A while ago I wrote a post about how I use Dropbox to sync my Adobe Lightroom catalog across multiple computers. This worked fine until I started using a Mac OS X Lion system, actually at the moment of writing I want to sync between two Mac OS X Lion systems. (The next section contains useful info for Windows users too!)

Maybe you should read my previous post before reading the next section.

It seems that Mac OS X handles symbolic links a little different than Windows 7 does. On Windows I stored the catalog in the Dropbox folder and created a symbolic link to another location on my harddrive, let’s say c:/lightroomcatalog. By doing this I managed to get the Lightroom previews cache folder to be created in c:/lightroomcatalog and NOT being synced to Dropbox. The catalog itself was synced to Dropbox because of the symbolic link.

On Mac OS X though, I noticed that although I had created a folder like /lightroomcatalog and opened the alias or symbolic link created in that folder, Lightroom was actually opening the catalog file in the Dropbox folder. It turned out that the previews folder was now created in the Dropbox folder too and not in /lightroomcatalog.

One thing you don’t want on Dropbox is your previews folder because it becomes large and it has no use to have it there.

The solution is even simpler than expected. In Dropbox is an option to exclude specific folders from syncing. So now I just point lightroom to open the actual catalog file in Dropbox and it does create the previews folder. Then I close Lightroom, go to preferences of Dropbox and in the tab ‘advanced’ choose ‘selective sync’. Push the ‘advanced options’ button and exclude the lightroom preview folder from syncing.
Next go to dropbox website and manually delete the folder from there too. I expected it to be deleted but it is not.

You have to exclude this folder on all systems where you have Lightroom running. Otherwise system 2 will still sync the folder.

Conclusion: Keep in mind that Dropbox has a feature called ‘Selective Sync’  and you can exclude folders within Dropbox folder that you don’t want to sync!! New folders added in Dropbox folder are synced by default.

Get your free Dropbox account using this link. It offers both you and me additional free storage!

 

In one of my older posts I wrote about camerasync to automatically upload your photos to several online storage services. I wrote this article before iOS 5 and Photostream were released.

I really love photostream which syncs all my photos taken or imported with my iPhone and/or iPad to my other devices. The only downside is that you cannot share your photostream with another user.

My girlfriend and I have both our own Apple ID and therefore our own iCloud and Photostream. So photos taken with my iPhone are only visible to me and sync only to the devices that use my Apple ID. Photos taken by my girlfriend are stored in her photostream. Using one Apple ID is no option because we don’t want to see all of each others photos on our devices.

I found that Camerasync App is the solution to automatically upload the photos from our iPhone or iPad (both CameraRoll and Photostream) to an online storage location. In our situation it is a FTP location on our NAS (network storage) at home.

As told in my previous post, camerasync automatically uploads each photo from Cameraroll to the online location. Now we can access each others photos on the network disk at home. We can pick the ones we like and do with it what we want without interfering with each others photostream.

Conclusion: If you want to share your photostream with somebody else, pick one of the camerasync supported storage locations and (one-way) sync your photos to that location.

TIP: Camerasync can upload your video’s too. Something which is not supported by photostream.

 

Within a couple of weeks I will do a presentation on Projectmanager 2.0 within our company. Because this is all about a new way of working together and also about using new online Web 2.0 applications, Social Media and devices like smartphones and tablets, I want to do the presentation from my iPad.

A quick google search led me to the iPad VGA connector cable. My car brought me to the Apple store to buy one . This setup is no rocket science. Just plugin the cable to the iPad and connect it to a VGA monitor or projector and enable AirMirroring on the iPad. (only iPad 2+ and iPhone 4s support AirMirroring).

Airmirror is functionality that mirrors your iPhone or iPad display to an external display. You can use whatever App to do the presentation itself. Think about KeyNotes, Prezi and so on.

Actually this does exactly the same as Airmirror to the Apple TV so if you have an AppleTV 2 or 3 and a projector with HDMI connection, you can wireless present using the iPad with the AppleTV.

