Whilst there are plenty of solutions available, I’m not going to provide the post-processing options here. I only want to record those that embed the co-ordinates at the time of taking the photo. No products that require post-processing are included.

Digital SLRs inbuilt GPS

• None yet, but maybe this year, there are rumours the Canon 60D may have inbuilt GPS.

Digital SLRs with Accessory

• Nikon D5000, D90, D300, D700, D3,D3X – requires  Nikon GP-1 accessory or a di-GPS
• Canon EOS 40D, EOS 50D, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 1D Mark III, EOS 1Ds Mark III – requires Canon Wireless File Transmitter accessory (model is dependent on camera body). More info on Canon GPS, and manual page. It additionally requires a third party GPS as well that can provide position using the NMEA protocol.

Point and Shoots

• Nikon Coolpix P6000
• Ricoh 500SE
• Leica V-Lux 20 – as well as having inbuilt GPS, it also appears to have an inbuilt database of 500k points-of-interest that can be used to show nearby sightseeing opportunities (added: 2010-04-22)
• Sony DSC-HX5V Digital Camera

GPS Receivers with Camera

• Garmin Oregon 550, 550T

Mobile Phones with GPS

• Apple iPhone 3G, 3G S
• Nokia – a number of models that I’ll list in due course

Survey Quality solutions

• ikeGPS

Frankly, Nikon appear to have to produce a far smaller and lighter GPS solution for their cameras. Canon requires not only a bulky grip, but still requires a GPS to be added as well. The Nikon GP-1 or di-GPS look to be far more appropriate for field work for emergency management. Additionally, the Nikon solution can be used in conjunction with a battery grip, which allows additional batteries into camera (two, instead of the usual one). The Canon grip increases the bulk of the camera, but the camera itself cannot use a battery grip to extend the battery life in the field. Of course additional batteries can still be carried and swapped – although to replace the camera battery, the WFT must be removed. Finally, the WFT3/4 also require their own battery to operate.

As a Canon user, I am most disappointed with their solution to geotagging-at-shutter-click, and the Nikon approach appears far superier as it adds very little bulk to the camera, and doesn’t get in the way of using a battery grip to double the life of the camera without changing batteries.

Here’s what I did – some for speed, others just freeing up space.

0. Complete a Time Machine backup first.

Naturally, I wanted to make sure a had a backup before I did anything destructive – such as deleting files – so I forced Apple’s Time Machine to complete a backup. With that out of the way, I could start tidying up. If you’re on Windows, you should do a backup first before you do anything else.

1. Check the Backups directory.

I have Lr setup to backup my catalogue weekly – this keeps a fairly good trail of backups in case something goes wrong. It hasn’t yet. However, after 2 years of Lightroom use, my directory of Lightroom catalogue backups had blown out to 13.52GB! There were a couple of things I did to trash some of the existing backups.

• I removed all Lr v1 backups. I knew the date that I upgraded (by the last modified date of my old v1 catalogue file). I deleted all the v1 backups and this freed up 8.71GB. Since the upgrade produced a new catalogue name (with a -2 appended), I was able to confirm that I was only deleting v1 backups.
• For all months bar the last one, I decided that I only really needed to keep the most recent backup in each month, rather than sometimes all 4 or 5 in a month. I deleted all but the most recent and freed up another 2.64GB of space.

This brought the Backups directly back to a rather svelte 2.42GB.

2. Optimise Catalogue

I hadn’t seen this option before today, so I thought I’d check it and see how it goes. It is accessible via Lightroom > Catalogue Settings, and is a simple ‘Relaunch and Optimise’ button. My catalogue was around 18k photos, and was 262.9MB before optimisation. My Previews file was 101.7MB. Note this figure. After expecting it to take say quarter of an hour to process, I was surprised at how little time it took.

The resulting catalogue saw ~20MB removed and the overall file size brought down to 241.5MB.

