Photo album

If someone were to ask me what I can suggest for putting up photos online, I would suggest them to use Flikr, Imagestation, or Picasa. I use Flickr myself from time to time, to post a few photos here and there, and these photos are really for public viewing. For everything else, I use a photo album software on my web server at home. I manage about 20,000 pictures. My home album is password protected so only family and friends may view them.

I started out with a software called Yappa-NG (Yappa, next generation). It is a great piece of software written in php. Its design is simple but effective. No database required. Everything is stored on the filesystem. When you create a new album, Yappa-NG creates a directory. You can then dump all your pictures in that directory and the first time you browse through it with your web browser, Yappa-NG builds the thumbnails and a smaller version of the original image. You can add captions to the images and create sub-folders.

Earlier in the fall, I was introduced to JAlbum. It is a Java software that runs on your desktop. With it, you can build an album in a matter of minutes. It will create an album on your desktop computer and can publish the album to a website. I used it a few times and like the web interface for viewing the albums. Very nice interface I need to say and the skin can change. There is only one thing I did not like about JAlbum and that is it is a desktop software. You create an album then upload it to a website. It is not a server-side software like Yappa-NG.

A couple of months thereafter, I was introduced to Gallery2, a php-based photo album. It functions like Yappa-NG, being a server-side software, but is much more flexible. It does sport more features than Yappa-NG but in the end, I only use a small number of its entire set of features. Overall, I do like it. However, I found a glitch -- it was not able to process the 3000 pictures I uploaded in a folder and a few subfolders (I had to process about 1000 pictures at a time) and it feels a bit slugglish too, slower than Yappa-NG. Nice interface though.

What am I looking for in a photo album?

1. Be able to create folders and subfolders.
2. Be able to upload images into a folder and subfolders using scp/sftp or Windows file sharing.
   
3. Be able to rotate pictures without modifying the original (Yappa-NG can rotate your picture but it will also modify the original).
4. Be able to add captions to the album and to each picture.
5. Be able to change skins / themes. The skin should allow for creating different borders around albums and photos. I like the single borders around the images in this blog. I also like the shadow effect that Gallery2 creates.
6. Password protection.
7. Fast.

So, I am now using two software on my home web server: Yappa-NG for my friends photos, and Gallery2 for family photos. Yappa-NG is the quicker of the two.

Maybe I will write my own photo album software. Maybe.

Where are you photos? Part 4.

I just completed what I had in mind one year ago. I moved the Slackware 11 installation off the IDE hard drive onto a compact flash disk. The host OS boots off the compact flash and runs off a ramdisk.

My next step is to reduce the size of the host OS -- as it is, when uncompressed, it occupies 128MB of disk space and therefore, 128MB of ramdisk. I have only 192MB of physical RAM so there is not much for the host OS. I suppose I could run the host OS with 64MB remaining though. This will be a long term project.

Not sure ...

I just found this photo I took in the summer in my backyard. I am not sure what it is about the photo but I like it a lot. It was either during the rain or after the rain that I popped the lens out and took the picture. There is an element of freshness and simplicity in the picture. There is that ruggedness of the stem, the needles and the thickness of the leaves, and yet there is the vulnerability of being exposed to the cold and rain. There is also something about the separation of the bright background on the left vs the darker background on the right. Not sure what it is ....

Where are your photos? Part 3.

This morning, I have reverted back to my Slackware 11 installation. The host OS must go on a compact flash card however, one of these days.

This time around, instead of building a 900GB RAID5 storage, I decided to build a 600GB RAID5 storage instead using three of the four drives I have. The fourth drive will be a hot spare. Why not build 900GB now? Because it will take me years to fill it up. By the time I get closer to 500GB, my drives might start to break down and I would have to replace them with bigger drives then.

At last count, I thought I have 30GB of images. It is actually 43GB.

Where are your photos? Part 2.

Well, FreeNAS has been a pain in the you know what. It has been so unstable. Constant writes to the disks tend to trigger something that causes the system to reboot. I have not quite figured out what the root cause is yet but am not about to spend any more time on this software. The problems I see with this unstability are the following.

• First, the unstability itself is the problem.
• Second, every time the machine reboots this way, one of the drives in the RAID5 configuration goes out of sync and needs to be re-synchronized with the other drives. On a 1TB storage, this takes 8 hours or so.
• Third, because of the abnormal reboot, fsck kicks in on reboot. This version of FreeNAS, based on FreeBSD 6.1, does not support the ext3 filesystem or any journal file system. I used UFS (version 1 and 2). You can imagine what happens when fsck kicks in. It's a lengthy scan through 1TB.