The only disadvantage of this iPad VGA Connector cable is the…. Cable. I would prefer to be able to walk around with my iPad without dragging the VGA cable with me.

A solution, besides the above mentioned AppleTV which has HDMI output only, is a Mac OS X application called AirServerApp. The Airserver application is installed on an iMac or Macbook system. Now it can act as an Airserver meaning you can display the screen of your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S on your Mac OS X device. Connect an external VGA monitor or projector to your MacBook and you have a great solution to present from your iPad to a projector and wireless.

I used the connector cable yesterday and had very positive reactions on the fact that I could easily display the PDF on my iPad to 3 other colleagues on a normal 17″  monitor. Could have done it with a laptop too ofcourse… But that is so 2011

Instead of using the iPad 2+, the iPhone 4s can be used too.

 

Kickstarter has some great projects lately. Now you can find the Pebble, an e-paper based watch for the iPhone and Android. You can connect the Pebble to you iPhone or Android, upload apps and use it as an extention to your phone via Bluetooth. Imagine, you are being called and you see the name of the caller on your watch. Or you are playing music with your iPhone and use you watch to skip to the next track. This is only a very minor selection of the possibilities.

 

Galileo, Your iOS in Motion!
This is the name of a great product which is found on kickstarter.com, the site for funding great ideas.

The Galileo is a motorized iPhone stand which can be controlled from another iOS device like iPhone or iPad. Now you can control your iPhone remotely. This is great during video conference or other photography projects. Check out the video !

 

Evernote…. Haven’t written about this incredible application before and I don’t know why not.

What is it? Your notes everywhere and forever. Evernote is available online, on mobile platforms and PC’s. From iOS, Android to Windows and Mac OS X. You can store all your knowledge into Evernote. In short you can:

• Create text-, photo and audionotes
• Save webpages including text, links and images,
• Synchronize all your notes between all your devices
• search for text in screenshots and images

Evernote indexes your notes and performs text recognition on your images, therefore making it very easy to find back information. You can tag your notes and create multiple notebooks. You can save PDF files in Evernote, so you have your ebooks, flyers or documents available with you.

Personally, I started small. Just using it as an application to save my notes. Soon I started adding ebooks to Evernote and nowadays I scan most of my important documents and add it to Evernote. I’m a paying Evernote users which offers me some additional features.

Because Evernote is a online service it is possible to connect other online services. An example:
I daily check my Twitter messages at a moment that I feel like it. When I find an interesting Tweet, I mark it as a favorite. My favorite tweets are added to my Instapaper account. (Instapaper is a service to collect pages to read later). When I’ve read the article and want to keep it I mark it as a favorite in Instapaper. The article is added to my Evernote automatically and available to me on all my devices.

I’ve connected a Canon MX-885 all in one printer. Unfortunately it cannot scan directly to Evernote but it can scan to PDF. Once I’ve scanned the documents I want to keep. I simple ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’  them to Evernote by using the regular windows keyboard shortcut ‘Ctrl+C’  and Evernote shortcut ‘Ctrl+Alt+V’. I tag the document, move it to the appropriate notebook and done.

Think about it:

• Once in a while I export my complete contents to a local folder which I add in my regular backup schedule.
• Think about what you save online. Evernote is not encrypted. You can encrypt some tekst but it’s not top of the bill encryption. Create encrypted PDF’s yourself if you think you need to or don’t save it online.

Want to know more:

First of all, visit www.evernote.com and create your free account and start using. Want a kickstart? Check out the great ebook written by Brett Kelly, Evernote Essentials.

 

Adobe Lightroom is not a network enabled application. You can perfectly store your images on a network storage location (speed might become an issue) but the Lightroom catalog has to be on your harddrive.

When you want to use Adobe Lightroom on multiple computers, it’s always a hassle to keep your Lightroom catalog in sync. Lightroom relies heavily on the catalog. The catalog contains references to your photos and holds all adjustments to your photos.

When you want to use Lighroom on multiple computers, lets say your PC and notebook, you always have to copy your catalog file from one system to the other. And someday it will go wrong. That day you will copy the older version of the catalog over the most recent version.

