In 1986, my father took my brother and I on a trip to Europe - mostly Germany, both East and West, as well as some time in Yugoslavia and Austria, and of course Lichtenstein.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped at this pretty impressive looking palace:

Nearly 20 years later, I have no clue which palace it was, but I’d like to know so I can reference it. Hmmm… here’s an interesting shot. And probably one I over-exposed (14 year olds with manual-everything Yashica cameras tend to do that):

Huh… I wonder if at full resolution that sign says where we are…

Chinesisches Teehaus? Hmmm…. wonder what good ol’ MSN Search has to say… no, no, no…hey, what are these refs to Sanssouci Park? Bingo! This was the summer palace of Fredrich II, his “Sanssouci Palace.” Sans souci is French for “without worry.”

I love my job.

As faithful readers (Hi Meg!) will recall, I’ve been scanning old photos into digital form. I’m about halfway done with my photo scanning, which is to say I’ve completed the wedding album and am working through maybe 50 rolls of random 35mm and APS film.

While I was waiting for a scan to complete tonight, I decided to take a look-see though a box of photos from my late great-aunt and uncle, June and John Marcinkevich. One of the first things I found was a nice frame with three kids pictured, and on the back a description of the kids, who are the children of Joe and Kathy. Apparently, they’re the neice and nephew of June and John. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them before. And now that June and John are gone, I’m not sure I’ll ever find out.

Which brings me to today’s deep thought. A lot of people are doing stuff that amounts to putting your entire life in digital form… some colleagues at Microsoft BARC (Bay Area Research Center, the Shoebox Greetings of MSR) are working on this thing called My Life Bits. The idea is straightforward enough: put everything in digital form and store it. No more writing letters, that’s e-mail. Christmas Cards? That’s what Jaquie Lawson is for. Photos? Canon, Nikon, or pretty much every frickin’ phone made is the past year. So it’s easier and easier to record your entire life.

Say June and John did this. And whereever they digitized things had full backup and recovery, so nothing was lost. Would I have any further idea who Joe and Kathy are? Like their last names… or whether or not they’re still alive. How they’re related (I assume on John’s side, as I know my side of the family fairly well).

Knowing one way or the other won’t really affect my life. I doubt these folks live in Seattle, and judging by the photo style the kids are probably grown and gone on with their lives by now. But I found it an interesting lesson in thinking about things such as My Life Bits. When my daughter’s children look at my photos, they’ll probably know who the people are who are in them. But will they know why those people are in them? Will they know the stories that the pictures tell, or just that some people related to them happened to be in front of a camera? In looking at how I arranged my photo gallery, right now, no. There’s just a title for a photo shoot… no names, places, story, or whatnot. I just scanned in a thousand pictures from our wedding. The event needs no explanation besides “Erik Selberg marries Mary Kaye Rodgers.” But that isn’t even the caption… it’s “2000-07-20_Wedding_Pictures.” It’s assumed that it’s our wedding and people viewing it know that…. a grandchild might also, but would a great-grandchild? Or a niece or nephew?

So, looks like I’m going to need to put down some more descriptions of events. Hopefully, I’ll have the patience to do it well, but who knows what I may miss for someone who doesn’t know my history (for example, I now know the importance of last names). But the issue is still there… without some way for people to meaningfully store both the facts and the backstory around their lives, personal histories will still mostly die with the person. I’ll leave the pondering of how to solve this for the comments.

I’ll gripe about the lack of IPTC tomorrow.

Well, today I finally finished the scanning and hopefully the photoshopping of the black and white weddings. Some 500 black and whites… each scanned and photoshopped. I’ve been learning a bit about PhotoShop. Mostly, I start with the Polaroid Dust & Scratches plugin I mentioned below. I used to use the PhotoShop Dust and Noise for the early photos, which is kinda like a self-adjusting color fill. It works well for white dust blots, but horrible on scratches. I then started using the Clone tool (looks like a blotter) and then the Healing tool (looks like a band-aid)… the clone tool is good for big patterns, like skin or clothing. The Healing tool is OK, and sometimes does OK on scratches across big areas (again, clothing and swatches of skin or background). Nothing really helps scratches across detail.

The other thing I’m trying to determine is what caused the scratches I kept seeing on the pics… I wasn’t sure if it was the rollers on the Nikon Scanner or rollers from where they were developed when we had the prints done. I’m thinking it’s from previous developing, as I cleaned the rollers and sometimes see them, sometimes don’t. This also indicates it’s not likely dust on the scanning lens itself, and the parallel streaks just yell roller. Hmmm… frustrating. What I don’t know is if it’s a scratch (meaning film loss) or rubber residue (so cleaning would cure it). It probably doesn’t matter…. if we ever get more pictures done, we’ll let the developer deal with that. I suspect we will shortly… the nice thing about getting all these done is MK and I can now look at them and see if there are any we’d like to see blown up.

