Recently I wrote about using OS X "Image Capture" for photo Scanning. I've gotten some praise for the results, so I figured I'd detail my current scanning workflow.
My goal is fairly quick image acquisition of about 3,000 low quality 3x5 and 4x6 prints. Speed is more important than quality. The very best images, probably less than fifty, will be rescanned using a high quality Nikon Film scanner. After scanning is completed the prints will be discarded but I will keep the negatives in a single large binder.
Scan output is, for now, manged in iPhoto. If Aperture ever allowed us to edit date metadata I'd use Aperture. [foul language censored]
I thought I'd be doing this using a sheet feeder, dropping the prints in and returning hours later. I can't find a decent one for working with prints; the only one I can find is the SnapScan and they've historically not imaged prints. I'm using an old Epson 1660 Photo scanner, but if my secret weapon continues working I'll invest in the Epson V700 -- if I do that I might try bulk film scanning instead.
My secret weapon is the combination of an 8 yo with a Lego habit, OS X "Image Capture", and Aperture post-processing. Ben is willing to work for low wages [1] and Image Capture is simple enough he can go through 20-40 scans while I work on an adjacent machine.
He scans at 400 dpi with no adjustment and the images are output as TIFF. The results at this point are mediocre.
When Ben is done I drop the TIFFs into Aperture and optimize one image: auto-level, sharpening, noise reduction and contrast enhancement with some mild color saturation adjustment. I then apply the set to all images. (I think I can save it as a standard setting but I haven't done that yet. iPhoto 8 can also be used in a similar way, but iPhoto 7 would be very inefficient.)
A few minutes later Aperture is finished. I quickly review the results but usually I'm done with the initial work. I then crop the images fairly extensively. Lastly I export as 98% JPEG and I delete the TIFFs.
The JPEGs are renamed using 'A Better Finder Rename', since Image Capture adds a counter to the string "Scan" I rename "Scan " to YYMMDD_RollNumber_# where # is the counter produced by Image Capture. YYMMDD is based on the date of the roll, and Roll_Number comes from the prints. The roll number binds the roll of JPEGs with the set of prints with the set of negatives. I don' t capture the actual print or negative number, the roll ID is good enough for my purposes.
I then drop the JPEGs into iPhoto and add ratings, date estimates, and comments. I choose one date for a range of prints and add it with a 1 minute separation using iPhoto's batch update. The iPhoto roll information includes the YYMMDD_RollNumber identifier. The five star prints will later be replaced by VueScan negative scans from a Nikon CoolScan V.
The resulting images are impressively better looking, on screen, than the original prints.
[1] Amazingly this is legal for one's own child. I should mention that once he can do this without my help his wages will rise to whatever he can get from the neighbors for their scans. Of course I could start charging him for the scanner...
Update: This article on scanning with Aperture is pretty good. Note that Aperture has a big date problem. You can't revise the acquisition date. True, you can set a date in the IPTC extended image creation date field, but Aperture mostly ignores that field value. I use Aperture for editing, but iPhoto for archiving.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Microsoft's Access 2003 to Access 2007 animated reference guide (Flash)
Via Microsoft's Access blog: a flash app that shows where an Access 2003 command moved to in Access 2007: Interactive: Access 2003 to Access 2007 command reference guide. There's also a link to documentation.
I'm not a fan of the ribbon bar, though I suspect I could come up with a defense for it. It provides zero value to me when using Access 2007, in fact in most ways Access 2007 is either a weak improvement or a regression. The ribbon bar works a lot better in Word, and Excel seems to have mostly ignored it.
I have to give credit though, this is one amazing Flash tutorial. I couldn't figure out where "compact and repair" went to, this tutorial answered my question immediately. On the other hand, it didn't tell me where the dependencies feature went. I think that's supposed to be resolved by the Access 2007 table/query view, but that appears to be broken for now.
Del.icio.us: maybe I should try it again
Recording Artist: Crazy Del.icio.us is one of the best introductions to the Del.icio.us value proposition I've read. I've tried them off and on again, this suggests I should go for another try.
Why we need something better than HFS+: bit errors are cumulative
I hope this analysis is not correct, but if it is then there's no debating that we need an HFS+ replacement. The geeks I read generally favor ZFS+, perhaps with Apple contributing improvements.
Recording Artist: ZFS Hater Redux
Here's a fairly typical Seagate drive with a capacity of ~150GB = ~1.2 x 1012 bits. The recoverable error rate is listed as 10 bits per 1012 bits. Let's put those numbers together. That means that if you read the entire surface of the disk, you'll typically get twelve bits back that are wrong and which a retry could have fixed.
Yes, really. Did you catch the implications of that? Silent single-bit errors are happening today. They happen much more often at high-end capacities and utilizations, and we often get lucky because some types of data (video, audio, etc) are resistant to that kind of single-bit error. But today's high end is tomorrow's medium end, and the day after tomorrow's low end. This problem is only going to get worse.