Dropbox, an online file storage and sychronisation service is a perfect solution to prevent this. I believe there are multiple articles written about Lightroom Catalogs and Dropbox, but those usually have one disadvantage, they also store all ‘previews’ on Dropbox. You will run out of space soon.

This article describes how I’ve setup Lightroom in combination with Dropbox AND your images stored on some kind of network drive.

So first you have to get yourself a free dropbox account. Use this link and we both get an addional 250 MB storage as a bonus . Install the Dropbox Client on all systems that you want to sync your files with, but for now at least on the systems where you have Lightroom installed. For this article my assumption is you use a PC and Notebook, but you can do it on as many systems as you like.

Assumption: You have your images files stored on a network drive so the images are available from all your systems.
I expect you have this setup already and just want an efficient way to sync the Lightroom Catalog.

As you will see, the Dropbox client will create a folder ‘Dropbox’ on your system. All files and folders in that Dropbox folder will be synced between all systems. The benefit of Dropbox is that the files are stored on your harddrive AND online at Dropbox. So you don’t have to worry about internet connection speed.

Now go to the folder where you have stored your Lightroom catalog. You will see that besides the catalog file (*.cat) there are some other folders with Previews. If we would move the whole set to Dropbox your dropbox would run out of space soon.

First of all, make a backup copy of your lightroom catalog file. Just in case something goes wrong!

Now download and install Link Shell Extention. You can find it at the end of this page.

Now create a folder ‘Lightroom Catalog’ inside your Dropbox folder. Move your Lightroom catalog file inside that new folder. Now the lighroom catalog is stored in Dropbox. (DO NOT START LIGHTROOM YET!).
Make sure the catalog is not in your original folder on your harddrive anymore (otherwise rename it to something as a backup).

Go to the Dropbox/Lightroom Catalog folder and right click on your catalog file. Choose ‘Pick Link Source’. (if you don’t see ‘Pick Link Source’ then you have not installed Link Shell Extention correctly).
Next go to your original folder and inside that folder (where your catalog was before) right click and choose ‘Drop As – Symbolic Link’. You will see a shortcut to the Lightroom catalog in your dropbox folder is created.

What has happened? You have moved the LR Catalog to Dropbox and created a symbolic link at the original location.

Now you start Lightroom and you will notice that Lightroom will start normally. Do something in Lightroom that modifies a photo. Now you will see that the Dropbox icon in your taskbar will start synchronizing.

Remember: NEVER start Lightroom on more than 1 system at a time, otherwise a sync conflict will occur. Also after closing Lightroom, give Dropbox some time to sync the catalog file before opening Lightroom on the other system.

What I’ve noticed is that Dropbox saves a history of changes in a hidden ‘Cache’ folder. Because every tiny change is written to the database you get hundreds of history files in that cache folder making you run out of space.
1. You can delete the contents of that Cache folder (it’s inside your dropbox folder)
2. Better, before starting lightroom rightclick on the Dropbox Icon in your taskbar and ‘Pauze Sync’.  Do your thing in Lightroom and when finished, ‘Resume Sync’.  Now the most recent catalog is synced with Dropbox.

*So when you notice that your harddrive is running out of space quickly (30Gb in an hour!!) you have not paid attention to point 1 and/or 2 above!!

You have to create the symbolic link on all your systems and actually it doesn’t matter if you have stored the catalog in another folder. Just symbolic link the catalog from dropbox to your original location of the catalog on that specific computer!

Because we used a symbolic link, the preview folders remain on your harddrive and are not moved to Dropbox! This would have happend when we pointed Lightroom directly to open the catalog from within the Dropbox folder.

TIP 1: I’ve also stored my plugins into a folder ‘Dropbox/Lightroom Plugins’. I configured Lightroom to open Plugins from that folder directly, without using Symbolic links. One benefit of the Plugins in Dropbox is that the configuration of the plugin is usually available on all systems too and all systems use the same version!

