I have been struggling with making everything digital for years now, and there are stacks of photos and thick albums that remain uncharted territory. Every once in awhile I sit down and scan in an album.

Trouble is, unless you do the whole job at once, it’s pretty easy to lose track of where you have already been. And if that’s not bad enough, we always bought double prints—they didn’t cost much more, and we could give some away. Now how do I know if I have scanned the long-lost twins of some photos that are already on my computer? That’s a problem for another day.

Here’s how I make sure I don’t scan the same single photo twice:

That’s right, I leave breadcrumbs in the form of little dots on the back of each one.

Such a simple thing, but it saves me from a lot of head scratching and wasted time scanning the same stuff over and over.

Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software EXIF data is hit or miss.

I looked for commercial software to handle a few special cases of EXIF data troubles, but came up empty handed. So I wrote a few useful AppleScript droplets that do these tasks quite nicely, and I will share them here.

Warning!

These scripts use jhead to manipulate and rewrite your JPEG files!

Don’t be a fool. Experiment first with a safe set of throwaway JPEGs. And never use these tools on original files; always keep a backup.

Prerequisite

All of these scripts depend on a fine piece of free software called jhead written by Matthias Wandel.

Installation is not difficult, but it does involve the command line.

• Go to the jhead site
• Scroll down to the Releases section and look for Pre-built OS-X Intel executable
• Right click on the jhead link on that row and choose Save Linked File to “Downloads”

At this point, I found that jhead was saved as jhead.txt. Oh well. We needed to do some command-line magic anyway.

• Open a terminal window and enter the following:

These lines do the following:

• Lines 1 and 2 navigate to the Downloads directory and remove the “.txt” from the name
• Line 3 makes the file executable by everyone on your Mac
• Line 4 places the file in a public area where everyone on your Mac can see it (you will be prompted for your password)

Stripping All EXIF Data

Sometimes I receive files that have corrupt EXIF data. I had a large quantity of scanned files in my collection that claimed to be scanned some time in 2038, while others insisted that they had been around since 1901. Neither situation is good, and I found that standard EXIF editing tools may fail to change these corrupt EXIF sections.

The answer is to blow away the EXIF data.

Download: Strip EXIF

This zip file contains a compiled AppleScript application. You can unzip it and place the application on your desktop. Safari will probably unzip it for you when you click the link.

To be safe, open AppleScript Editor and use it to open the Strip EXIF app to see its magic.

Now you can drop any number of JPEG files onto the Strip EXIF app and it will kindly eviscerate each JPEG, removing all traces of EXIF data.

Adding Basic EXIF Data to a vanilla JPEG

Some tools create JPEG files without EXIF date and time information within. This is typically the hallmark of photo manipulation software and dodgy scanner software. And if you happened to use the Strip EXIF app to rip out a bad EXIF block, then you will want to replace it with a proper data block so that you can still use camera date and timestamps.

Download: Add Basic EXIF

Again, unzip the file, place the app on your desktop, and then drop any number of JPEG files onto Add Basic EXIF.

The app will set the EXIF date to the file creation timestamp.

Spreading EXIF Timestamps

This is the real reason why I wrote these scripts. I couldn’t find a satisfactory tool on the market that would allow me to automatically spread out the shooting times for a series of images.

Why would anyone want to do this? Because some processes give you fifty JPEG files all with the exact same creation time and exact same shooting time. I like to use file renaming tools to incorporate the shooting time in the filename, so that files sort by chronological order. This doesn’t work if all of the timestamps are the same.

So I wrote a little app that adjusts the first photo by one minute, the second by two minutes, and so on. If there are fifty photos, then the last one will have its shooting time adjusted by fifty minutes.

The result is a series of photos/scans that have different timestamps.

Download: Spread EXIF Timestamps

Again, please look at the short program before you run it.

Closing Thoughts

I hope that my favorite tool implements these tricks soon (A Better Finder Attributes, I’m looking at you!), but until then, I will be dropping my files onto these three little droplets.

The jhead tool is so versatile that I will probably end up with a whole slew of similar droplets that will do all kinds of spiffy stuff. Nevertheless, I would rather the commercial products already provided these features. Not everyone likes dipping into AppleScript and the command line!

What do you do with 1,500 photographs?

In hope of sparing some folks hours of boredom I’d like to share my ideas on this topic here.

The Endless Stack of Photos

We have all been there. A friend or family member brandishes a stack of photos, saying “Let me show you photos of our trip to Ecuador…” (oh no… here it comes…). At this point, you reach for the photographs, but they hold the stack out of reach. They then turn each one over slowly, telling a long tale about every single image. “Oh, look at this monkey, it was so cute when he stole the candy out of little Billy’s hand and spit it into Aunt Sally’s hair.” and so on and so on.