I did get a shock when I saw my Previews file though, it had blown out from a lowly 101.7MB to a massive 7.74GB! However, I think this may have been a case of the package (Previews are a package on OS X) under-reporting its true size. I don’t think the optimisation process was busy enough to create 7GB of previews in such a short time! Therefore I think the optimisation actually made the package report the correct size. So I’m not treating this as a ‘loss’ of 7GB

3. Deleting Cruft

In the same directory as my main catalogue, I noted I still had my unloved v1 catalogue, as well as a couple of ‘Temporary Folders’ Lightroom had created that contained a couple of images that I no longer needed. Since these were already backed-up, I just deleted the old catalogue and these temp directories.

4. Rendering Previews

Quite a few of my previews had already been rendered, but I decided to check my rendering settings, and force Lr to render the rest. Library > Previews > Render Standard-sized Previews. I expect I may be facing a 20GB+ Preview file by the time its finished!

5. Adobe Camera Raw cache

As per Lightroom Queen’s article, I went and configured the cache on a separate internal hard drive. I created a new directory called /Cache/Adobe Camera Raw in the root of a second ‘working’ drive and added this in the Lightroom > Preferences > File Handling dialog. I choose the new directory I had created, and upped the somewhat meagre 1GB cache to a more workable 10GB.

Summary

All up, it has been a good little cleaning effort that netted me another ~11.5GB of storage. Which I think I will probably lose to previews. Lightroom doesn’t seem noticeably faster on open, but it does seem quicker to quit. I haven’t spent any other time in it this evening yet to comment on general usage. I’ll report back once I have completed the preview rendering and had a chance to spend a little more time using the optimised Lightroom.

1. Relaunch and Optimize Your Catalog Today – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips
2. Hurry Up Lightroom – Lightroom Queen

Update – amusingly, Adobe limit their submission form to 2000 characters, and mine was about 3600. So I split it in two!

*******Enhancement / FMR*********
Brief title for your desired feature:
Provide configuration option to allow Lightroom to automatically manage files and folders by date and time metadata.

How would you like the feature to work?
1. Lightroom Preferences. I believe there should be a preference option that allows LR to automatically manage all folders and files in a catalogue. In the preferences the user would be able to set the following policies that are applied to all images.

1a. Folder structure – determine the folder structure e.g. yyyy/yy-mm-dd/
1b. File name – determine file name e.g. yyyymmdd-hhmmss-n
1c. Manual or Automatic update – determine whether changes are made immediately when date/time metadata is adjusted (Automatic) or if a user-initiated refiling is undertaken only when the user manually starts the process (Manual). Recommended default should be Automatic (e.g. immediate) updates.
1d. Time field – probably want to default to capture time. Not sure if this approach is useful for other times.

2. When a user imports images using ‘automatic file management’ the file handling import option is greyed out, and indicates that it is being automatically managed and shows the file/folder naming structure selected in the preferences. All other relevant import options are made available.

3. When a user edits date/time information in any way, upon saving the metadata, the image filename, and if necessary the folder it is located in is adjusted to represent the new date/time metadata (Automatic). This results in immediate refiling of the photo when the date/time is adjusted. Otherwise, the image stays in the same location until such time as the user interactive tells Lightroom to refile all images based on their current capture date/time (Manual).

4. If the user opts to change the filing policy set in the preferences – Lightroom should support a complete refiling of the library. E.g. if the directory policy is changed from yyyy/yy-mm-dd/ to yyyy/mm/dd/ then Lightroom should prompt the user to restructure the whole library now under the new policy, and indicate that this may take some time depending on the size of the library

5. Provide an option to check and refile all images that are currently selected (whether in grid, or by folder). This would allow the user to force a manual refile immediately. This option should of course only be visible to users that have enabled automatic filing.

Why is this feature important to you?
I would like to avoid having to manage names and locations of files and folders. I would like to optionally configure Lightroom to fully manage the names and locations of all folders and files. As long as I can define a policy for how the folders and filenames are structured, I am not concerned about having full control over the filename and location. I would like the image metadata to determine where it is stored on the hard drive.

