travellin' meets real life

hi folks,

this time i want to outline my personal photo-lifecycle. – as i dislike anything that is related with real-life archiving (in other words printed photos and hard-cover albums) – because it’s takes a long time to search your photos, the quality of photos and albums decrease over time due to wear and tear, … – i always wanted to have my photos digitalized and stored in a way that i can access them wherever i like.

i remember, when i bought my first digicam a couple of years ago (i think it was in 2003), i was happy about taking nice digitalized pictures, but the chaos on my hard-drive with thousands of jpgs was also preprogrammed. this chaos increased after travelling for a couple of months. – until gernot introduced me to flickr. – soon after I became enthusiastic about this service and bought a pro account. the upload-limits that flickr had in 2006 where dropped a year or so later and almost every day they provided new functionality (and judged on my very strict quality standards, i have to say it’s one of few web 2.0 applications that keeps impressing me). one of my favorite features is the flickr map, thus geo-coding of my photos became a must, too.

in addition to the photos i took with my digicam, i scanned dozenths of old (paper-based) ones to preserve them for the future. and life was good. nevertheless, as a security geek, i always feared an enemy takeover (microsoft or other attackers ). i mean, i really invested a lot of time into writing descriptions, geo-coding, etc. and i don’t want to loose that information. moreover, retrieving photos from flickr is of course slower than holding them on your local hard-drive.

hence, i’ve been looking for a flickr-backup solution as flickr keeps denying, that they can produce a backup of your data, even in case you would pay for it. to be honest: my ideal solution would be the synchronization between my local photo folder and flickr without loss of metadata (e.g. tags, geo-tags, descriptions), but that’s still a dream. though, after playing around with several flickr backup tools (for windows, because i don’t have the time to deal with complicated linux-stuff) over the last years, i finally found a piece of software that helps me setting up a photo-lifecycle that satisfies me for now.

so my current workflow (which is imho still way to complicated) consists of the following steps:

1. first of all i take loads of funny and interesting photos with my camera.
2. in parallel i log my gps positions with my gps tracking device edit: 2010-01-27: (which is now a htc hero equipped with google my tracks).
3. back to my computer i retrieve my gps log with timemachinex. edit: 2010-01-27: from my tracks, because it is able to export gpx files .
4. after downloading my pics from the camera, i use a location stamper to write the gps-data into the exif-tags.
5. then i upload the photos with flickr’s uploadr and add descriptions and tags on-the-fly.
6. the integration on neotrinity.at is done automatically by the usage of a heavily customized wordpress plugin, called falbum.
7. as aforementioned i found the tool downloadr with which it is possible to get flickr photos including most of the related meta-information back onto my hard-drive. unfortunatley you can’t retrieve the photos’ geo-coding with downloadr, but following my email conversation with the author jan-gerd, he already considers implementing this functionality. edit: 2010-01-27: since 2009-08-30 it is possible to include the geo-information in the exif-tags with downloadr, though it does not work for me, because the resulting coordinates are always slightly off and some software can’t read the tags at all. – i’ve sent an email to jan-gerd a few months ago but didn’t receive a reply.
8. as downloadr stores all photos in one directory, i implemented a simple php script which retrieves the sets (including their descriptions) from flickr and copies the photos (flickr-photo-ids as filenames) into folders named after the associated sets. edit 2010-01-27: moreover, it is now possible to retrieve some meta-data like for example a photo’s geo-location (gps-coordinates) from flickr. this information can either be written to a separate text-file or to the jpeg’s exif tags (i use exiftool in flickrmovr).
   i’ve coded this little helper quick and dirty without any user interface. – sorry for that. – anyway, it should do the job after you’ve inserted the necessary variables in the php-file itself. if you don’t have php installed, just download the latest version and execute the code below.

php -f flickrmovr.php

phh, how inconvenient… thus, finally i like to present the cornerstones of my desired photo-lifecycle:

• take photos with a geo-coding enabled camera
• upload photos to flickr
• enter and adopt meta information online
• easily integrate my flickr account’s data – without to much customizing – into my wordpress blog
• backup all media items to my hard-drive including all available meta-information entered on flickr (preferable into jpgs’ exif-tags)

that’s it folks. – one remark: there are currently no plans to enhance the functionality of flickrmovr. – if you plan to use my tool, please stick to the flickr community guidelines. in case you find any errors, don’t hesitate to contact me.

greetz,
berny