The Blog of Harald

“Reid”:http://rae.tnir.org/ bugged me about documenting the tools I use for photo processing and publishing:

“Irfanview”:http://www.irfanview.com/ Thumbnails – autorotate. Irfanview is a very good image viewer for Windows. I’ve always used the lossless jpeg rotator in the package. Recent versions have been shipping with Irfanview Thumbnails, which lets me do bulk autorate of my photos, based on the EXIF orientation flag which is set by an orientation sensor in both of our cameras.

“Picasa”:http://picasa.google.com/ – photo management. I discovered Picasa when Google first bought it; I love both the photo browsing interface and the builtin “simple” photo editing tools, which do a surprisingly good job of basic edits (light balance, crops, etc.). One thing I like is that Picasa always keeps your original photo; any edits can be undone, even months later.

“Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chkoch/, “Gallery”:http://gallery.menalto.com/, “Picasa Web”:http://picasaweb.google.com/harald.koch, Rogers Photos – publishing. I use each for different things. Flickr has the advantage of social networking; my friends see my pictures because they have friended me. Gallery runs on my server, and I use it for blog images (including for the “rpg blogs”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/). Picasa Web is new from Picasa/Google; not sure if I like it yet, but it does make publishing from Picasa trivial. And Rogers Photos I use because of the “unlimited” storage for bulk pictures, like those from kite flying events.

“Unison”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ – sync/backup to the main fileserver. Unison is a bidirectional file synchronization program, like rsync but it moves files in both directions, resolving conflicts appropriately. I use it so that the photo collection can be stored and edited on all four computers around here, without (too many) conflicts.

“Nero”:http://www.nero.com/ – backup to CD / DVD. Mentioned for completeness, and because the Roxio package that comes with the Compaq’s -sucks- doesn’t work for me (Nero came with both of my DVD writers).

“Ubuntu Dapper”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ – fileserver. Also mentioned for completeness :-). The fileserver currently has 200Gb of disk, but it’s filling up again; I have a pair of 320GB drives on order, with plans to RAID-1 them together.

HP PhotoSmart 7960 – printing :-). I love this printer, even though it’s not available anymore (the new Vivera-based HP PhotoSmart printers like the 8250 are even better, from what I’ve seen). The output quality is awesome. I also have an HP LaserJet 1020 for day-to-day printing; saves wear-and-tear (and ink!).