An article with more information on how to store stuff outside your dropbox folder can be found here

TIP 2: I create a Lighroom Backup from Lightroom everytime I exit Lightroom. I save this backup on my local harddrive, just in case something goes wrong in Dropbox sync!

 

Twitter, Facebook, I don’t need that because:

- It takes to much time;
- I don’t want to know when somebody drinks a coffee;
- It’s for the younger generation;
- Give me some privacy please.

Those remarks are often heard when I start talking about social media. This article desribes how I use social media and how it brings me added value. And trust me, I don’t want to know when somebody goes to the toilet .

Social media can offer a way to gather information about topics you are interested in. This can be al sort of topics, for me those topics are mainly photography and projectmanagement. So I started using Twitter just to find out what it offers. I created my Twitter account and started searching on ‘Photography’, ‘Photo’ and ‘Projectmanagement’. Of course I found a list of other Tweeps (Twitter People). I looked at their tweets (Twitter messages) and when it looked interesting, I added those people. I just started with a small number of people. I also knew a couple of names of ‘great photographers’ and searched for them and added them too.
The result? Within a couple of days I found out that those people retweeted messages of other photographers, some of them interesting enough to be added to my following list (follow = people who’s messages you want to see).
Doesn’t this take me too much time? No, it doesn’t. I check my Twitter messages when I feel like doing this. This might be when waiting on something else. The coffeebreak, a delayed meeting, or the commercial breaks on TV. I favorite the interesting tweets or answer questions of other people when possible.

When scanning the tweets, I skip al nonsense tweets of somebody having lunch although sometimes it is a connection point like in case you have been in that restaurant or whatever…. It is just another way of making contact.

For my work and photography I use several different software tools. I started to follow the suppliers of some of those tools so I see all kinds of interesting information passing by. And what do I post myself? When I have written an article like this, I post the link on Twitter. People who follow me are probably interested in this. Also other photographers are following me, so the results of a photoshoot are published online and a link is posted on Twitter.

Facebook is the other social media site I use. Actually all my Twitter messages are automatically posted on Facebook. I made my Twitter account visible to everybody. My Facebook is visible to my friends only.

How to make things easier:

Scanning the tweets itself is done very quickly, reading an interesting article which you found on Twitter (at least, the link to the article) takes more time. Usually I just favorite the tweet (there is a favorite link beneath the Twitter message).  When I have more time scheduled, I can go back to my favorite tweets and read the articles. Actually I’ve made it a even better by using Instapaper… Read on !

Send favorite tweets to Instapaper:

Instapaper is a webservice that you can use to save articles or webpages you want to read later. I.e. you are browsing the internet, find something nice and want to read it later. You can save that page to Instapaper and easily find and read the page later. Visit that site and check it out !

I used the site IfThisThanThat www.ifttt.com to create an automated tasks that checks my Twitter account every 15 minutes and when I favorite a tweet in my account, it send the Tweet to Instapaper. Next time I visit Instapaper I have a nice overview of all the articles or pages I want to read. It is not difficult to setup. Create an account at that site and search for a ‘recipe’ like:  Link In “Favorite” Tweet Sent Directly To Instapaper. Configure your Twitter and Instapaper account and you are ready to go !

I even went one step further. In Instapaper you can configure to send a Liked (or favorite) article to Evernote. So when I really like the article and want to save it for future reference, I just push the Like icon in Instapaper and a couple of seconds later it is offline available in Evernote. Visit Evernote.com for more info about Evernote !

Share the Knowledge:

When you have something that might be of interest to other people, why not share it on Twitter. Just share the knowledge. And when you see somebody asking a question and you know the answer, why not answer it. Next time you have a question…

Flipboard on iPad/iPhone

There is another very nice way to read Twitter, Facebook and all other kind of information streams. Download the app ‘Flipboard‘ to your iPad or iPhone. Flipboard is a digital newspaper that is build up with things you like. Flipboard collects the messages you receive on Twitter or Facebook. In case the message contains a link it will display the page behind the link. So you a get kind of newspaper that is build up of the messages you receive on your social media and contains information from your friends or contacts. Flipboard is really great and contains more than Twitter and Facebook. Just check it out.