You begin to look at the size of the stack and estimate how long this process will take.

Everyone has been on the receiving end of this treatment, but have you ever been the perpetrator?

It’s an easy trap to fall in to. To be honest, when you are showing photos to a friend, each image brings back a wave of pleasant memories and it is tempting to bask in the enjoyment of the memory, talking about how you felt at the time, as your friend’s eyes begin to aquire a glossy sheen.

Don’t Be That Person

Remember how it felt the last time you endured a four hour photo flipping marathon and have pity on those around you.

Here’s my strategy for pleasant photo sharing:

• Pare down the photo collection. Substantially.
• Create an attractive photo album with the finest photos of the lot.
• Hand the album to your friend and let them turn the pages.

Back to those 1,500 photos from India…

Here is one of the pages from the album I made from that trip.

As you can see, the end result is fairly simplistic, with a few very nice photos.

Paring Down the Stack

Even the most avid photographer understands that nobody wants to see a thousand photos. And don’t think that just because you made a slideshow with music instead of printing the photos that you are exempt. You can afford to cut the number down quite a bit.

Consider that a typical Hollywood motion picture contains less than 10 percent of the total footage filmed. Stanley Kubrick, ever the perfectionist, took this to the extreme with shooting ratios around 100 to 1. Following the analogy, in photography, it is quite reasonable to take dozens of photos for every single picture that you might share to others.

The real trick is deciding exactly how far to go with the selection process.

In my experience, you can weed out the bad photos for hours, and when you think the job is done, you can still go back and toss out a few dozen more.

I filter my photos in three major phases, using the five-star rating tool of my photo library software to help keep things in order. I personally use iPhoto, but any other good photo library suite should offer ratings and smart folders.

Phase 1: Removing obviously bad photos

This is a very quick pass through the whole collection. I start by selecting everything and marking all photos with a neutral rating of three stars.

I then find any photos that are underexposed or are blurry and give them one single star. Along the way, any photos that obviously have no useful content get the same treatment.

Phase 2: Identifying decent photos

I use a smart folder to show all photos with three stars or greater. This hides all of the junk from the first pass.

Now, I go through each photo and give it a deeper look. I sort them into three different stacks, giving two stars to anything that has useless or boring content and giving four stars to photos that I think are worth showing to people. Photos that don’t fit either description retain the neutral three-star rating. These are often repeats of the one good photo I tossed in the four-star stack.

Phase 3: Identifying the best of the best

I use a new smart folder to show only photos with four stars or better.

This is the hardest part. I go through the photos and try to find the absolutely best photo that expresses each experience or thought.

• If the photos are of places, then it makes sense to check that you have at least one photo of each important place you visited.
• If these are shapshots of friends and family, then you probably should verify that each person shows up in at least one of the pictures.

I often have a difficult time working through photo collections from visits to my wife’s family in Brazil: there are hundreds of people in the pictures and I often have doubts over who is family and who isn’t. Fortunately, my wife sits patiently with me and helps at this stage.

Look again at the photos of the elephant ride and the snake charmer. I probably have two dozen different shots of the snake charmers, while the elephant shot was a single dodgy photo taken by the tour guide. I was able to pick the very best snake charmer photo, but I had little choice with the other—there was no way I was going to omit a picture of me on an elephant so I used it. These are the kinds of tradeoffs we are dealing with.

You can see in this screenshot how I flagged most of the photos as three stars (I have already hidden all of the one-star dreck). There is one photo that has four stars, while the one next to it had an unappealing composition in my opinion, so it got two.

How far should you go?

I suppose this comes down to personal preference, but I like to keep things down to thirty or forty photos—from a starting point in the thousands. In a photo album, you can represent your whole trip in fifteen or twenty pages. This is far less intimidating than a big thick stack of photographs.

Of course, context is important. I will go out on a limb here and say that a new baby can be shown to co-workers in five photos.

In the end, I create a smart folder that shows only photos with five stars. And boy do they look good!

Tweak the best photos

My favorite tool of all for tweaking photos is the crop tool. A good crop can dramatically change the composition of a shot while still retaining the purity of the photo.

I will also straighten any slanting horizons and possibly fix funky light balance at this point. The tool set provided in iPhoto is quite adequate for these simple tasks.

Now create a slick photo album using any of the great tools available online.

Make the Photo Album

Again, I like using iPhoto. It allows you to easily create fancy albums using templates and so forth. Once you are done, you can buy a finished album with a few clicks.

Once you have your short list of photos, use a five-star smart folder as the source for the photo album. You can then spend a pleasant evening or two playing around with the layouts and composition and adding captions to your photos.

