Sean Tucker gives some great advice to landscape photographers, likening landscape photography to fishing in street photography. Fishing is the act of finding an interesting place on the street and waiting for someone to walk through. I’m more of a hunter. I keep walking, looking for an interesting subject or situation, rarely stopping. You’ll see many examples of that in my Edinburgh photos.
“It’s a great place for landscape photographers to start. They’re used to fishing, to framing a composition first and waiting for the weather or light to come to them.”
I’m always wondering if I should post photography stuff on this blog here, or should I write my words about photography on my photoblog? What say you, gentle reader? Should I care at all? It’s a personal blog after all.
Geotagging your photos means adding location data to the image so they can be displayed on a map. Be aware that doing so might reveal sensitive information you’d rather keep secret like your home address.
You can of course remove location data when you export images, like I did with the images in this post.
Anyway, here is how I geotag my photos.
For photos I’ve already taken, I use Google Timeline and export it from my Google account using Google Takeout. You’ll get a rather large “Recent.json” file out of that. To convert that file into the GPX format usable by Lightroom Classic, use this Python script which I’ve already covered in this post.
When I go out with my camera now I use the Anrdoid app, OpenTracks. It’s a free app you can grab from f-droid, but there’s also a paid version on the Google Play Store if you want to support the developer. You can also use GPSLogger, a free app that has the advantage of being able to save your .gpx files to Dropbox or Google Drive.
On iOS, the myTracks app appears to do a similar job but I can’t test it. Please comment if you have tried it or know of decent alternatives.
To geotag your photos in Lightroom Classic, the Adobe documentation on the subject is excellent. Once you’ve opened the Map Module and done it once it’s easy to do again. When you geotag your photos, the Map Module will look like this.
There is also Jeffrey’s “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom that I’ve used for years but maybe it’s because of changes to LrC in recent years, it’s gotten really slow for me. I usually use the built in LrC functionality in the Maps module now.
While watching Stephen Leslie’s latest video on Lee Friedlander it occurred to me I could search Google Photos and Immich for “camera” and I might get back fun photos of photographers at work.
Sure enough, it did, including many photos of people from Blarney Photography Club, and of course people in Automattic. There were also a couple of people who have since passed away which was sad to see, but still a nice memory to have. They’re not tagged nearly well enough to identify the people. I sometimes wonder what will happen to this collection when I’m no longer around to pay for backups, and make sure the external drive they’re on is working.
Immich is a self-hosted Google Photos. That’s the simplest way to describe it. It can run in a Docker container and will happily live on your local network, without access to the Internet unless you want to. They do warn you that, “The project is under very active development”, so bugfixes are happening all the time. At the same time, bugs are sometimes introduced, and breaking changes are sign posted weeks in advance.
Immich. How do you pronounce it? I say it with a hard “CH” at the end, but others will say it sounds more like “image”, which leads me to think that’s probably the way to pronounce it.
It looks uncannily like Google Photos. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of it’s older, proprietary inspiration, but it does have some very useful features.
I love the face and object recognition in Immich. I can search by people on the Explore page, and search for objects too. It doesn’t present animals on the Explore page, but searching for “chihuahua” leads me to lots of photos of Diego. It’s face recognition that doesn’t go to feeding a gigantic corporation too. It works pretty well, but make sure your Docker install has enough RAM, or it will silently fail.
It has partner sharing too, which is of course a handy feature for families. I noticed that partner shared photos can’t be discovered through the Explore page, where you find face recognition and places. There’s a GitHub issue about this, so it’s something they’re aware of. To be fair, Google Photos has the same limitation (I think) unless you’ve copied the photos to your account, using your precious free space.
To get around this limitation, I symlink any shared photos to my wife’s account. I use External Libraries for 99% of my photos, and 100% of the photos that come from Adobe Lightroom. I export photos to “single” or “shared” directories, and a shell script moves them all to my Immich External Library, and symlinks the shared photos to my wife’s one. On the External Libraries admin page, I simply “Scan new library files” to import the symlinked files. Immich is smart enough to pick up the new files in my External Library. Files are scanned twice, with thumbnails made twice, and face recognition done twice, but the overhead in space used isn’t too bad.
