is that those badly behaved trials made me try Duplicates Cleaner from the Windows Store. I normally avoid the Windows Store because it has a lot of rubbish, and it’s Microsoft. Duplicates Cleaner is FREE. And guess what, it worked very well – got rid of 4.5 Gb of redundancy in my Android directory alone. Duplicates Cleaner has a $6 Pro version which I may well upgrade to. But the free version does the trick and includes a small ad for one of the developers products. Duplicates Cleaner doesn’t try to inspect your image to see if they are visually similar – it looks at the content (or name) to make its decision. Content is a good way to go, two files with different names and identical content ARE duplicates. You can see it also found redundancies in the organization of my “big camera” directories. (Usually because I’m not always careful about where I tell Photoshop to stick things).

With the setting “Scan Type Preference: Same Content” it’s really speedy. Once it finds the duplicates you have the choice of deleting them or backing them up. Normally it deletes the second item, but I’ve switched those because the first items were placed in the wrong folders. (Also notice how the last item is incorrectly named!)

The Six Month Sabbatical

It is amazing how a planned six month sabbatical turned into 14 months. We decided to retreat from our teaching and photography schedule for the first six months of 2015. Family and work issues lengthened that to 11 months… and well, it has taken another several months to get back on our feet.

And we are re-starting with a Free “Exploring Night Photography” class that extends from April 6th, to May 25th, 2016.  However before I even started writing this column the class was full. The class would not help many of you since it is being taught in Los Gatos, California, with thanks to Venture Christian Church for providing the venue.

But there is good news: in the coming weeks we will be publishing the material we use in the class HERE on the website.  The class is aimed at DSLR photographers who have gotten out of “Automatic” mode at least once, but that is the only real requirement.

Here is the course description:

EXPLORING NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY:

You’ve got a Digital, Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera, and you are getting fairly good at it. Now it is time to try something new and creative: photos taken at night. Night photos can reveal the amazing majesty of the night sky (Isaiah 40:26). You will learn how to photograph in low-light using your DSLR. Along the way you will learn a little about the night sky and several photography techniques that will aid all of your photography efforts. Most of all you’ll be amazed at how much there is in the dark that remains unseen without the aid of a camera. You just might unleash a creative direction you may have never considered. This is a hands-on course. You will be taking photos on the very first session of the course, so bring all the equipment listed in the prerequisites.

Prerequisites:

  • Must have a DSLR camera (smart phones are not acceptable)
  • Must understand the basics of exposures – i.e. the relationship between f-stop (aperture), sensitivity and exposure length, and have shot photographs in some mode other than “Automatic”.
  • Your camera’s operators manual

Also recommended are:

  • A tripod- strongly recommended!
  • A remote release (cable)
  • An Intervalometer (Steven will have some to loan)
  • Extra batteries
  • Memory card(s)

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Teacher Bio

Steven Christenson is the founder and teacher of StarCircleAcademy.com, and winner of the 2010 Greenwich Observatory “Astronomy Photographer of the Year”, and a runner up in 2012. His work has been published as album covers, in the Economist and Backpacker Magazine and even featured on local TV stations. Steven specializes in “Landscape Astrophotography” a field that is easily approachable by anyone with a DSLR camera and a tripod.  You can read his instructive columns on his website (StarCircleAcademy.com).

What you will miss is the hands-on portion, of course, and the relentlessly punny style of Steven’s teaching, but the good news is that the discussion, resource list and class exercises will be right here for you to follow along.

And, it is not too late to influence what we cover… So feel free to ask any beginnerish questions here and we will either respond directly or include that material in what we publish here on the web.

Hope your skies are dark and clear, and the stars smile for you!

Now Open: The Store

So many of our students at our webinars and workshops as well as our website visitors ask us about our Notes, Instructional Videos and Photoshop additions that it was time to make it possible to deliver them.  So we created a digital store integrated with this blog.  In fact, we’ve only had the store open for two weeks and already we have a clear bestseller:

Advanced Stacker PLUS [14E] with Online Video and Notes
Includes the even EASIER to install Advanced Photoshop action set version 14E, an unlimited viewing online video on creating star trails, notes (PDF) on creating star trails and practice files. The video is 2 hours long. This action is power. You can create star trails, cloud timestacks and stack images with a minimum of effort and a maximum of control. You can create "comets", "midgets" streaks and much more. And you can create intermediate files along the way to put interesting motion effects into your timelapse. Compatible with Photoshop CS6 (standard or extended), CC, CC 2014-2018. While we have every reason to believe compatibility with CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 still works, we have no means to test these.
**NOTE: MAC Users with Yosemite or El Capitan, or Sierra and PS CC 2015 or later are reporting installation problems. We recommend you do NOT purchase this product until we have been able to resolve this issue. NOTE: We believe ASP DOES work properly with High Sierra and CS6 and CC 2018.
NOT Compatible with Photoshop Elements, or Lightroom. Please specify your primary OS and Photoshop version when ordering. You will receive links to both Mac and Windows installers.