The lack of a journal really irks me so I am moving away from FreeNAS as fast as I built that initial interest in it. Maybe I will look at it again when they move over to FreeBSD 7.0.

It is too bad because I like the user interface (although more options can be added to it.)

Where are your photos?

As soon as you finished with one shooting session, you download your images to your computer and eventually burn the good photos onto WORM media, e.g. CD-ROM or DVD disks. If your computer disk drive crashes and this happens once every 5 years or so, you rebuild your image collection from your WORM library. What happens to all those wonderful pictures you recently downloaded from your camera though?

I have had too many disk drives failing on me in the past ten years that it is no longer funny. I hate to lose data. I would hate to lose those family photos you took on your vacation to the Bahamas. I would hate to have to restore 30GB worth of photos from CDs. I would also hate to see a CD go bad because of a scratch or over-exposure to the sun. Plastic material can get brittle over time.

Nothing lasts forever but I would still do backups onto CDR media. However, is there something you can do about your disk drive? Of course you can. Build some redundancy. You can build a secondary disk drive and periodically dump everything in the first drive to the second drive. You can still run into the issue of losing some data in between those dumps however, unless you always keep a copy of your photos on your camera until a dump has occurred. A little inconvenient -- I just want to remove all my photos from the camera and start shooting right away the next day.

My solution is to build a RAID storage system. You can buy one off the shelf these days but I am still a computer geek inside so I built a RAID5 storage with 4 x 300GB SATA300 drives. Last January, I assembled the unit from spare computer parts. I decided that I did not want to use a hardware RAID card because my speed requirements are not significant and the ease of hot swappable bays is not too important to me. I would also be locked in to the proprietary data storage format of the RAID controller manufacturer. I am open source and open community, so software RAID it was.

To add support for my 4 SATA drives, I ordered a new Promise SATA300-TX4 controller card. I do not recall how much it costed but it was a lot cheaper than any RAID controller card.

To get the storage going, I found an old 8GB IDE drive and installed Slackware 11 on it. It has full support for the SATA drives and built a RAID5 configuration from the 4 drives without a hitch. I had nearly 1TB of storage for just about $700.

This week, I realized I forgot something. The old 8GB IDE drive was not meant to stay in the system. Why build a RAID storage that is hosted by a drive that will soon die? The original idea was to run the host operating system on the 8GB IDE drive as a test then transfer the image onto a Compact Flash drive. Well, it is not all that easy and I got lazy so I never moved the image.

I could not afford to wait for that eventuality though. The 8GB drive will die and with the luck that I have it may die tomorrow. So, it has to go. Now, I could really try to fit the image onto a Compact Flash drive but in the end, I decided that I no longer want to deal with command line management for this mass storage. I decided to go all GUI, and I have to do this before my collection of photos grows too big because the storage format is likely going to change -- I already had something in mind for the move.

Last night, I downloaded FreeNAS (freenas.org) and burned the image onto a Compact Flash drive. It is based on FreeBSD and is only 30MB or so big. I have a new RAID5 volume now and am am waiting for it to finish building itself before dumping over 30GB of photos back on it.

Damaged sensor

To the right is a plain shot of a corner of my room to show a problem I just noticed of the CCD sensor. After 15000 photos, the sensor shows some wear and tear. It appears that 4 pixels on the sensor have been blown out for some reason. I gotta send my D80 in for repair. That would mean I am camera-less for 2 or 3 weeks.

The Mississauga repair centre opens from 8:45am to 4:45pm.

Change the angle

A photo can look uninteresting if it looks like everything else that you see everyday. If you rotate your camera or change your shooting angle, the result may offer a new and fresh look at the same otherwise boring subject.

The following photo was at the Allen shopping plaza in Allen, TX. I was passing by this grass in a huge concrete pot. The grass is probably a meter tall so it comes up to my chest. A straight, level shot of it would look uninteresting, especially when the background is the parking lot and there were some lamp posts around it. I did not like the background or the posts -- too much distraction -- so I kneeled down and angled my camera up for a shot of the grass. The background is a beautiful pure blue sky, no clouds in sight. The warm western sun lights up one face of the grass nicely, and the blowing wind certainly adds a better action effect to the shot.