The Quick Start docs tell you to use Docker to install, and if you are at all familiar with Docker, this should be easy enough to follow.
When you do get Immich installed, make sure you perform backups. I have all the images stored elsewhere, but I back up the database file with the docker command listed on that page. Syncthing copies it to another machine, where it’s backed up daily.
Another option is the Nextcloud Memories app which is very slick and looks great. It has face and object recognition too, but it depends on another Nextcloud app to do those jobs. It doesn’t have partner sharing, however, which is the main reason I tried out Immich.
If you do decide to expose your Immich install to the Internet, take a look at Cosmos Cloud. There are other options too, like Caddy or Nginx Proxy Manager. Getting an HTTPS certificate has never been easier. If you don’t know your IP, have a look at https://checkip.amazonaws.com too.
Have you ever converted a RAW file to lossy DNG and noticed how much smaller it was? You can make the RAW file 80-90% smaller! I always thought of lossy DNG files as JPEG files saved at a compression level of 10 or 100%. In other words, with barely anything stripped, but it’s more interesting than that.
I discovered that a panorama I made in Lightroom was a lossy DNG. After I made it, I tried converting it to lossy DNG, and the new file was the same size as the old one. So, panoramas are lossy DNG. They used to be huge files, but, in Lightroom 13.0 that changed. Adobe started using Jpeg XL instead of Jpeg to store data in lossy DNG files. Even though the files are smaller, they are higher quality than older panoramas! It’s the same with HDR and Denoise. Remember when Denoise was introduced and the files it made were gigantic?
HDR images created by Lightroom are also now saved using the same lossy DNG format. An HDR image I created in 2017 on my 24MP Sony A7III is 77MB, but using Lightroom 13.3.1 that file is only 11.9MB. When I convert the image manually to lossy DNG with an embedded medium Jpeg and fastload data, the file reduces further to 8.1MB and looks practically the same at 100%.
I haven’t noticed any major problems fixing highlights or shadows in panoramas, so lossy DNGs are pretty good, but not without their own drawbacks, which I’ll get to later.
On the Adobe forums someone noticed this last year, and received a few interesting replies:
The compression method for derived DNGs has been changed from JPEG to JPEG-XL, which provides a smaller data footprint without loss of quality.
Creating a merged DNG such as a panorama is already a “lossy” process because the merged pixel data has been demosaiced, aligned, and blended from the original photos. Using JPEG XL compression makes a much smaller visual change.
Do not look at the words ‘lossy’ and ‘lossless’, look at your image and see if there is any visible effect of this new compression method. Recreate an older panorama and compare the old massive DNG with the new, much smaller DNG. Do you have any reason to be concerned?
Before you convert all your RAW files to lossy DNG, be aware that it will affect how Lightroom treats your file in ways you mightn’t think of. Years ago, I noticed that the Transform tool worked differently on lossy DNG files. It straightened walls slightly differently, not that it looked wrong, just different. You also can’t feed DNG files to Topaz Photo AI (Files->Plugins Extra->Process with Topaz Photo AI) or Lightroom Denoise, so use those before making your panorama or making the file a lossy DNG.
This is an example of a simple image that transforms differently when it was converted to a lossy DNG file. Lens correction has been applied to both images, and they are identical then. However, when “auto” transform is applied, the lossy DNG is modified differently. This bug has been there for years. If you want to compare yourself, here is the before image, and here’s the after image.
Greg Benz has published a post on the subject too and came up with the idea of exporting images to lossy DNG “to the same folder” and adding them back to the catalogue, making it easier to compare before and after images before you delete files. He points out some other problems I never noticed with lossy DNGs, such as haloing and colour tones, and other unspecified issues with older RAW images imported before 2012.
