Pragmatism in the real world

2023 in pictures

As we finish 2023 and look forward to 20024, I have had an enjoyable time looking back at the photos I took throughout the year. As with the last 10 years, I have managed to take a least one photo every day as part of my Project 365, which allows me to remember what happened during this year of my life and reflect on the year as I usually do. January I like to start… continue reading.

Use ExifTool to remove private data in images

I'm a huge fan of ExifTool for manipulating EXIF data in images as it really is the Swiss Army knife for all things metadata related with images. Recently, I wanted to strip some privacy-related metadata from some photos; specifically location, people and keywords. That is, I wanted to keep the title, the camera settings, the creator, and so on, but remove information that pertains to people and place. This is the script that I wrote:… continue reading.

2022 in pictures

We've reached the end of 2022. We're a little bit further from the COVID-19 pandemic and I've travelled more this year too. A bitter-sweet year when a close friend died and I managed to catch COVID-19 again, but fortunately wasn't as affected as last year and recovered more quickly. I continued to take a photo every day though my Project 365 which allows me to appreciate what happened during this year of my life. January… continue reading.

Writing a Lightroom Classic plug-in

As part of my migration to Lightroom Classic from Photos, I needed to recreate my folder and album structure. In Photos, folders container albums (or other folders) and albums contain photos. An album cannot contain a folder. This maps directly to Lightroom Classic which has "collection sets" for folders and "collections" for albums. To transfer the folder and album information over to Lightroom Classic, I wrote an Apple Script for Photos that added a keyword… continue reading.

Migrating to Lightroom Classic from Apple Photos

I recently moved over to Adobe's Lightroom Classic from Apple's Photos in order to have more flexible non-destructive editing features – in particular local brushes. Rather confusingly, there's also another Adobe product called Lightroom which is a new build for cloud-based storage which doesn't (yet?) have all the features of Lightroom Classic. In particular, the lack of virtual copies and smart collection sets make Lightroom feel like a step backwards from Photos, while Lightroom Classic… continue reading.

Analysing the focal length of my photos

I'm currently thinking about upgrading my camera to an EOS R or Z6 and, as result, I'm thinking about which lenses I should get. While discussing options with Stuart, I wondered which were my favourite focal lengths for the photos that I've taken in the past. To work this out, I decided to use the wonderful exiftool and some scripting. This is the analyse.sh script: #!/bin/bash DIR="$1" if [ "$DIR" == "" ]; then echo… continue reading.