Yeah, yeah, there’s yet another CVE to be worried about, this time in the Linux kernel. FFS. It was PHP last week, Linux this week.
But Sure Patrick Stewart dying? No! F*CK.
Like many I knew him first in TNG but I laughed out loud at his guest appearance on Extras.
There’s going to be an emergency PHP release made in just over 2 hours. It’s to address a critical security bug.
I’m not sure how long it’ll be before Ubuntu updates, but I will preload a bunch of posts here and on inphotos.org using WP Super Cache and turn off PHP until it’s updated. The files will be served by Apache’s mod_rewrite, so no PHP involved at all. Uncached pages won’t be so lucky, but at least some pages will still be live.
I made a WordPress plugin for my holidays. It’s called Travel Steps, and it turns a trip into a page with a map down one side and the story of each day down the other.
Every photo I take ends up in Immich, on my own server. My phone sends where I’ve been to Dawarich, on the same server. So after a trip I have all the photos and the whole route, sitting in two apps on my private server. The travel apps that make nice trip pages want your photos and your location on their servers. I’d rather keep them on mine.
You make a trip, give it a first and last day, and press Sync. Travel Steps asks Dawarich for your location over those days, and Immich for the photos you took. You can pick one Immich album instead. If you don’t use Immich at all, upload the photos to the trip. It will detect the start and end dates from the uploaded photos, or an Immich album too.
Sync makes a draft post for every day that has favourite photos. Each one is a “step”. It splits the day into places too. A new place starts when a favourite is more than 2 km from the last one and in a different town. Each place gets a heading and a block of photos, so all that’s left is the writing.
Place names come from GeoNames data that ships with the plugin, so naming a town doesn’t send your location anywhere. Immich only names a place from a photo’s own GPS. A photo from a camera without GPS gets placed from your Dawarich history instead, and named the same way.
Publish the days you want people to see. Drafts stay private, and so do their photos.
The distance at the top follows the whole route, flights included. GPS glitches that put you in the Atlantic for a second are dropped. Anything you’d have needed to travel faster than 1,080 km/h to reach counts as a glitch. Sorry, Concorde.
Visitors never talk to Immich. WordPress fetches each photo, caches it and serves it itself, so Immich and the original files stay private. It caches a trip’s photos in the background after a sync. The trip keeps working when Immich is down. A daily sweep deletes cached photos older than a number of days you choose, whether a trip still uses them or not, and they’re fetched again the next time someone looks.
Photos you upload to a trip keep their GPS in the original, but it’s stripped from every copy WordPress makes, and only those copies are ever sent. A trip can have a password, and you can let some logged-in people skip it.
Hover over a photo to pin it (always show it), hide it, or make it the trip’s cover. The rest of the day’s photos sit behind a “Show more photos” link.
On phones, those buttons show up after you press Edit photos as illustrated by the images below.
Tap a photo and it opens full screen. On a phone you swipe from one photo to the next, edge to edge. On a desktop there are arrows, and the arrow keys work too.
Here’s a demo in WordPress Playground. It’s a week in the west of Ireland, running in your browser that installs nothing. Stand-in Immich and Dawarich servers feed the real sync code with photos from Unsplash. You’re logged in as an admin, so press Sync, pin and hide photos, and edit the days in the block editor. It all disappears when you close the tab.
The code is on GitHub. To install it, download travel-steps.zip from the latest release and upload it under Plugins → Add New. It needs WordPress 6.7 and PHP 8.0. Immich and Dawarich are both optional. It has been submitted to WordPress.org but if you read this blog, you’ll know how to install a plugin from a zip file!
Travel Steps is built on WpApp, Alex Kirk’s framework for building apps on top of WordPress.
A plugin usually adds screens to wp-admin, or puts its pages inside your theme and hopes the CSS gets along. A WpApp app gets its own URLs instead (/travel-steps/ here), and its pages are plain HTML with no theme in the way. WordPress still does the boring work: users and logins, roles, the block editor, the REST API, cron and the database. WpApp adds the bits in between:
You can start one with composer create-project akirk/create-wp-app my-app. Alex has a showcase of apps built with it, including a cookbook and a family wiki.
I wrote Travel Steps with Claude Code. The first commit was on 11 October, and there are many more now. Most of the work went round the same loop. I file an issue, Claude fixes it test-first on a branch and opens a pull request, and other agents review it. I deploy it to my own server and try it. The tests run in WordPress Playground too, the same as the demo.
If you run Immich, give it a whirl. Bug reports welcome on GitHub 🙂
Demo photos from Unsplash: Cliffs of Moher by Jarek Skowron, Temple Bar by Sarah, Galway by Daniel Zbroja and Anna Hunko, Kilronan by Jonathan Borba. Map © OpenStreetMap contributors.
I just want to mark this time with a blog post. For years people have been looking for Lightroom (and then Lightroom Classic) alternatives. And for years there have been alternatives for Lightroom/LrC and Photoshop like GIMP, DigiKam, Darktable and others. The advent of AI tools made it easier to create these sorts of projects, but Adobe posted record profits this year, so I don’t think they’re worried just yet. Their stock price is down, maybe reflecting investor attitudes to the new tools, but coding an app is only one part of it. Distribution and getting people to use it is another.
RapidRaw appeared just over a year ago that looks like Lightroom, and it’s a pretty decent editor. However, it displays compressed DNG files in a strange purple shaded almost mono way but displays Sony ARW files perfectly. An earlier version I tried didn’t have recursive display of photos in a directory tree (or maybe I didn’t find that setting) but the latest version does. I might be to help them figure out the problem with compressed DNG files.
Meanwhile, the latest Lightroom clone to hit the internets is LightCraft, part of the ArtCraft series of apps that replace the entire Adobe suite and some Microsoft apps.
They’re only a couple of weeks old, but the user interface of LightCraft looks very like Adobe’s Lightroom. My YouTube history this week is full of videos talking about it, about what’s missing from it usually, but there’s an optimistic feeling that these apps might be able to replace your Adobe subscription sooner rather than later.
I tried it and it behaved well. Like RapidRaw, it didn’t play well with compressed DNG files, displaying a message saying:
LightCraft can’t decode this raw variant vet (lossy JPEG XL tile with a declared encoding that is not linear RGB). You’re editing the camera’s embedded JPEG preview, which already includes the camera’s picture style (e.g.
Monochrome) and white balance.
It had no such problem with Sony ARW files, but wasn’t able to apply lens correction.
Anyway, they’re worth keeping an eye on if you don’t want to send Adobe any money. LightCraft shows how much you can do quickly with AI, but RapidRaw is a slightly older project developed using AI tools too. That project impressed me but there’s a huge amount of work to do, regardless of what magic pixie dust you throw at it.
Here are a couple of videos you should watch. Fstoppers put PhotoCraft through its paces, while Andy Hutchinson goes through LightCraft. Whatever you think of the apps now, it’s early days yet. I think they’ll have a pretty good chance of persuading a few people to stop using the Adobe Suite.
Edit:
Mark G Adams posted reviews, here and here of RapidDraw 1.6.6 that added a bunch of interesting features, and also CalibRaw 1.3 that has some overlap with those features. It’s quite amazing what’s happening with RAW editors these days. Relighting was added to Camera RAW recently (I think?) and these apps already have a similar feature.
Edit 2 on October 23rd: I just found out about RAWmakase, another RAW editor that looks like Lightroom. Unfortunately, it doesn’t edit lossy DNG files either so they must all be using the same library for opening RAW files.