2014 – Page 6 – Just thoughts

In an earlier post (in 2012) I detailed how I went about integrating my photography with the technology I use for post-processing and publishing. In what is a fast moving world everything is in need of constant review and revision

I use three cameras. The main one is the Sony Alpha 700 – it uses Compact Flash cards but I usually transfer pictures off it using the USB cable because my MacBook Pro and Windows 7 machines are set up for SD cards. The everyday camera (used on walks as well) is now a Sony NEX-6 – it uses SD cards, but again I tend to use the cable to transfer pictures. I use it also for short video clips. It’s worth noting that I have several Compact Flash and SD cards. I try NOT to delete any pictures from a card (apart from obvious rejects) until I’ve uploaded the images into Lightroom. Finally I use my iPhone 4s for both pictures and video clips using the Capture app, although I have had difficulties with it as described previously in this post.

Incidentally, the iPad with the Camera Connector kit also works reasonably well and is a good travelling companion with the two cameras. I intend to experiment with the mobile version of Lightroom on the iPad as soon as I have the time … but I’ll leave that for another post.

If you read the earlier post you’ll see reference to using iCloud to synchronise images between systems. Not any longer. I found that “managing iCloud” and iTunes synchronisation was just something I didn’t want to engage with. At that time, I’d also switched-off Google+ Instant Upload (now Auto Backup) for Photos on the iPhone/iPad – did I really want a double dose of synchronisation? I wasn’t using Dropbox to synchronise either.

So … you’ll gather I changed my mind. This occurred principally because I changed my thoughts on how I was going to use Lightroom. I moved to a strategy of storing all my images, together with the main Lightroom catalogue, on an external USB disk. That meant the external hard disk became a hub for my photography. As long as images got uploaded to the disk and added to this catalogue, all would be well and synchronisation was unnecessary. I backup the catalogue when closing Lightroom, and the images at the time of uploading them into Lightroom. [With a secondary periodic backup of the external hard disk to satisfy my paranoia.] I move between the MacBook Pro and the WinPC and the move is seemless.

And as for the iPhone photos? Well I created an IFTTT (If This Then That) recipe to move images from my iPhone Camera Roll to a Folder called Camera Roll on my Google Drive. I also Enabled Google Drive as a source for Photos when posting from Google+. With that in place, after possibly some editing in Snapseed or Camera+, the act of saving to my iPhone Camera Roll, added the image to the Camera Roll folder on my Google Drive. I could then import the image into Lightroom from that Google Drive folder, as well as have the capability of posting directly to Google+ (the only social media platform I use) from my desktop browser.

So nearly all my images are imported into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (v.4.4) being placed in a Folder for the Year, within a Sub-folder for the import-date, residing on the external USB disk with a Backup Copy of the imported pictures being made at the same time automatically to a folder on a different drive either on the MacBook Pro, or the WinPC. The import is controlled by a Pre-set in Lightroom which I change every year to reflect the change in year folder. The backup folders are cleared-out periodically after other scheduled backups have taken place.

After processing images in Lightroom, which includes tagging them and adding them to Collections they can be exported as JPEGs to Picasaweb or to the Google Drive folder as a Hard Disk export – for sharing in Google+, or to 500px, or Flickr (all using Lightroom Plugins).

Why the image of an iris? Couldn’t think of anything more different from what I’ve been writing about 🙂

A long overdue post on the way I go about blogging. It would be too grandiose to call it a strategy, but actually that’s a reasonable way of describing what I’ve been trying to work out in my mind.

The first thing (as ever with blogging) is context and identity. This “problem” has led me to create different blogs for different purposes. This in itself has caused me problems of identity and of course the targeting of posts to different audiences. [At least in my mind, if not in practice.] This led to a proliferation of blogs on different platforms and a sparsity of posts on nearly all of them :-(. This had to stop!

Some of these issues were also resolved to a large extent by using Google+ and Circles. However the one insurmountable issue appeared to be the spamming of Circles with Public posts – I have come to the realisation that I can’t solve that one without going down the separate identities again, and I’ve come to the conclusion I just can’t do that. I want simplicity, not complexity – so “spamming” it would appear is unavoidable! Actually, it’s not so much spamming as a challenge to me to get people learning a different way of looking at posts :-).

If you think of it, using Google+ is akin to reading a newspaper and absolutely no one reads a whole newspaper from cover to cover … do they? So, I’ll just be sending an explanatory message to my Google+ Circles requesting tolerance and suggesting they just ignore anything that has the word Public after my name :-).

The second issue is where to blog – what platform to use and how to integrate them with social media. For a long time I’ve used Blogger as well as WordPress. That had to stop. The latter is so much a better platform than the former, even if Blogger did integrate so much better with the other Google services. However, WordPress gets better all the time, and in its hosted form the flexibility it offers, and the integration you get by using the Jetpack plugin, creates a platform that is a joy to use. So I decided that my Private (mainly family) blog(s) would remain on Blogger, and so gain from the close integration with Google+, but that my two remaining Public-facing blogs would move to a hosted WordPress platform.

Here I must put in a plug for 5quidhost who (as well as being a UK-based hosting company, which I appreciate and would wish to support in any case) are also incredibly good in their email support and account administration and whose response time for readers in the UK is very good. They have an easily understandable approach to hosting which allows a try-before-you-buy free hosting account before you decide on the scale of hosting you want.

I also would highly recommend DomainMonster for domain registration. Again their dashboard is the easiest to understand of any hosting organisation I’ve seen or used. I moved a number of domains to them from another domain registry a couple of years ago and this went remarkably smoothly. They’ve got a very satisfied customer too!

So, I now have two Public-facing blogs – this one, and one – “Moments like these …” to focus on my photography hobby. They both integrate seamlessly with my social media accounts and I believe now that I’ll be able to keep both reasonably active.

Issues? Well … yes! I thought I’d like to share with you what I’ve learnt from my self-hosting experience. I’ve found that it’s absolutely a time-saver to have a development platform with loads of space that I can have a number of blogs hosted on – as I do authoring and design work for others as well. Using this platform led me to realise a number of things which I wanted to share.

Firstly, store your images off your blog – use flickr, Google+ photos, whatever, and link to them in your posts. This reduces the space used by your blog and therefore the cost of the hosting at very little decrease in the speed of loading a page.

Secondly, be absolutely ruthless in your choice of widgets and plugins. Only use ones that do not impact on the speed of loading a page. Then having made your choice, not only de-activate the plugin but delete it as well – the space and speed you gain by doing this for a number of plugins is remarkable.

Thirdly, only use Responsive themes. There are plenty of them available for free at WordPress.org. Doing this will make the rendering of your posts on mobile devices so much better and easier and the effect is remarkable. It’s like looking at different blogs, every time you look at a post on a different device. Choose the theme that makes your post look best on those multiple platforms.

Fourthly, don’t be scared at the thought of “messing” with your theme. There’s a huge community of wordpress bloggers who will help you create and edit your first child-theme and after that you’ll fly! In fact there’s even a widget or two to help you do the job.

And that’s about it. I hope to have the opportunity to plug (sic) the plugins I’ve found most useful – it may be of use to someone – in a later post. That’s for another day.

Tag: 2014

Photography, technology and workflow – a further update

On self-hosting WordPress blogs