As Lightroom currently stands (v2.3) when the capture date/time is adjusted, the file retains the imported time (which is clearly incorrect) and possibly is stored in the wrong folder (if the time adjustment has been across midnight). This is particularly an issue with travel photos.

It would be very nice to have the option to have all this managed automatically and transparently by Lightroom. Of course this should be an opt-in process only, as it really makes sense for uses that manage their photos using date and time. Conceivably, it may be possible to have Lightroom manage files and folders using other forms of metadata automatically in future, but I believe date and time makes the most sense to start with.

Update: Just to clarify, this is only about changing the second option (time zone adjust) in the adjust time dialog. There are a number of countries that work on 30m TZ offsets – Alaska, a number in South America, Middle East, the Pacific. There is a good table available on this page from the US Naval Observatory.

******BUG******
Concise problem statement:
Timezone adjustment does not support all timezones.

Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Attempt to adjust timezone by -7.5 hours (difference between New Zealand Daylight Time and Sri Lanka time)
2. Only 1 hour increments are available in the time zone adjust drop down combo.
3. Fail!

Results: It is not possible to adjust the timezone in half-hourly increments. After some Googling, I found a very unintuitive workaround that involves selecting the first photo, and adjusting it by the required amount. This is not intuitive enough, and as there are 30 minute timezones, I believe obvious and intuitive support for 30 minute timezones should be included.

Expected results: In addition to the hourly TZ adjustment combo box, there should be another combo to the right that allows selection of 30 minute TZ by selecting either :00 (default) or :30 that is applied in addition to the TZ hour adjustment. This would make it possible to adjust the time to 30 minute timezones (e.g. Sri Lanka and India) in an obvious and intuitive manner.

The topic of developing a good backup strategy for your computer surely makes most peoples eyes glaze over. It is decidedly unsexy until such time as you need it. Of course, by then it is too late. I’m hoping to combine some of my IT, risk and emergency knowledge to provide some insight into develop a suitably robust backup strategy.

If the consequence is lost data, what are the risks?

When developing a backup strategy, it is important to have a good understanding of how data can be lost – the risks – so that we can create a simple yet comprehensive plan to backup our data that accommodates the many different ways data can disappear.

So, lets pick a few. I’ve named them L1-L5 where ‘L’ is for loss.

• L1 Loss of computer (e.g. theft, smoke or water damage; electrical surge from computer power supply)
• L2 Filesystem accidents – formatting of filesystem, deletion of files, data corruption
• L3 Malicious software – formatting, deletion, or encryption of files with an unknown key (e.g. encrypt and extort)
• L4 Mechanical failure of the hard drive (the dreaded clunking sounds)
• L5 Loss of home containing computer (e.g. fire, earthquake, flood, landslide)

Whilst not comprehensive, this includes a good range of different issues we may face where a backup would be very handy and save us a lot of time, and potentially money. If we can come up with something that protects us from these losses, we should be doing pretty well.

What we need to do now, is look at various means available to backup data, and then create a quick matrix comparing each type of backup, and which losses it may/may not protect us from.

Firstly, let’s identify a number of backup solutions.

• S1 Backup to CD/DVD/HD and store on site
• S2 Backup to external HD on site
• S3 Backup to internal HD
• S4 Backup to other computer at home
• S5 Backup to Internet (service or web host)
• S6 Backup to CD/DVD and store off site
• S7 Backup to HD and store off site

Now, all these solutions are not equal. What we need to investigate now is which type of loss a given backup solution can protect against. I’ve created a sample table below to give you some idea of how it all comes together.

We start with a grid comparing types of loss and solutions. A green box means the solution generally prevents that type of loss, and red box that it generally doesn’t protect, and an orange one means that it may provide some protection.

Next, we compare solutions with various costs and constraints – in this grid green means it isn’t really a cost/constraint, red means it is a cost/constraint, and again, orange means it might be a cost/constraint.

In this example matrix, two points stand out.

• backing up to an internal hard drive does not provide much protection against data loss
• quite a few backup solutions do not protect against major losses such as the loss of a home from fire.

