Tag Archives: Photography

ArtCraft is pretty good

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.

My eyes hurt after the eclipse

Searches for “eclipse hurt eyes” jumped 170% in the last 24 hours after the eclipse yesterday evening. Ouch. I hope those people didn’t stare too long and that no permanent damage was done.

The sky was cloudy where I live, but I still managed to get a photo, even if it was only with my phone as the clouds briefly allowed the sun through. So much for my plans to use eclipse glasses with my compact camera.

Instead, I spent a nice evening with my wife, our pets and a neighbour who called over for a chat. Lovely!

As expected, Facebook is full of amazing photos of the eclipse, but I love this.

Experiences with the Samyang Lens Station

If you have a Samyang lens for your camera you may find that the lens stops working after a camera firmware update. That’s what happened to me when I updated my A7RV to the version 4.0 firmware.

I do a lot of street photography with the Samyang 24mm f/2.8 and I noticed I was missing lots of shots. Photos that should have been easy, with a clear subject and face visible for the camera to focus on were entirely out of focus. It seemed to happen more often when I was shooting from the hip, and then it seemed the camera wouldn’t take a photo at all.

I thought it might be some auto focus setting on my camera. I played around with settings attempting to fix it, but nothing worked.

Eventually, I figured out it was the camera firmware update. Sony’s new firmware changed something in how the auto focus information is transmitted from lens to camera. My Sony lenses worked fine but not the Samyang ones. There had been Samyang firmware updates in January for the A7M5. My camera firmware came out in December but I hadn’t updated it until about a month ago.

I bought the Samyang Lens Station. The Amazon websites around Europe didn’t have it in stock, but amazon.ie did, shipped from Spain. It was only after that I remembered to check MPB and found it there at a much cheaper price. I guess these things don’t have much use once your lens is working ok again.

You’ll need to download the Lens Manager app. The interface is simple, and updating the lens is easy enough, if not obvious. Once you seat the lens on the lens station you’ll see a screen like this:

The “Download Link” goes to a website that doesn’t load but you can grab the firmware files from here, their current site. A .hex file is extracted from the downloaded zip file and that’s the “Lens F/W File” that you load. Click “Update” and the lens will be updated in about 60 seconds or so.

The 24mm lens went from version 5 to version 9, my 75mm f/1.8 lens went from version 1 to version 7.

Once I’d updated I tried out the lenses and all was good again. Yay!

I want to explore the AF/MF settings in the programme too and see what that’ll do but my priority was getting the lens working.

Do I love the Samyang 24mm f/2.8? Why yes. I have 33,409 images shot with it. Most of those are probably rubbish as it’s my street photography lens of choice but it’s worked really well until now. You can see a selection of my best photos here.

LrC: Sync Smart Collections with Adobe Cloud

Lightroom Classic (LrC) is fantastic for organizing large photo catalogs… but one longstanding limitation has frustrated many people: you cannot sync Smart Collections directly to Adobe’s cloud ecosystem (Lightroom CC for mobile/web). Only regular collections can be synced.

To work around this, plugins like Any Source have already implemented clever solutions but I wanted something that fit my own workflow better. That’s why I created the LrC Smart Collection Sync plugin to mirror smart collections into regular collections for syncing, with a few improvements I needed myself.

Lightroom Classic won’t let you sync Smart Collections directly, so:

  • This plugin automatically mirrors selected smart collections as regular collections.
  • Those mirror collections can then be synced through Lightroom Classic’s built-in sync to mobile/web/cloud.

The Any Source plugin does that too, but my plugin also:

  • Lets you set the interval when background syncing occurs, from 10 seconds to 300. This is how often mirroring of smart collections with normal collections happens, not syncing with the Adobe Cloud.
  • Automatically pause sync while editing (so it doesn’t interrupt your workflow)

All this makes syncing smart collections more streamlined and controllable.

Back in 2020 I posted here about using Any Source, and I’ve been using it ever since, but I never used any of the other features of that fine software and I wondered if it would be difficult to write my own mirroring plugin with the help of Claude Code that is.

The result is a new, simpler plugin. It’s also open source if that matters to you.

Install

Installation is easy enough:

  • Clone or download the plugin by clicking on the CODE button and clicking the “Download ZIP” link.
  • Place lrc-smart-collection-sync.lrplugin in your Lightroom or Pictures directory.
  • Add it through File → Plug-in Manager in LrC.

When enabled, it will add 2 new menus to Plug-in Extras:

  • Smart Collection Sync…
  • Sync Now

Usage

  • Go to File > Plug-in Extras > Smart Collection Sync…
  • Select the smart collections you want to mirror
  • Set your sync interval
  • Enable auto sync or run a manual sync

Check “No sync while in Develop” to disable syncing while you’re working on a photo. I noticed while editing photos that Any Source would sometimes sync, and the syncing action became part of the undo which was annoying.

Once the collections are created, tell LrC to sync them with the Adobe Cloud. You can now edit them in Lightroom.

This is the first release of the plugin. It seems to work ok for me. If it takes a while for the configuration window to appear, optimize your Lightroom Catalogue. That really helped me. I guarantee nothing except that this will take up space on your computer!

I don’t have any “new release” checks added but I’ll post here about major changes, or you can watch the GitHub repository to get updates.

PS. The Any Source plugin is really a great plugin with many more features. If you use Lightroom Classic you’ll probably find something in there that will be useful.