Making It So

But making it so was not a straight line path from where we were to where we wanted to go. We toyed with a variety of things to create a store. Using PayPal buttons directly – simple and maddeningly painful at the same time, using ZenCart, and looking at a few others solutions.

Ultimately we wanted something relatively simple. Something that could handle a small, but growing array of products – all digital, and that would be relatively easy to integrate into the BLOG without breaking off limbs or snapping frazzled nerves. We settled on WP E-Store. It’s neither flawless nor as spectacularly simple to get working as we would want it to be, but it is well featured and well supported.

I should probably make a note that I, Steven, am capable of twiddling with HTML, circumspect of all CSS (because I’ve never found it to be pleasant to deal with), able to write JavaScript and PHP when needed – but prefer not to. If none of that makes sense to you, that might be fine unless you decide to embark on creating a store because I’ve already learned that I have needed all those skills in some form already.

We want a store secure against theft, hacks and intrusion, that is easy to use and easy to configure. We also want to offer discounts to people who attend our Webinars and Workshops as well as repeat customers. Using PayPal directly proved unmanageable. Our store also needs to manage the digital content that gets created on an almost daily basis. We had no expectation or illusion that we would sell prints or images through this store. In fact, Steven has a well featured means for selling hard goods through ZenFolio. Interestingly most Steven’s print sales occur in the United Kingdom – likely because they see Steven’s images in the Royal Observatory. ZenFolio is great for selling prints and mounted images – even iPhone cases!

WP eStore

What we like about WP eStore is that it does handle the key things we want: digital sales through PayPal (and credit cards), and secure encrypted links for digital goods and a nice simple interface for our clients and customers.

What WP eStore lacks, however are a number of things including a simple way to process refunds (always a painful thing through PayPal), more configurability of the display of products and the shopping cart and a few gotchas in the way you configure products. For example, with WP eStore you can specify a “thumbnail” image for a product – but by default the thumbnail will be clickable and go to the thumbnail image. That’s completely silly.

Of course since we purchased WP eStore we’ve also noticed a lot of other competitors, including WooCommerce which looks snazzy, but it appears you get nickeled and dimed to death to get all the pieces together.

Biggest Obstacle

The biggest impediment to our eStore is our theme.  Theme? Yes, the page layouts are controlled by a WordPress theme. Unfortunately the theme we like is not as customizable as we’d like. That spiffy graphic at the top, for example clutters up the store so we are planning to either switch themes or hack up the Twenty-Ten theme we are using.

What is Ahead?

One day we hope to also offer free and paid Webinar registration through the store. And perhaps even workshops, too. Please check out our store. Here is another resource of interest:

>Photography with Harold Davis obviously this is Harold’s spot and covers much more than night photography.

Oh, and if you would like to see if a Webinar will work for you and your set up, you can join a FREE webinar to kick the tires on March 12, 2013. We hope to see you there!

Total Lunar Eclipse and San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge

As many of you are aware Star Circle Academy has been hosting webinars devoted to “Catching the Moon” in a creative way – and many other topics including Astrophotography. Catching the moon near a landmark is not simple, and conditions are seldom ideal … but on the morning of December 10, 2011 a total lunar eclipse will be visible from much of the US including Hawaii.

The full moon rising behind Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, San Jose, California

Normally I’d keep all the details to myself so as to avoid throngs of photographers trying to fit into an itty bitty space. But while I am off in Washington, DC catching my “Landmark” photo people in and around San Francisco have a GREAT opportunity to catch the eclipsed moon over the Golden Gate Bridge. And the good news is that the location you need to be in is big and broad and can accommodate a LOT of people. So we decided to let you all in on this great opportunity!

While you do not have to do so, we’d appreciate it if you would sign up and indicate whether you are coming so that Eric Harness will know to look for you.

All the details can be found hereevents.starcircleacademy.com/events/42862122

If you sign up, you’ll be shown exactly where to meet Eric. If you just want to go on your own – no problem, there is enough information in the write up. Do remember to bring a tripod, a telephoto lens (whatever you have is good), and dress warmly and in layers. Now all you have to do is to keep the legendary fog at bay.

Many happy photons from us to you this Holiday Season!

Airplane Transits the Partially Eclipsed Moon

Oh, and please post your best shot into the photo pool after the event!  We appreciate it!