• Create a smart folder that shows only five-star photos
• Create a new photo album based on that smart folder
• Choose a pleasing layout
• Add your photos in varying page styles to the book
• Write some informative and/or witty captions for the photos

This is a screenshot of the iPhoto application, with the A-list photos along the top and the snake charmer page in the editing window.

You can even make albums like this online, without any editing software whatsoever…

This is a similar photo album creation tool that is run completely from the Winkflash website.

Now, finish picking out the features you want on your album (e.g. cover style) and place your order.
In my opinion, these albums come with the optimal number of pages (usually 20). Any more pages could make it tedious and boring. Fit your vacation into those 20 pages.

These books usually cost around forty bucks, but they are worth every penny.

The Finished Product

When everything is done, you will have a beautiful printed photo album that looks like you bought it at a book store.

I have seen photo albums from three different outfits up close.

MyPublisher

I have a couple of albums from these guys and they are near perfect. The pages look like thick magazine pages, with magazine-quality photos. I found that my white-on-black text bled a little.
Note that the leather used on the leather-bound books is paper thin.

These folks are always sending me coupons for 40% off, so it seems that you really don’t ever have to pay full price for their wares.

Apple iPhoto

These are identical to the MyPublisher books. Indeed, at one time iPhoto could send its output to either MyPublisher or Apple. I heard a rumor that MyPublisher did the books for Apple at one point.

The only down side to the Apple books is that you pay high shipping costs. Otherwise, the books are perfect.

Winkflash

A friend shared one of these with me. I happened to have my India album nearby, so we compared them. On the one hand, Winkflash is much cheaper; however, the image quality is not nearly as nice as the other books. Perhaps I was looking at a lower-end book from them, but the ink dots were a little coarse for my taste.

Summary

By putting a little effort in aggressive photo selection, basic image tweaks, and then taking advantage of the many photo book tools out there you can create a beautiful album that is a pleasure to leaf through.

These books have been available for several years; even so, whenever I hand one to a friend, they page through it, transfixed. People really love these albums and they actually enjoy looking through them.

Oh, and they make great gift ideas too!

What does this topic have to do with reducing paper in our lives? Believe me, printing one of these books is so much neater and cleaner than printing hundreds of loose photos. And you will enjoy them more.

I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle your life randomly, why not do it the old fashioned way and move your documents into folders of your choosing?

This article discusses some of the advantages of old-school folder management and gives a few hints along the way.

Why bother?

By creating your own well thought out folder structure, you gain the following advantages:

• You can find something fairly easily without needing to launch the special app.
• You can copy reasonable subsets of your document sets to friends or for backups.
• Someone else can find something without needing the special app.
• You can place files in a common network drive that others can see, from PC, Linux, or Mac.
• You do not lose all of the metadata about your files if the document management app ceases to exist.

People have been managing their documents this way for decades, so this is not anything new. What is new, however, is that folks don’t necessarily see what flexibility they give up when they allow the computer to squirrel things away on their behalf.

What kind of folders?

In short, pick some categories of documents that you will be filing, and optionally pick a timeframe which to partition the folders. This mirrors what we do with paper folders, doesn’t it? We create dozens of manila folders with tabs, and optionally create subsets of these files by date (e.g. Receipts, 2009).

One key difference helps us: Computer folders enjoy one feature that their physical counterparts lack—they can be nested several layers deep.

A few examples are probably in order…

I like to keep several kinds of scanned documents relating to day to day home paperwork. Over time, it has become clear that I scan lots of receipts, health insurance papers, banking papers, bills, and … everything else.

As such, I created the following top-level folders: Banking, Bills, Health Insurance, Receipts, and Miscellaneous.

Over time, they start to get stuffed to the gills with things, especially the Bills and the Receipts folders. My answer to this was to split them out by date. Within each category folder I have subfolders by date. This is because some categories need lots of years, while others might not need to be broken down by date at all.

Digital photos are a different creature: I feel that the date of the photo is the most important piece of information, and subject matter is secondary. For this reason, I store my photos in a series of top-level folders labeled with the years.

With photos I have a three-level system: Year, Month, and Subject. For example, within the Photos folder there is a 2009 folder. That contains a 2009-02 folder, and that one contains a folder called Cats. There are many ways to arrange these, I have chosen this approach.

I like iPhoto as much as anyone, and I use it for my photos. The difference is that, for me, iPhoto only holds a copy of each photo—the original photos are all stored on a NAS using the file structure I describe above.

Put a little thought into it and come up with a system that works for you.