Make Photo Competitions Simple

Running a photography club competition used to mean juggling spreadsheets, chasing emails, and manually tallying votes. I built Photo Competition Manager to change that.

This free WordPress plugin handles everything your club needs: member management, secure uploads, flexible voting, and beautiful results displays.

This will suit a photography club that uses WordPress for their website and that has a projector for their meetings. If you already run a photo league with projected images or prints but collect votes from your club members using pen and paper you’re the perfect candidate to try this plugin.

This is the very first release of this plugin. It has been used a couple of times to run several test photo competitions and one monthly league competition. However, bugs happen. I would love if your photography club used this plugin but I will need feedback to improve it. Run a couple of test competitions first to get used to how it works.

Getting Started in Minutes

The setup wizard creates all the required pages automatically. Select the pages you need, click a button, and you’re ready to go.

Manage Your Membership

The Members page is your central roster. Add members individually or bulk import from CSV. Assign grades, track status, and send magic-link upload invitations with a single click.

Each member gets a unique upload URL—no passwords to remember, no accounts to create. They click the link and upload.

Create and Track Competitions

The competitions dashboard shows a list of competitions, allowing you to edit them and send out upload emails to members. Only one competition may be active at a time, but a competition may have more than one category.

Create competitions with custom categories (Colour, Mono, Projected, etc), grade divisions (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced), and submission quotas. Each competition can have its own rules without affecting your defaults.

Watch Submissions Roll In

As members upload, the submissions page displays thumbnails of every entry. You’ll see who’s submitted, which categories are filling up, and whose photos are still missing.

A Frictionless Upload Experience

When members click their magic link, they land on a clean upload form. They select their category, choose their image, and submit. The progress banner shows upload status in real time.

The plugin handles validation automatically—file types, dimensions, and quota limits are all enforced before the image is accepted.

Complete Control Over Voting

The voting controls page is your competition command centre. From here you can:

  • Open and close voting for each category independently.
  • Toggle the results display on or off.
  • Enable slideshow mode for in-person club nights.
  • Disable uploads once the submission deadline passes.
  • Show a QR code for members to scan with their phones to vote.

In the competition settings, you choose between token-based voting (unique links per member) or password-protected public voting. The voting controls page features a full-screen slideshow mode where members can vote together during meetings.

On the night of the competition we do the following:

  • Close uploads and hide results.
  • Show the slideshow with a 10 or 15-second delay as a preview.
  • Display the QR code and make sure every member can scan it and open the voting page.
  • Open voting and show the slideshow again.
  • When everyone has voted, close voting.
  • 2 members of the club will then go through the images and offer a critique, using the slideshow again but in manual mode this time.
  • Repeat for the next category.
  • When all the voting is done, toggle the results page on and display the “top 3” results, and then the anonymous results page on the projector.
  • Finally, an email is sent out to all members showing their score, ranking in their grade and the votes they received. Names are not attached to the votes for obvious reasons.

Voting By Phone

Members can vote on the competition using their phones after they have scanned the QR code on the voting controls page.

Results That Make Sense

When voting closes, the results dashboard breaks down every score by member grade. See vote distributions, identify your winners, and export everything to CSV for your records.

The frontend includes a responsive top-3 podium display perfect for announcing winners, plus full results tables with filtering by grade and category.

Built for Photography Clubs

Photo Competition Manager was built specifically for the way camera clubs actually run competitions:

  • Magic-link authentication means members don’t need WordPress accounts to upload.
  • Grade-based scoring supports clubs that split their membership by experience level.
  • Slideshow mode turns any screen into a projection-ready display.
  • CSV export keeps your archives intact.

Get Started Free

Photo Competition Manager is free and GPL. Install it from the WordPress plugin directory or from the plugins page on your WordPress site in the usual way. Navigate to the Competitions menu to get started.

Download Photo Competition Manager

The source code is available on GitHub if you want to contribute or customise:

View on GitHub

Questions? Open an issue on GitHub or post in the WordPress support forum. I’d love to hear how your club uses it.

Fisher or hunter street photographer?

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.

Geotag your photos in Lightroom Classic

A gentleman in tan hat and plaid shirt standing at a busy car boot sale in Bantry with market stalls and shoppers browsing various items spread on tables, County Cork.

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.

A satellite view of Cork City with a blue line showing where I walked and orange squares showing how many photos I took at various locations.

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.

Search for a camera

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.

Anyway, here are a few I liked.

A photo of me from behind as I take a photo of a mountainous scene with my phone. I have a perfectly good camera hanging off my neck.
Thanks Kuba for this photo of me in Germany.
A young woman photographing another two young women who are sitting on a railing on a steep stepped street.
What kind of camera was this I spotted in Valletta, Malta?
Mark almost lost his camera there.
Procession in Malaga.
A man hanging out the side of a car while holding a DSLR camera.
The Cannonball Run in Blarney, 2018
A sheep poses for a photo in a pen while someone holds their camera phone up to them.
Posing for a photo
Lots of photos of my camera taking a photo

Using machine learning on photos is a great way of diving into your collection of images. You’ll unearth all sorts of stuff!

See more of my photos on my other blog.

Playing around with Immich again

Immich Logo

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.

A screenshot of the Immich mobile app showing a search for chihuahua and thumbnails of my dog.

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.

Lossy DNG isn’t so bad

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.