Oh, and yes, they’ll be turned into an album shortly.

So, a Nikon scanner and a couple digital cameras (Canon S500 point-and-shoot and the Nikon D70 SLR), and before I know it I have 10G worth of photos — not including thumbnails and all that rot. So, photo management has become rather interesting.

File storage
Right now, I have all my albums in a “pics” directory with various folders. This folder is on a RAID-1 (mirrored) 75G partition, and is backed up using a script I’ve hacked a bit called “snapback” that effectively uses rsync and cp -l to create backups on another box I have. The backup partition is also RAID-1, although I’ve been thinking that’s just overkill. The right thing to do would be take that second disk, stick it in an el-cheapo box, and take it to work so I have a remote backup in case of a fire or some such.

I spent a lot of time getting this set up, but it’s been working really well now so I don’t fret too much about it. I gotta say, I really enjoy the freedom of having all my files backed up every 6 hours, and only using disk space for files that change!

Album organization
I name my folders YYYY-MM-DD_Event_string. This is mostly because album, the primary program I use to generate photo albums, parses that string in a pretty way — it separates out the date and turns underscores into spaces. I’ve since started putting them under year-labelled directories, for example, “2005/2005-05-21_Great_Wall_Eriks_picks.”

One of the things album doesn’t do well is leave originals “alone.” It’s a simple script that sticks a “tn” directory in each album directory, along with an index.html file. Well, I’d rather have a pristine directory tree to work with. I also don’t want to waste 10G and deal with changes. Well, hard links to the rescue! Under pics, I have three folders:

• pics/__ORIGINALS__
• pics/GalleryMirror2
• pics/By_Date_and_Topic

I created By_Date_and_Topic and GalleryMirror2 via cp -l. I use album’s .hide_album magic file to have it ignore __ORIGINALS__ and GalleryMirror2, and thus album just leaves things in By_Date_and_Topic (and a few other files we’ll get to in a second).

Something I haven’t quite solved is keeping the three in sync… what I want to do is dump pictures into a folder, and then run some script or web page wizard that automatically creates the folders (after asking me for the event name), and copies them out. Right now I’m doing that manually, and it’s a drag.

Album and Gallery2
The reason for the separate directories is I’m playing with both album and Gallery2. Gallery2 is another photo-album generator. However, instead of being the “simple script with templates” model that album is, it’s more of a full-fledged beastie with database requirements and everything. The good news is it has a ton of additional features. The bad news is that it’s slower and a bit more of a pain to operate. I’m still trying to figure out which I like, thus I want to be able to deal with both for a while.

Process
Here’s what I want to do:

1. Upload pics from my camera somewhere.
2. Have some wizard automatically segment the photos into “shoots” - e.g. folders that group pictures taken about the same time into the same folder. Presumably, this is done by assuming photos taken within N seconds of each other are part of the same shoot, where N is something like 30 minutes and is adjustable.
3. Prompt me to name the shoots, and modify the contents if needed.
4. Save ‘em to an album, calculate thumbnails, and be done with it.
5. Oh, while it’s saving, it should auto-rotate the pics (in a lossless way for jpegs)

Optionally, there may be a sub-wizard that prompts me to write captions about a picture, or write a detailed description of an album. Or perhaps it has plug-ins so I can just auto-blog it or some such.

Oh, and what I really want is for all this to not be on my server. It’s reasonably fast enough when I’m sitting next to it, but DSL upload is pretty crappy. So, I need on the order of 20G starting to dump all these photos on.

Tags / Searches
One of the things I do with album is create directories and use symlinks to link albums from the By_Date_and_Topic directory into other special directories, such as Latest or Vacations. It’s easy enough, and as long as I don’t change the names of folders (which I rarely do), it works great. The problem is that it’s a bit of a pain to do this after I’ve done through all the work to do it. Perhaps things like auto-searches (Latest within N days) or Flickr-like tags would be a better solution… certainly symlinks are a kludge.

How close we are
We’re pretty close, but there’s still too much manual process all around. Importing new pics is the biggest issue… once they’re into an album or a gallery, we’re just talking about more features on the scripts. And they’re all perl or php, so that’s easy to do. But it’s still going to be tough to get this all working smoothly… and that’s the big issue, I think. Once you have lots of pictures, you want to move to a “deliver and dump” kind of model, as you have to deal in bulk.

