Archive for July 2012
Photo of the Day: Starlets
It has been a while since I used my favorite Nikon D90 and Raynox DCR-250 combo. The bad weather loosened its grip last week, and we finally had a few decent summer days perfect for shooting flowers and plants in the Aarhus University botanical garden. The signage in the outdoor areas of the botanical garden leaves a lot to be desired, so I couldn’t find out the name of these amazing tiny flowers.
.jpeg "Starlets")
Starlets
The photo is published on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Starlets_(Macro).jpeg
digiKam Housekeeping with the Maintenance Tool
Starting with version 2.6, digiKam features the Tools → Maintenance menu which gives you access to tools designed to perform a variety of housekeeping tasks: from scanning for new photos to running a face recognition action. Here is a brief overview of the available tools.
Maintenance dialog
Scan for new items This command scans the collections for newly added photos. By default, digiKam does that automatically on every start. But if you’ve disabled this feature to speed up digiKam, you can use the Scan for new items tool to add new photos manually.
Rebuild thumbnails If, for some reason, thumbnails in albums are missing or broken, you can use this tool to fix them. To speed up this action, enable the Scan for changed or non-cataloged items option. This will ignore photos which have already been processed and catalogued.
Rebuild fingerprints digiKam uses fingerprints for certain search actions, and this tool allows you to generate or rebuild fingerprints. Enable the Scan for changed or non-cataloged items option to skip the already processed and cataloged photos.
Find Duplicate Items Need to find duplicate photos? This command can help you with that. Note that this action uses fingerprints, so you might need to run the Rebuild Fingerprints action prior to using this tool.
Sync image metadata with Database When digiKam adds new photos, it automatically reads metadata from each photo and writes them into its database. The Sync image metadata with Database tool does the opposite: it reads metadata from the database and writes them into photos or into so-called XML sidecar files. This feature can come in handy in many situations. You can use it, for example, to back up metadata from the database to XML sidecar files.
Face Detection This tool finds photos containing faces and attempts to recognize person or persons in each photo. (see the Face Recognition article for more info.)
Pygmyfoto Goes Beta
In my spare time, I work on a a simple photo roll publishing application called Pygmyfoto. Since the project’s launch, I’ve been working steadily on adding features and improving Pygmyfoto.
Pygmyfoto
Besides a handful of interface tweaks, the current version of the application features several major improvements.
- A dedicated navigation menu makes it easier to move around Pygmyfoto.
- The application now uses the jQuery lightBox plugin to display photos. This offers a much better way to showcase your photographic masterpieces.
- A new search feature can be used to display photos that match a specific tag.
- Each photo now has a permalink which points to a separate photo page.
- The pygmyfoto.py processing script has better error handling, among other tweaks and improvements.
All key functionality has been implemented, so Pygmyfoto now enters the testing stage. A demo of the latest version of Pygmyfoto is available for your viewing pleasure, and you can grab the latest source code distribution from the project’s GitHub repository.