Conclusion:

Twitter has brought me an additional, more dynamic flow of information. Scan the Tweets when you have some time left. Pick out the interesting articles and read…..

Of course, when you have something to tell to the world, put it on Twitter and share the knowledge!

Using an app like Flipboard makes things even more usefull and fun to use.

And remember, this is how I use Twitter. Try and find your way of using it !

 

I’ve recently started a project where the teammembers are spread across two different locations and within the locations over multiple floors and rooms. The activities we have to perform can be done mostly by individuals but other members depend on the output of others. So it is essential that the teammembers are aware of the activities of other teammembers and their status.

To discuss all important actions, risks and issues I scheduled a weekly projectmeeting where most teammembers attend in person and some by phone. Because we are spread across the two locations it always takes more time for some of us to attend physically. Another downside of us not sitting near eachother is that we don’t meet at the coffee machine to have informal chats about what we are doing and also formal meetings take a little more effort.

To improve the team collaboration I’ve setup a Yammer network. You can think of Yammer as facebook for businesses. I use a very limited set of functionality of Yammer, just the status updates which can be placed in the Yammer feed of ‘our network with Yammer’. I’ve asked all teammembers to regularly post a status update and check our feed daily. Of course I could have asked all members to send me a status update by email daily which I can then collect and spread within the projectteam. The latter would cost me time and I would delay the information flow. The benefit of using Yammer is that members can reply on the status updates of others.

If it turns out that my teammembers will not use Yammer actively I still have the alternative to organize one or two additional status meetings so people can meet and discuss their ‘things’. Instead of a couple of status messages which takes 15 seconds to write, they will be in a meetingroom for a hour.

I believe Yammer is a usefull addition to my projectmanagement tools to keep the team informed and in contact.

 

A couple of weeks ago I’ve been on a short holiday and that was a great moment to use my iPad and Eye-Fi WiFi SDCard for real. I did not bring my laptop so I had to rely on my iPad for transfering photos. It all worked out quit well and raised some questions too.

The setup was my iPad 2 with Eye-Fi app installed. My Nikon D90 was equipped with the Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8Gb memory card. A direct WiFi connection between iPad and Eye-Fi card was setup. Additionally, at the holiday location a public hotspot was available to use internet on the iPad.
I’ve set the camera to store both a basic JPG + RAW file. The Eye-Fi card was setup to transfer both file type to the iPad.

So I started taking holiday pictures. The first thing I noticed is that the Nikon RAW files (*.NEF) are transferred to the iPad as *.TIF files and within the iPad only a minor thumbnail is shown of this type of files. On the other hand, the JPG files were transfered too and shown correctly.

• Is the TIFF file that is stored on the iPad actually a NEF file (Nikon RAW)?

• Can I configure the file type to be transferred (JPG and/or RAW) while I’m out in the field?

Actually this took a while to figure out and I’m not completely done with it. My current answer is:
Do it before you go out in the field. Connect both iPad and Eye-Fi card to a wireless network (I have not yet tested direct mode!)  and take a picture (to make the Eye-Fi really wakeup).  Then on your iPad in the Eye-Fi APP turn on or off the transfer of Photos (JPG), Video and/or RAW Files. Wait a couple of seconds and turn camera off and on so the Eye-Fi card reads its settings  from somewhere. Take a picture and test if it does what you want.

I still have to test this with Direct Mode. I will update this post with the results.

Conclusion:

Using the Eye-Fi card is great. Results of a shoot are directly visible on the iPad and files are stored (backup) on the iPad. The combination of the Eye-Fi with Apple iCloud is the best!  Back home, turn on the PC wait a while and all files are there. No cables necessary.

Only downside: You can’t see the difference between the JPG and RAW file on the iPad so you always have to guess when you open a file…. Does it open the high res JPG or the tiny RAW thumbnail. The fact that NEF files are renamed to TIF is not a big deal but when you think about it, it’s weird that it is necessary.

The Eye-Fi card can transfer images to online services like Flickr too. I have no need for that so I did not test it.