Is it worth converting your RAW files to lossy DNG? You’ll make savings of up to 90% and that’s very tempting. A 66MB RAW file may become a 9MB lossy DNG file. If you don’t like deleting, but you’re sure you’re not going to use an image, then it may be an option for you. On the other hand, use with caution on photos you want to edit and publish.
A comment on this video suggests loading the original photo and the lossy version into Photoshop as layers and use the “difference” blend more on the top layer. You’ll notice tiny changes between the images. Since I have deleted the original RAW file of the photo above, here’s one of the lighthouse at Ballycotton.
Here’s what the difference looks like in Photoshop.
There are obvious differences when you look at it like this, but I still think it’s worth considering. Today’s photo on my photoblog, The Rocks of Ballycotton, is a lossy DNG file for example.
And finally, one thing to consider is that third-party software support for lossy DNG files might not be what you expect. I haven’t tested any of the open-source software out there, so I’m not sure how good it is. A comment on that video I linked to above says RawTherapee handled them, and that was 6 years ago, so I’m sure the situation has improved since then.
While in the process of researching this, it has been so nice to find actual open, public, online forums and blogs talking about this, and not just on Reddit either. I bet there must be plenty of conversation about it hidden in Facebook groups too. Hidden from prying eyes.
One feature in Adobe Lightroom that many don’t use often is the Map module. It’s really useful if your camera has GPS, if it can connect to your phone GPS, or if you manually drag images onto a map. I use the Sony “Imaging Edge Mobile” app to connect my camera to my phone via Bluetooth, but this drains the battery quickly when I’m out for a long time. It’s not ideal. If I want to use the Bluetooth remote control (not the app, the physical remote) I can’t use the location feature.
The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Athens, Greece.
The battery life of my camera when “Airplane mode” is enabled is stellar. Not so much when using a Bluetooth connection. If I know I’ll be out for an entire day, I’ll toggle it on and off and usually remember to do it on both devices, and sometimes I even make sure to check the next image has embedded GPS data!
Google Timeline is a feature that records your location data over time, using your phone’s GPS. This data can be very useful for geotagging photos because it provides a detailed record of where you’ve been. I’ve long wondered if I could use that GPS data to geotag my photos. You can export the entirety of your location data from Google using their Google Takeout tool. If you’ve had a Google account for a long time, that file will probably be well over 1GB is size if you had location sharing enabled. Unfortunately, it’s not in a format that Lightroom understands, and may contain many years worth of location data.
A few months ago, I decided to try writing a script that convert the Google Timeline JSON data into the GPX format that Lightroom wants, but I didn’t get very far, as “real life” intruded, and it was yet another project left on the long finger. I was looking forward to a day when I had sufficient time and energy to look at it.
The Temple of Poseidon in Sounion, Greece.
I’m glad I dropped it because I found someone had already created such a script, and it can consume a gigantic Records.json file. It will spit out the GPS data for any date range I want in GPX format. I discovered a Lightroom extension that makes importing that file easy, and it massages the data if a photo is taken in between points too.
The conversion script is a Python one called location-history-json-converter that can be found here. It’s relatively easy to install on Linux or macOS. If you use Windows you hopefully know how to get Python installed.
Once installed, I ran the following command to extract the GPS data I wanted for the first 17 days of May this year, and output it in the GPX format.
That produced a nice 1.3MB file from the huge Records.json file.
The Maps module in Lightroom does allow you to import tracklogs, but I’ve used it in the past, and sometimes it missed photos, maybe because my tracklog wasn’t recording points often enough. This time I used Jeffrey Friedl’s geoencoding extension for Lightroom. The ability to adjust the timezone was critical to me, as I wanted to geoencode or geotag the photos I took on a recent trip to Greece.
On the metro in Athens, Greece.