Worse, bit errors are cumulative. If you read and get a bit error, you might wind up writing it back out to disk too. Oops! Now that bit error just went from transient to permanent.
Still think end-to-end data integrity isn't worth it?
I wonder how NTFS compares? Too bad it's not open source :-)!
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Ecto - the first good blogging app for OS X?
I've tried several OS X blogging tools, but none of them compared to Windows Live Writer. This post, however, was authored in Ecto 3 beta from infinite-sushi.com, and it comes close to WLW. It even supports OS X services! The link to the "alpha" version in the news blog actually downloads the beta version, I'm on 3.0b2.
I'll have more to say on Ecto as I test it, but it's great to see this emerging.
Outlook and automatic task lookup based on email subject
Microsoft Outlook is a great, shambling, brute of an application. In the fold of Office it has obliterated all traces of its betters, it stands unchallenged atop a mountain of the digital dead.
The beast is encrusted with the weapons of forgotten wars. Many barely work. Outlook 2003 [1] still lacks a cross-PST accessible object identifier, so neither Microsoft nor developers can create a robust object link. Sorting a categories view still undoes the view settings -- a bug dating back the 90s that was only fixed in Outlook 2007. Outlook 2003 tags (categories) are still stored in the registry and the master category list has been utterly broken since the dawn of time (happily, it can be ignored).
All the same, in a stupid and accidental sort of way, Outlook is powerful. If you can figure out where all the sharp edges are, if you learn to step around the explosive charges, if you have good backups and you know all the command line repair utilities and the caches and configuration files to periodically delete, it can be sort of tamed.
I have, over the course of many years of trial and pain, figured out how to make the combination of Outlook and Windows Desktop Search work. Yes, it periodically blows up in a very impressive fashion, but that's life with Microsoft. Only Excel is immune to this behavior.
The combination of full text search across GB PST files, the ability to effortlessly rename email subject lines, drag and drop transformation from one type (ex. email) to another (ex. task), the quick tag (category) and the ability to set metadata (category, due date) values by dragging and dropping between view "headings", the robust metadata query language and hierarchical view srtructures -- put them all together and one can painfully create a semi-stable workable PIM environment.
It only took years of work. I could write a book, indeed I've taught around a draft of such a book in my corporate life.
Apple could do far better -- if they wanted to. I don't think they want to. Microsoft could fix Outlook [1], but I sincerely doubt they care. There will never be a challenger to Outlook on a Microsoft platform. Google now ...
Well, I can dream.
Which comes, at last, to what I want.
We all know that managing work by email is the road to damnation. Work must be managed to tasks, which in Outlook are created by renaming subject lines [2] then dragging and dropping email to the task icon. Tasks get priorities, and depending on priorities they may be assigned due dates, calendar slots, and category attributes.
The process of creating these relationships between task, email and appointment could all be made much more fluid, but I'm asking for less than that. All I want is a quick way to find tasks based on the subject lines of incoming messages. Then I can update existing tasks rather than creating new tasks and then resolving the redundant tasks.
Put a button next to the subject line -- or on the email taskbar somewhere. When I redo the subject line [2] I'll click the button and the application will run a full text search using WDS to locate matching tasks. I'll then select the task I want.
I think an Outlook developer could probably do this. I'll pay $30 for this feature.
Go for it.
[1] I've used Outlook 2007 a bit, but we're still stuck on 2003. My sense is that 2007 has fewer bugs but probably no significant new features.
[2] I am running a one person campaign in a large publicly traded corporation for better subject lines. I think it's slowly working, but for the foreseeable future being able to effortlessly redo subject lines by clicking and typing in the subject field will remain one of Outlook's best features.
The beast is encrusted with the weapons of forgotten wars. Many barely work. Outlook 2003 [1] still lacks a cross-PST accessible object identifier, so neither Microsoft nor developers can create a robust object link. Sorting a categories view still undoes the view settings -- a bug dating back the 90s that was only fixed in Outlook 2007. Outlook 2003 tags (categories) are still stored in the registry and the master category list has been utterly broken since the dawn of time (happily, it can be ignored).
All the same, in a stupid and accidental sort of way, Outlook is powerful. If you can figure out where all the sharp edges are, if you learn to step around the explosive charges, if you have good backups and you know all the command line repair utilities and the caches and configuration files to periodically delete, it can be sort of tamed.
I have, over the course of many years of trial and pain, figured out how to make the combination of Outlook and Windows Desktop Search work. Yes, it periodically blows up in a very impressive fashion, but that's life with Microsoft. Only Excel is immune to this behavior.
The combination of full text search across GB PST files, the ability to effortlessly rename email subject lines, drag and drop transformation from one type (ex. email) to another (ex. task), the quick tag (category) and the ability to set metadata (category, due date) values by dragging and dropping between view "headings", the robust metadata query language and hierarchical view srtructures -- put them all together and one can painfully create a semi-stable workable PIM environment.
It only took years of work. I could write a book, indeed I've taught around a draft of such a book in my corporate life.