If I did not tell you where the photo was taken from, would it look like a Texas photo, i.e. plains of grass, cows, and horses? :)

Up a notch

Well, I am back in Toronto now. I took well over 3000 pictures in Texas. Of course, many were just repeats. Looking back, in terms of lighting, I think one of the best times during the day for taking pictures is near dawn and dusk. You can also play with the shutter speed to create different effects.

Here, I upped the speed by 1.3 f/stop.



A little brighter for some detail but still retain some contrast:

ISO settings

Here I go, forgetting to reset my ISO settings once more. Last night as we were driving home, I cranked up the ISO setting to 3200 ("H1.0" on the display) to shoot a couple of restaurant and highway signs. I forgot to bring it back down to ISO 200 that I use for most of my shots.

Anyways, as it were, it allowed me to do a quick comparison between ISO 3200 and ISO 200. After shooting two photos I looked at the LCD display. Sure enough, a photo taken at ISO 3200 is very grainy but not too bad if you keep the picture size small:


It looks similar to those images on a VGA screen in the 90's or images produced from a dot matrix printer. It also looks similar to a fuzzy picture taken at say ISO 200 and sharpened with software. However, a fuzzy picture sharpened with software would look a lot worse than this.

The same shot at ISO 200:



The pictures were taken at 7:20am CST, shot through a pane of glass.

Another shot behind the windows:


Well, I am packing my camera gears up for my flight back home this afternoon.

What will they think of next

As I am preparing for my flight back to Toronto, I thought I'd re-check what I thought I read earlier this week. I was on a .gov website that talked about a new rule for flyers carrying rechargeable batteries, effective January 1, 2008. As it stands, the rule applies to Lithium-based batteries, the kind you use for your digital cameras, in checked-in luggage. I have 10 Nickel Metal Hydride rechargeable AA batteries for the strobe, so they are ok. I also have two extra Lithium-ion batteries for my camera though. That might be a problem, so I had to check. Here was the .gov website:

http://safetravel.dot.gov/whats_new_batteries.html

I could not find the original .gov website initially. I found this good web article that also talks about it:

http://www.divephotoguide.com/articles/flying_with_lithium_batteries

Carrying the two extra Lithium-ion batteries with me on the plane should be ok, except that I have no idea how many grams of Lithium content they have. Well, remember the other battery is actually dead so if there is a problem with too many batteries, I would just throw it away. :)

What will they think of next.

Backup battery or not?

That is the wrong question. Of course you need a backup battery for your camera. How many times do you find yourself out of battery during a shoot? Me, a couple of times, just enough it looked like I was not learning my lesson.

I did buy a backup EN-EL3e battery in the summer. It saved me on multiple occassions thereafter -- I tend to shoot over 300 pictures in a single day. So, why am I writing about backup batteries? It is obvious enough you need a backup battery, yes? But, do you know you should not go cheap on backup batteries? After having used two no-name brands made in China (one for my Canon PowerShot SD110 compact camera, and another for my Nikon D80) I would say, stay away from them. They may be cheap but after maybe 10 charge cycles, they break down. My EN-EL3e backup battery is dead after less than 10 charge cycles.

I am not going to purchase another EN-EL3e battery as I have a battery grip with a built-in battery, in addition to the original Nikon EN-EL3e battery. I will wait to see how long the battery grip will last, although I have a feeling that it is no longer pulling the weight that was advertised. It is supposed to store 2.5x as much charge as the normal EN-EL3e battery, so effectively, you should be able to take 2.5x times as many photos. My observation thus far has been purely qualitative. I am starting a quantitative measurement now.

First day of 2008

Here I am back in Frisco, TX. I could not take a picture of the rising sun on the first day of the new year but then I was able to capture it before it draws its curtain for the day.

Down in Texas, they get one extra hour of daylight more than we do in Toronto. The sun does not set until 5:30pm and because there is virtually no clouds in the sky, the atmospheric transition from yellow to blue is simply a must see sight.

This shot was taken at the Allen Premium Outlets plaza in Allen, a city south of Frisco. We were walking about to find any good deals. Well, it was not worth the walk. I did not think anything was of that great of a value for the buck. I would just wait till I return to Toronto.

Anyways, I focused on the branches and leaves and locked it before reframing the shot. For the shot, the D80 can focus on an object in the far left of the screen on its focus area but it was quicker and easier to focus then reframe. The difference in distance is negligible.

Happy New Year!