I messed up the first time and told it to adjust the timezone by 2 hours, the difference between Ireland and Greece but that was an hour out, possibly because of daylight savings time settings somewhere in the mix of camera, phone and exported data. I was really annoyed with myself over that because the plugin allows you to choose only “unmapped photos”, but now every photo was mapped. 75% of them were mapped to the wrong location!
I realised it didn’t matter because the originally geotagged images were tagged off my phone, so they had the same location data as Google Timeline. I went slower a second time, picking a couple of test images of places I knew, and by adjusting the timezone by 3 hours, I saw that it worked perfectly. I ran the job again against more than 1800 images and those images were geotagged correctly.
In the past, I used a GPS logger app to log my location to my phone. That created a GPX file, but I completely forgot I had that installed and simply used the Sony app connected to my camera for a long time. The Google Timeline data is already there because I allow Google to log that data, so it’s a handy source of this information. I can attempt to geotag years worth of photos now, but I’ll have to go slow, as I know the time on my camera drifts, so that will have to be accounted for.
If you live north of me in Europe, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll see an aurora tonight. I’m looking forward to seeing all the photos!
The US Space Weather Prediction Center has issued its first “severe geomagnetic storm watch” today for the first time in nearly 20 years.
The activity is expected to make the aurora borealis phenomenon visible across Northern Europe in the early hours of Saturday, May 11th (after midnight tonight).
John Free was a very talented street photographer in Los Angelus, who I have admired for many years. I saw on Facebook that he passed away last night. If you’re at all interested in photography, have a look at his YouTube channel, where you will get a taste of his excitement, enthusiasm and energy for photography and people.
I forgot he posted a video from the Musée D’Orsay a few years ago, but I’m extra happy that I visited there last year, and as John suggested in the video, I was able to balance the subject with the art.
There were a couple of problems with it, however. I wasn’t entirely happy with the workflow.
Images were deleted from DCIM/Camera immediately (and moved elsewhere), making it impossible to review the image I just photographed in the camera gallery.
When I opened the gallery app separately, the resized images wouldn’t show until some time later, or not at all. I verified the files were there using a file manager. Android’s media system just didn’t know about them.
I put up with these downsides for quite a while, occasionally researching how to fix the disappearing image problem, but I couldn’t find any good answer until last month.
I found out that Tasker must run the “Media Scan” command when it creates a new image file. The documentation says you can give it a directory, but that didn’t work for me. When I gave it the filename of the newly created image, it all worked! The image appeared in my gallery apps immediately!
Next up was the problem with deleted images. Originally, I moved the files into a “work in progress” directory to easily work on them, but if I left them in DCIM/Camera, I could check if a file of the same name existed in DCIM/Resized/. If it didn’t, then it’s time for a new file!
That did leave the problem that files were left in DCIM/Camera. Some of which might have been resized, some not. (It happens if I burst mode photos, where the task starts and works while new files are being created. It doesn’t catch the very new files). I created a new task “Photo Backup” that simply runs the resize task, and then runs the shell command “mv” to move all the Jpg files to where Lightroom will see them on my computer. I added that task to my launcher with an icon. I tap that when I get home and within a few minutes, the files are synced to my computer, using Syncthing.
To better track changes, I’ve uploaded the task to GitHub in this Resize Images task for Tasker repository. All development happens on my phone, and I’ll publish it to Taskernet first, but then changes will be copied there.
To install the task, go to the Taskernet page for it on your phone and click on Import. You can also manually import the .xml file if you like. How you use the task is up to you, but I created a profile that uses the “File Modified” event, and gave it “DCIM/Camera” as the File. The action to fire is the “Resize Jpeg Files And Leave Originals” task listed here.
If you’re of a certain age you’ll probably be familiar with Queen’s album, The Miracle. Or you might have heard of it because a “deluxe” version came out last year, with some great “sessions” versions of the original songs.
Anyway, the cover of the album is very distinctive, featuring the faces of each member of Queen merging together. It was made in the late 80s when computer image software wasn’t quite as sophisticated as now, but they still made a great job of it.
The video above shows how it was done. Really impressive work!
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