Apple could do far better -- if they wanted to. I don't think they want to. Microsoft could fix Outlook [1], but I sincerely doubt they care. There will never be a challenger to Outlook on a Microsoft platform. Google now ...
Well, I can dream.
Which comes, at last, to what I want.
We all know that managing work by email is the road to damnation. Work must be managed to tasks, which in Outlook are created by renaming subject lines [2] then dragging and dropping email to the task icon. Tasks get priorities, and depending on priorities they may be assigned due dates, calendar slots, and category attributes.
The process of creating these relationships between task, email and appointment could all be made much more fluid, but I'm asking for less than that. All I want is a quick way to find tasks based on the subject lines of incoming messages. Then I can update existing tasks rather than creating new tasks and then resolving the redundant tasks.
Put a button next to the subject line -- or on the email taskbar somewhere. When I redo the subject line [2] I'll click the button and the application will run a full text search using WDS to locate matching tasks. I'll then select the task I want.
I think an Outlook developer could probably do this. I'll pay $30 for this feature.
Go for it.
[1] I've used Outlook 2007 a bit, but we're still stuck on 2003. My sense is that 2007 has fewer bugs but probably no significant new features.
[2] I am running a one person campaign in a large publicly traded corporation for better subject lines. I think it's slowly working, but for the foreseeable future being able to effortlessly redo subject lines by clicking and typing in the subject field will remain one of Outlook's best features.
Monday, October 08, 2007
The iPhone is not all bad and Fortune's new Apple blog
Rob Griffiths has some kind things to say about the iphone: Macworld: Editors' Notes: Ten of my favorite iPhone things. He even pointed to an unconvincing, but not irrational, explanation for the stupid headphone jack.
It's a soothing story, it helps reconcile me to the bitter truth that I'm going to have to replace my wretched Palm Tungsten E2 with .... another E2. Not to mention that I will have to continue to live with my thrice cursed Motorola RAZR. [John takes another slug of scotch.] The iPhone doesn't do what I need.
I've largely given up on Apple producing the solutions for my n-of-1 market, though I have come up with a theory that suggests some missing features may have been belayed by the seven month slip of OS X 10.5. So I really need third party apps on the iPhone, because the long tail means even a market too small for Apple to notice can feed a hungry developer or two.
Which brings me to an excellent new Apple blog from (of all places) CNN/Fortune: Apple 2.0.
Apple to Open iPhone in particular smells like a leak from somewhere in Apple. It alleges that Apple is going to adopt a regulated development model for the iPhone similar to what Apple did for a few months to a year after the release of the very first Mac. I think it may have also been the development model for the Lisa. I think I could live with that, so I've another reason to hope for an iPhone in 2008 -- even if I have to buy 10.5 and spend $200 on yet another obsolete and increasingly flaky Palm device.
Continuing the theme of "things are not as bad as they seem" Apple 2.0 claims Apple's iPhone attack was manslaughter, not murder. It seems that iPhone 1.0 is held together by glue, bailing wire, and hope. Significant updates will destroy a small percentage of millions of unhacked phones, as well as a larger percentage of hacked phones. This is more plausible than one might think because Apple has a similar, but smaller, problem with OS X updates. Any major OS X update has a small, but real, risk of hosing the OS -- which is why I reboot my machines prior to an OS X update and don't touch it during the update process.
I think I've exhausted my iPhone patience now ...
It's a soothing story, it helps reconcile me to the bitter truth that I'm going to have to replace my wretched Palm Tungsten E2 with .... another E2. Not to mention that I will have to continue to live with my thrice cursed Motorola RAZR. [John takes another slug of scotch.] The iPhone doesn't do what I need.
I've largely given up on Apple producing the solutions for my n-of-1 market, though I have come up with a theory that suggests some missing features may have been belayed by the seven month slip of OS X 10.5. So I really need third party apps on the iPhone, because the long tail means even a market too small for Apple to notice can feed a hungry developer or two.
Which brings me to an excellent new Apple blog from (of all places) CNN/Fortune: Apple 2.0.
Apple to Open iPhone in particular smells like a leak from somewhere in Apple. It alleges that Apple is going to adopt a regulated development model for the iPhone similar to what Apple did for a few months to a year after the release of the very first Mac. I think it may have also been the development model for the Lisa. I think I could live with that, so I've another reason to hope for an iPhone in 2008 -- even if I have to buy 10.5 and spend $200 on yet another obsolete and increasingly flaky Palm device.
Continuing the theme of "things are not as bad as they seem" Apple 2.0 claims Apple's iPhone attack was manslaughter, not murder. It seems that iPhone 1.0 is held together by glue, bailing wire, and hope. Significant updates will destroy a small percentage of millions of unhacked phones, as well as a larger percentage of hacked phones. This is more plausible than one might think because Apple has a similar, but smaller, problem with OS X updates. Any major OS X update has a small, but real, risk of hosing the OS -- which is why I reboot my machines prior to an OS X update and don't touch it during the update process.
I think I've exhausted my iPhone patience now ...
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