Wonder who will come up with the right solution first.

Actually, I don’t. I love it. It’s great.

However, when you have to touch up 500+ black and whites, it gets old very, very, very fast.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been scanning in photos from our wedding. The photos were taken by Stephanie Cristalli, who does weddings in a photo-journalist style and is good with both color and black & whites. We hired her for I want to say 4 hours… maybe 5, and did roughly 50-50 color and black & white (although we had them printed in sepia).

The negatives (she returns the negatives… a must with any wedding photographer. The ones that want to keep the negatives and then sell you prints are a bit scammy IMHO) are in a number of these PrintFile polypropylene negative holders. Each slide holds one 36-print roll (6 strips of 6 frame negatives plus a seventh the leading bit of film that has a roll number on it). How many do we have? Color goes up to letter “O.” Quick, what number is O? …… 15. 15 rolls of 36 prints. However, that’s not too bad, as the Digital ICE on the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 does most of what we want, and we can just take the JPEG that it makes.

On to black and whites… well, the last PrintFile is labelled BB. So quick… 28 - 15 is…. yes, 13. 13 rolls of black and white… and 13 * 36 is…. 468. Granted, some didn’t come out at all, so maybe we’re looking at 450 here. Oh, and the Digital ICE won’t remove the dust and scratches, and Stephanie used Kodak TMAX 100, TMAX 400, and TMAX 3200 film. That’s professional black & white film, but sadly when scanned in infrared to detect dust and scratches (as the Digital ICE does), the silver on the film causes the dark portions to come up as dust — so Digital ICE just turns all gray to dark-gray portions of the frame black. So, you have to scan the photo as a TIFF file (20M each), pop it into Photoshop, run an initial pass using a dust & scratch removal filter (I’m using Polaroid’s now unsupported Dust and Scratch Removal Plug-in for Photoshop, but it’s also available stand-alone), and then look to see what gaping dust holes (big white dots) or scratches (long white streaks) were missed. Then, select an area around them and apply a darker filter (I typically use the built-in Photoshop Dust and Scratches filter @ radius of 25). Then, save it… I made an Action (a macro) that saves files as both a Black and White as well as a Sepia JPEG.

For scanning, I’m mid-way through Roll X… so only Y, Z, AA, and BB to go. Yay! However, for running through Photoshop, I’m only through S… so I’m behind by 4 and a half letters from where I’m scanning. And while scanning is slow (about 2 hours for 6 frames), it’s automated. You set up the scan, and then go do something else, like write a blog post or find new RSS feeds to read. With touch-up work, it’s a lot of load the frame, clean it up, look for defects, fix them, then save. It’s fast enough that it requires your complete attention, but slow enough when running the image through the filters that it sucks up time.

Blarg. Luckily, AFAIK this is the only B&W film I have, so I doubt I’ll have this problem again. But it’s still takin’ freakin’ forever!

Oh - huge shout-out to my brother for having a friend who works at Adobe and getting me Photoshop CS (well, the entire Adobe Creative Suite) for Christmas on the ol’ employee discount. I think this is one of the most used Christmas presents in years! (Although surprisingly enough, the most used Christmas present I’ve ever received is a set of 4 Pyrex bowls that my folks got for both myself and my brother over a decade ago… they’ve held up great to constant use. Go figure!)

So avid readers (hi Meg!) will recall that I’ve been mucking with the ol’ Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED scanning negatives. I’ve finished the near-600 color shots from our wedding, and now I’m working on the black and whites. They were taken using Kodak T-MAX 100, aka TMX 5052. Why does this matter? ‘cuz the Digital ICE that comes with the scanner won’t remove the dust and scratches, so after scanning the negatives look pretty crappy.

I wonder how the original prints came out so nice, given the condition of some of the negatives… but I digress.

I found a good link from Graf Photography: http://www.grafphoto.com/dust.htm, that helped out a ton. What I’ve ended up doing is using the Polaroid Dust & Scratch Remover as a plug-in to Photoshop, then manually touched up scratches and large dust points, mostly using the Photoshop CS Dust & Scratches filter. I’ve also made great use of the File Browser window, Actions (i.e. Macros), and the Automate feature of the File Browser window. It’s almost like a command line, just slower with more mouse clicks.

I’ll post up some of the results when done… some are still iffy (like those with lots of medium-sized scratches… drat), but a lot are turning out reasonably well. Yay!