Additionally, every backup solution has a number of costs and/or constraints on its operation. The next step has been to add some cells that identify some of the more common costs and constraints associated with each solution.

What we can see is that there is no single perfect solution. We could extend this further and add a grid outlining some of the benefits of each backup solution – they all have some – and this would also further educate us in the development of our backup strategy.

Now, we’ll use this grid to look at selecting a couple of complementary backup solutions that avoid each others weakness.

Personally, I’m a fan of backing up my home computer using Time Machine on a Mac to an external USB hard drive (effectively S2). As you can see from the matrix, this protects me against most of the common losses, except the rather catastrophic loss-of-home. Clearly then, I can select an Internet or off-site solution as well that will provide me with more complete data protection than just backing up to an external hard drive.

Quite a few people will look at the Internet backup option (S5) and think that it looks pretty good, but be warned, there are some issues that you may face including – the speed of your internet connection when backing up files to remote servers, ongoing service fees, and potential privacy risks by storing you files on a remote server of a business.

I’d recommend selecting solutions so that you can meet the follow three four requirements.

1. You should have at least three copies of your data (source + two backups).
2. At least one backup must be reasonably current and disconnected from the computer most of the time (except when a backup is being made).
3. At least one backup file must be offsite.
4. At least one backup should be incremental.

Ian (in the GPS forums) made a good point about incorporating incremental backups into the process. Broadly speaking, there are two types of backups, full (where everything is copied at once) and incremental (where only the files that have changed since the last backup are copied). When doing incremental backups, the first backup is a full backup, and then incremental backups take place from there on. Time Machine is a good example of incremental backup software – every hour it backs-up any changed files.

As I’m not that keen personally on online backups, I’d recommend one of the following as the minimum. There is nothing wrong with making more copies on CD/DVD media to supplement the main backup solutions.

• external hard drive onsite + DVD media offsite (affordable setup)
• external hard drive onsite + external hard drive offsite (same sizes, switch them once a week or month, expensive setup)
• synchronise files between two home computers on network + external hard drive offsite (utilise existing hardware and provide backups of both computers)

There are three other tips to provide as well:

• If you use backup software, keep a copy of the install media (and licence key if appropriate) with the backups
• If you need quick access to data upon failure, make sure that at least one of your backups uses a very accessible filesystem on external hard drives (CD/DVDs are good as they generally use filesystems that are accessible in any computer). This means you can literally plug them in and access key files without having to perform a software installation and full restore
• AND TEST THAT YOU CAN ACCESS BACKED-UP DATA and/or RESTORE FROM BACKUPS

Finally, as you should have a GetAway Kit for natural disasters and the like, in addition to your other important paper information such as identification, policies and photos – you should also include a backup of your data in the kit. If you haven’t got a GetAway Kit, then now is a good time to learn about how to get ready!

Have you ever wanted to quickly find all the photos taken at your family bach? Chances are that unless you’ve been meticulous in filing your photos or tagging them with keywords, this could take quite a bit of time. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could click on your bach on a map, and bring up all of your photos within 1km, or display all of your holiday photos on a map? This is the promise of geotagging.

Simply put, geotagging records the latitude and longitude of the camera at the time the photo was taken and stores it in the image file.

Geotagging is not a new technology. It has been possible to geotag images for several years now, but previously only enthusiasts or professionals geotagged their photos, as it added extra steps to processing photos. It also required a GPS receiver that could record tracks – a breadcrumb trail of where the GPS had been. By matching the time in the GPS track log with the time that photos were taken, it is possible to reasonably estimate where the photo was taken. This took extra time and effort, and except for a dedicated few it was not worth the effort. The GPS receivers also added extra weight and bulk to carry around.

Recently GPS functionality has greatly shrunk in size and power demands, making it more friendly for the photographer by enabling the technology to be directly embedded in cameras and mobile phones.  Already a number of camera phones support geotagging photos – including much of the Nokia N series, and the recently released Apple iPhone 3G. Nikon has embedded a GPS receiver in their new Coolpix P6000 compact, and provide an optional GP-1 GPS attachment for recent Nikon digital SLR cameras. As more devices support geotagging, especially more affordable cameras and mobile phones, the possibilities (and the risks) are going to grow exponentially.

