Category: Photo

Managing photos

I am still managing my photos based on directories named by date + event (e.g. “110515-person” contains photos from the person and taken today). I tried Shotwell, saw Picasa or iPhoto working but I was not really convinced. Maybe I like to be closer to the file structure (and it’s enough for my needs) and don’t like too much the idea of being dependent on a software and its internal database.

The only issue I faced is that I’m collecting photos from my camera and my phone: they both use different naming conventions. So when I look at my photos, I first have all the photos from my phone in chronological order then I am forced to go back to the beginning of the event and look at all the photos from my camera (again in chronological order).

The solution I applied is to take into account the EXIF tag concerning the date/time each photo was taken in order to rename the file accordingly. For that I use exiv2:

exiv2 -r'%Y%m%d-%H%M_:basename:' rename $(ls)

The result are names like: 20110515-1814_IMG_3704.JPG. This is easily sorted. Provided my phone and my camera date/time settings are approximately synchronised, it solves the issue mentioned before.

Now not all pictures are rotated. Most file managers and photo editing software take care of that and show you corrected photo if needed (Nautilus and Gimp do that at least). But some software do not take that into account (I think of Piwigo for instance). Here I use jhead with the following command:

jhead -ft -autorot *.JPG

Now in order to get some photos out of the computer,

  • I just use a regular USB key to give the photo shop and print some photos ;
  • I use a simple FTP client to upload some photos to our private photo gallery ;
  • I use Postr (previously mentioned here) to upload some photos to my Flickr gallery ;
  • I finally sometimes use the Picasa web interface to upload a few pictures there.

And you, how are you managing your photos?

P.S. By the way, I recently discovered a nice tip to transform all spaces in file names by underscores (or any other character):

rename ' ' '_' *

Published in Schmap

Colonne du CongrèsOne of my photos on Flickr is now on Schmap, a website providing travel guides for some destinations in the world (only Europe, North America and Australasia for now). See here how it looks.

What was interesting for me was the way they did it. I came to know it via an e-mail from Emma Williams (from Schmap) telling me my photo was included. And, at first sight (*), they correctly understand the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0: attribution is on their website, as well as the “cc” logo next to the image. And they link to the the image on Flickr 🙂

(*) If you read the terms of use, you’ll notice all the material (including third-party material) “are protected by copyright laws. You may only access and use the Materials for personal or educational purposes and not for resell or commercial purposes by You or any third parties”. My photo is also protected by copyright laws but you can access it for other purposes than personal or educational uses, you can sell them (the cc-by-sa allows it). Since the transformation they did is “only” a resizing, does it really matter since the original material is given and resizing is easy to re-do?

Un-published in Nature (NRSC)

In the last post, I told you one of my photo on Flickr was published in an article from Nature Reports Stem Cells. After some discussions with three friends, I decided to write an e-mail to the journal editors basically stating that, although I enjoyed my photo being shown in their journal, they did not comply with one of the two conditions of the CC-by-sa license (the “Share-Alike” part, more details in the copy of my e-mail). I chose this licence for this photo because it is there to give freedom to other people on some material while this freedom stays with the media even if the latter is modified.

The answer quickly came from Matthew Day, database publisher:

From: Matthew Day
To: Jean-Etienne Poirrier
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 20:55:39 +0200
Subject: RE: Photo license issue

Dear Jean-Etienne,

I’m sorry that we have published a derivative of your image without putting the new work under a Creative Commons license. As you adroitly guessed, we cannot publish the derivative work under CC as it contains components from other sources.

I would be willing to discuss with you a way of keeping the image, and your credit, on the NRSC article. However, an additional complexity is that I see that you are posting a PDF of the article on your blog. The cleanest solution for us may be to simply remove the image and PDF from our websites.

If you’d like to discuss this, I could call you tomorrow or Friday if you are free and can email me your contact number.

With best wishes,

Matthew Day,
Database Publisher
Nature Publishing Group

Matthew also removed the image from the website (before my answer). So I removed the PDF of the article (a personal copy but I don’t think I could consider it as a self-archived article) from this blog.

un-published from Nature

From an initial error, I think the Nature Publishing Group reacted correctly.

Published in Nature!

I was very pleased to see my first publication in Nature (1), the scientific journal with an impact factor of 26! Well, it’s not really what you can expect (especially if you are one of my two mentors): one of my photos on Flickr, representing a rat eating (or praying?), was chosen to illustrate a summary of UK Academy of Medical Sciences report on animal-human chimeras 🙂

Screenshot of the article containing a photo I took
Click on the thumbnail above to see the full screenshot

Here is the article full reference: DeWitt, N. “Animal-human chimeras: Summary of UK Academy of Medical Sciences Report” Nature Reports Stem Cells, published online on August, 2nd, 2007.

Note that I don’t know if they completely comply with the photo license since the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 allows them to re-use the photo and do the modifications, provided they give credit (ok) and distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to the CC-by-sa. They are not clearly stating to others the licence terms of their new work …

(1) As Jan Schoones wrote in his comment, it’s not published in Nature itself but in Nature Reports Stem Cells, a journal published by the same company as Nature but which does not have an impact factor! (Edited on August, 20th)

Online photos and privacy

Last week-end, I walked in the city center and posted some photos of sceneries and people on Flickr. It was the first time I posted photos of people I really don’t know (I already posted photos with people from parties where attendees want to see them online).

I recently read some articles (1, 2, 3) and blog posts about privacy and a new service from Google: Street view. I was then wondering if they are rules or regulations regarding online privacy for non-publishers (for online media).

If you have the opportunity to post your own photo and you don’t want to be online, you may just not publish it. Here I’m talking about people whose picture is being taken in public places and published online without their explicit consent.

A recent post from Slashdot discusses an article on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging (pdf). The issue here is a bit different since they are mainly talking about photos tagged with names of people on the picture (I didn’t go that far). But a stakeholder posted excerpts of the EU Data Protection Directive (already adopted in the Belgian law). You can find the text and some explanations on the EC data protection website. Other explanations and a good summary of differences regarding privacy between Europe and USA is in the Wikipedia article. Since Flickr is a US website/company, it’s not a surprise there are no references to nor guidelines regarding privacy of people on the pictures. But if I strictly follow the Belgian law, I should perhaps remove those photos. A lot of my contacts on Flickr do not take/publish pictures of unknown people. Is it on purpose?

I didn’t decided yet what to do, where is the right equilibrium between privacy concerns, hobby and knowledge/information sharing. Any insight is welcome.