So, I started running through wedding photos and saving as JPEG. Big mistake. Seems what is required is the Digital GEM, which is the grain remover — as the JPEGs are very, very grainy. Plus, with the GEM, which makes the picures better, they also compress by another 3-4M! So, less grain = smoother color = better compression. So a win all around!

But this means I gotta re-scan a bunch of pages… blarg.

More on the Film Scanner.

Without doing much, scanning a 35mm slide at 16 bit resolution without changing anything else gets you a 120M TIFF file. Yes, 120M, as in 122,927,684 bytes. Seems like a lot for a single picture, doesn’t it?

So, I started to look at the sizes for other cameras and what to expect. First off, some comparisons between the scanner, a Canon S500 5MP camera, and an older Kodak 2M camera.

The key takeaway here is how impressive the JPG compression is… from 122M to under 8M — very nice! So, I’m busy scanning things to save as JPEG now, and I’ll be down-converting the few rolls of TIFFs I did into JPEGs…. should compress nicely.

The scanner dimensions are also weird…. that matters is the pixel density. The DPI and size of the page are just arbitrary… say I divide DPI by 4 to 1,000… then I can double the length and width of the image. Whatever.

One of the first rolls of APS film I scanned was also one I had Kodak make a photo CD of when I had them developed some years ago. This gave me a good opportunity to compare the raw scan to what Kodak does to what I can do with either the Nikon scan software or Photoshop.

First, here are the pics:

Kodak	Nikon Scan	Nikon Scan w/ Brightness +50 Contrast +30

Some observations:

The Kodak one (which is roughly equivalent to what a 1 (one) megapixel camera would take) is very pink — you can see from the clouds and shading of the wood deck. However, it is the one where the color does pop out and (IMHO) looks better. The middle one is the scan with no processing (besides the digital ICE). It’s also the darkest and most plain. The third is the scan with brightness cranked up +50 (on a range of -100 to +100) and contract to +30. This seems a bit better, but the colors are still very washed… although I imagine that may be more true to life.

The scan pictures also show the graininess more than the Kodak JPG, which is interesting. This may just be in the downconversion from the full scan (a TIFF file) to a JPG… time for some more scanning. But this does show pretty clearly that Kodak’s magic for processing does do a pretty decent job!

My Dad, brother, and I went in for a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED, a film scanner. It handles slides, 35mm, and (with the adapter we forked out another $130 for) APS film. The plan is for Scott & I to scan in all our film prints, and then off it goes to Dad where he’ll spend quite some time scanning in all his film — mostly slides.

So far, I’m happy with the scanner, and less thrilled with the scanning software.

First off, a comparison. The scanner comes with this Digital ICE4 technology that essentially “fixes” errors on 35mm negatives. Here’s an example from the first batch of negatives I did. These were black & whites taken by a friend of ours on our wedding with a good camera:

(raw scan)

(with Digital ICE4)

Notice a lot of the dust (white specs) are gone. Also, check out the shoes in the upper right corner. Notice anything? Yup, the minor bit of hair is gone — magically imaged out. Sweet!

So far, I’ve done one roll of APS film and one set of B&W negatives. Initial thoughts:

• If you just scan files in, they’re big. The B&Ws were 60M each. Yow! Well, you do get 4000 DPI for your 60M, which if I did my math correctly is equivalent to a 20 megapixel camera. The APS (color negs) were 38M each. But hey, that’s why they invented 300G disk drives, right? (to save you the math, at 60M / image, 300G gives you 5000 60M images).
• Scanning isn’t just mounting the film and pressing scan. You have to crop the picture (there’s a white border around APS film, and a white / black border around 35mm — the black is between each frame, and the white is on either side). I need to see about ImageMagick’s convert which has an auto-crop as well.
• You also have to rotate the pics… on APS, I had to rotate every frickin’ one as for some reason, the scanner is aligned 90′ counter-clockwise. This means most of your portrait pics are upside-down and most of your normal pics need to be rotated. Blah.
• For each scan, you have to click the DigitalICE thing. Blah. Doesn’t seem to be a way to have default settings (at least for that feature).
• Scanning takes a bit. However, it’s not too bad on your CPU (I’m still on my dual 600Mhz, and it only seems to suck up half the CPU while scanning which is nice).
• APS is super cake.. you just dump the film cannister in, and everything gets scanned. Even though the film is something like 24mm vs 32mm, scanning is just so much easier. Although I haven’t seen how the slide feeder works yet.

Welp, more later… let’s see how long it takes to crank through the ol’ wedding photo album!