Combining GPS receivers with other devices makes the whole geotagging process transparent and automatic, and requires no effort from the user. This is going to rapidly open up opportunities for all sorts of geotagged data. But is it just technology for technologies sake? Not really, there are existing applications for geotagging, and even more to be come.

Travel photography just begs for geotagging. It is a great means of recording where holiday snapshots were taken, as you can easily show people where you took the photos. Not only that, but as people upload geotagged photos, they become a great travel planning tool as you can see photos that other have taken in a location that you are travelling to, and find sights nearby that you otherwise may have missed.

Real estate also stands to gain from geotagged photos – by being able to quickly load photos of properties for sale into an online searchable map, it will be easier to browse location and appearance at the same time. Councils and infrastructure companies have been using geotagged images for a number of years now to assist with managing assets – imagine being able to take a photo of a pothole and send the image to the council without having to try and explain where it is. Geotagging even has applications after a disaster – teams performing reconnaissance of an affected area can take geotagged photos whilst they are there, and when they return to an operations centre, the images and their exact location can be loaded into a mapping system to help authorities gain a better understanding of the extent of damage.

Location-based technology does come with inherent risks – mostly privacy related. Although many people are comfortable posting photos online, they may not be comfortable allowing people to determine the location where the photo was actually taken. This may be particularly relevant in the case of photos taken at home. No doubt we will see tools evolve to help people manage the privacy associated with geotagged photos, but in the meantime it is worth thinking about the content of a photo before uploading geotagged photos online.

The benefits of geotagging for the most outweigh the risks, and will likely lead to novel applications. The Apple iPhone 3G already has interesting applications taking advantage of geotagged images. Exposure provides mobile to Flickr – a photo sharing website. The ‘Near Me’ function will get your current GPS co-ordinates from the iPhone, and use that to display geotagged photos from Flickr that were taken near your current location. You can then view a photo, plot its location on a map, and if you desire, Google Maps will give you directions on how to get there.

Geotagged images don’t have to be shared online to reap the rewards – it may be that the biggest benefit is just providing another means of managing the vastly expanding data in your own photo library!

I spent around 3 hours experimenting with different exposures between midnight and 3am. As it was more of an experimental session, my focus was not so much on finding a good landscape but just to test exposures. Hunting for a landscape for next time will come later.

Where was it taken?
Off the balcony at my mother’s house where I was staying over Easter. It was taken at about 145am.

What settings did you use?
Manual. Focus was set to infinity. ISO was varied between 100 and 1600 – this shot was 400. Image was shot at 10mm and f8. Exposure was 1452 seconds (just over 24 minutes).

What gear did you use?
Canon 20D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens, Canon timer remote, and tripod.

Why did you compose the shot as you did?
I wanted to strike a balance between the ground and the night sky. I wanted to give at least the bottom third of the frame to the landscape illuminated by the moon, and use two thirds of the frame for star trails.

What post production work have you done on the shot?
Nothing significant. Removed some sensor dust spots and used luminance noise reduction to reduce the ISO noise.

What were you hoping to achieve with the shot?
To see if it was possible to expose a shot that creates the appearance of daytime, with star trails in the sky. The moon is a better light source than I had anticipated!

What did you do well?
I think I managed to create a reasonably balanced exposure that showed the movement of the stars, yet created the appearance of daylight. Using the relationship between ISO, aperture and shutter speed, I was able to adjust the ISO and aperture to generate a suitable shutter speed to turn stars into star trails

How could you have improved it?
Finding a more attractive landscape. For testing purposes the location worked fine, the trick would be to find better terrain. Interesting geological formations would likely be a good place. In hindsight if longer star trails were required, it might have been possible to use a graduated ND filter to reduce the reflected moonlight from the landscape.

