Archive for July 2010
Instant Photo Sharing with B3
My photography workflow is based on two key tools: the digiKam photo management application and a B3 personal Linux-based server. While I use digiKam for processing and managing photos, Bubba Two takes care of storing my image files and backs them up in the cloud. But that’s only one of Bubba Two’s many talents. This little server also comes with its own photo album software which lets you instantly share photos on the Web. It’s not a Flickr killer, but it can come in rather handy if you want to turn your photos into a photo album and share it with a selected group of people in the entire world with a minimum of fuss.
“By why not use one of many photo sharing services instead?” you may ask. For a number of reasons. Say, I want to share photos from my last trip with a few friends and family. Using Flickr or any other service for that would mean uploading a few gigabytes of photos, which takes time and can be rather impractical if I have to remove them afterwards. Also, some of the people I want to show my photos to are not registered with Flickr, so I either have to make my photos public or persuade them to join Flickr. But why bother, if I can just create a photo album and a viewer account on my B3, and send people the link to it along with the login info?
Using B3, to turn a folder with photos into an album is as easy as pie. In B3′s Web interface, click on the Photos icon. Press the Create album button in the main toolbar, give your album a name, enter an optional description, and press Next. Configure the available the access options, press Next, pick the photos you want to add to the album, and hit Create Album. That’s all there is to it.
Photo galleries generated by B3 allow visitors to browse the shared photos either one by one or as a slideshow as well as download original images. All in all, while the photo sharing functionality of B3 is rather bare-bones, it can be useful when you want to quickly share the photos stored on your server.
Disclamer: I work for Excito as an evangelist and community manager, but I was using Bubba Two long before my gig with the company.
Watermark Photos with digiKam
While there are many ways to protect your photos from unauthorized use, watermarking still remains the simplest and probably the most effective technique that can help you to identify you as the creator and make it difficult to use your works without permission.
Although digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice. Choose Tools | Batch Queue Manager (or press the B key) to open the Batch Queue Manager tool. Drag the photos you want to watermark from a digiKam album onto the Queues pane to add them to the current queue. Click on the Base Tools tab in the Batch Tools Available pane and double-click on the Add Watermark tool to add it to the Assigned Tools pane.
digiKam can use text or images as watermarks, and you can choose the desired watermark type in the Tools Setting pane. If you want to use the Image type, make sure that you already have a graphics file handy. Specify then the available settings such as Placement, Size, and Margins. Next, select the target folder in the Target section of the Queue Settings pane. In the Behavior section, you can specify what the system should do if it detects a file with the same name as the processed one in the target folder. You can either choose to overwrite the existing file or rename the processed file before saving it. You can also use the options available in the File Renaming section to specify a renaming rule to automatically rename the processed files.
Once you are satisfied with the settings, hit the Run button, and once digiKam’s finished, you’ll find the watermarked photos in the target folder.