Anything else?
Another point to note is the impact that focal length has on the size of star trails. You need really long exposures to generate significant star trails with a wide angle lens. This is why I needed around 25 minutes at 10mm, but could generate similar length trails at 24mm with far shorter exposures. But the joy of wide angle is that you can take much more in.

This was taken a few days after full, it may be interesting to see how the lighting dynamic changes say around half moon? For example, there will be far less light, and hence it might be possible to use far longer exposures as it won’t overexpose the foreground.

It might also be possible to time shots when there are a few bright planets in the sky – Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – so that their movement is in contrast to the star trails.

NOTE – YOU HAVE TO BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN PHOTOGRAPHING THE SUN! YOU CAN RISK BLINDING YOURSELF!

Details were Canon 20D, 400mm lens, f32, 1/8000, ISO100, Cokin 3 stop ND filter and Cokin ND Grad filter. My basic game plan was to try and reduce the incoming light to the absolute minimum. The purple tinge is due to the combination of filters. The surround is black because I was letting so little light into the lens. It was a sunny day, and this was taken at about 1740 local time in summer.

I shot in manual, with the following techniques used to let as little light in…

1. Set shutter speed to 1/8000 – very little light gets through.
2. Set aperture to f32 – this was the smallest I could get on the lens.
3. ISO100 – use the least light sensitive ISO setting.
4. I stacked the only ND filters I had with me – a 3 stop ND and a grad ND that I aligned so that the darkened band of the filter was over the sun.

What I would do next time? More ND 3 stop filters, or perhaps one filter designed for solar photography. I didn’t think of it until afterwards, but I could have put the 1.4x extender on which would have cut out another stop of light and got me closer to the sun. I’m also not sure if it would have worked, but I would be interested to see if a circular polariser would have cut down the light so that only polarised light was entering the lens.

Safety – I did a number of things to avoid blinding myself…

1. I wore my polarised sunglasses – helped a little taking the edge off the sun.
2. I tried to do as much as possible without looking through the viewfinder.
3. Before looking through the viewfinder, I would hold the back of my hand up to the viewfinder to see how much light was coming through and illuminating the skin on my hand. If it was too bright I would adjust the filter position and check for reduced light intensity on my hand. This was also how I adjusted the position of the camera to get the sun in frame.
4. I never looked directly straight ahead through the viewfinder, rather I kind of looked from the side with a kind of averted vision – just enough to help me focus the camera.

Much of this would have been helped by stacking more filters. A random thought I just had was stacking two circular polarisers, and setting them at different angles so that only a fraction of the light is getting through – this is one technique for observing eclipses – holding polarised sunglass lenses at 90 degrees. Might have to try that sometime.

Even after all that, the sun was still mostly blown out (highlights display in camera) – as you would expect.

Other details…
* Image has not been post processed.
* Image here has been cropped to a square frame – I didn’t have any opportunities where I was to try and include a silhouette in front of the sun (I was on the west coast of New Zealand and there is nothing but ocean there). Hence focus for me was not on composition as much – but more about the technical aspects required to photograph an eclipse.

With most of the world actively using ISO paper sizes, it would be far easier for framer producers to recognise that they should start producing frames that support internationally recognised standards, rather than trying to maintain antiquated North American paper sizes. This is just inefficient for international producers, and I’m sure they would love the US and Canada to adopt international standard paper sizes, so that they don’t have to keep producing paper for the North American market. If North Americans want to keep using different paper from the rest of the world, then surely their internal market would pick up on the opportunity?

I have my own personal beef about dealing with material sent out by professional organisations that are based in North America, in that the material does not sit nicely with the rest of our ISO standard pages that we use. The sooner North America looks to change and work with the rest of the world, the better off we will all be.

I haven’t actually printed many of my own photos recently, and it is something I’ll be getting onto soon, but we’ve always had the reverse curse – all our paper is ISO, but frames and software always talks about inches such as 4×5, 4×6, 5×7 etc. This can only be resolved suitably in the long term with decent international standards, of course, this is going to mean a few bumps along the way for all photographers – no matter whether we stand on the metric or imperial side of the line.