Closing thoughts

We are looking for ease of use here, as well as avoiding lock-in to some proprietary app. We also want it to be easy to back up specific bits of the data and share specific bits.

By looking at my example above, you can see how easy it would be to find a bill from 2009. By following a specific naming convention, you can see that each document is fairly descriptive as well. You don’t need DEVONthink or its brethren to tell you how to find the Allstate bill from June of 2009. In addition, the folder names are now easily searchable by my operating system, as are the filenames.

This might create extra work for you in the beginning, but do you really want to be at the mercy of someone else’s application?

Oh, and about making those folders? There are applications out there that can generate a bunch of folders for you following your own chosen rules. One I use is The Big Mean Folder Machine.  I wouldn’t want to depend on an automatic system for daily use, but as a one-time jump start, tools like this can work wonders.

Don’t forget to back up your files!

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part.

A few months back I received my copy of iLife ’09 and was quite pleased with the new Faces feature—I recall losing a couple of evenings sifting through photos and finding people I had forgotten.

Derrick Story from Macworld has written an article providing some tips for getting the most out of Faces. Even if you have been using the product since it was released, you may find these tips useful.

For example, after reading the article I immediately set up a smart folder that shows all unassigned faces—called “Missing Persons.” A simple idea that I would have never thought of.

I still don’t tire of refining the Faces gallery in my iPhoto collection!

Read the full article here: 7 tips for using Faces in iPhoto ’09 (Macworld.com)

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin

A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life?

In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and the raging wildfires closing in on his city have made it clear to him that it is critical to protect whatever can be easily preserved in digital form.

Mike gives a sound strategy, starting off with a fast pass at just getting it digitized with little regard for perfection, followed by more focused efforts.

He pointed out how some objects just aren’t as important as the memories that they represent, illustrating this with a photograph of his son’s martial arts trophies that he has since donated to various organizations.

Mike makes it very clear that backups are mandatory. My kind of guy!

Here’s the whole article: Why you should digitize ‘everything’ (Computerworld.com)

Why do we even need printers?

As much as I would like to do away with the wretched devices altogether, most of us can’t cut the paper habit cold-turkey.

In fact, a means of generating an attractive well finished printed document will probably always be a critical component of any paperless home. Think about the many items we capture or scan in that we might wish to print again…

• Short cheat sheets and checklists
• Recipes
• Receipts, for the one time when you need to provide a hard copy
• Sheet music
• Archived meeting minutes or reports
• And, of course, Photographs

Ditch the Photo Printer

I must admit that the day I rid myself of my Epson Photo 870, I did so in a very undignified fashion. It was quite satisfying. Besides the whole cheap-printer/expensive-ink scam problem, the print head nozzles always clog. Then you paint the air blue for an hour as you attempt to clean the heads, wasting more precious ink in the process. As far as I know (or care, for that matter), unless you print loads of photos on a daily basis, your print head will clog. It’s inevitable.

In my opinion, unless you are an artsy photo type who prints and tweaks things all day long, the best photo printer is … no printer.

These days, I do all of my photo printing via Winkflash.

It’s cheaper than buying the supplies for the printer, looks just as good, is more permanent (the photos are on real photo paper), and doesn’t cause aggravation.

When I was printing my own photos, I had to replace the 8×10 picture of Stonehenge that I keep in my office every year or so, as the inks would yellow quickly as air seeped in around the edges. My current copy, printed by Winkflash, has been going for four or five years.

For a cost comparison, a couple of weeks ago I placed the following order:

Qty Size      Unit Price  Price
3   4x6 Matte      $0.08  $0.24
5   5x7 Matte      $0.25  $1.25
1   8x10 Matte     $1.49  $1.49
                 Subtotal $2.98
                 Shipping $0.89
                    Total $3.87

I only had the 4×6 prints done because there was a checkbox next to the 5×7′s for it and they only cost 8 cents each.

Shipping was a flat-rate 89 cents, all you can eat.

I ordered them on Thursday and they came on Monday. As a bonus, they don’t jack up the prices when you place large orders. I have printed sets of 200-300 4×6 prints at times and they did them at the same rate. Amazing.

Other Photo Options

There are dozens of online printing services available. They distinguish themselves in the following areas:

• Ease of use
• Quality of paper
• Quality of ink
• Overall print quality
• Speed of Delivery
• Price
• Shipping cost
• Add-ons (albums and calendars, for example)

If you wish, you can even print your photos online and pick them up at Walgreens in an hour!

Note: if you print online to a brick-and-mortar store, make sure they really are printing your photos on site and that the quality is good. Some years ago I tried a local retailer’s  online photo service, only to find out that I needed to go to the store in a week to pick up the photos. Why bother.

Here’s a couple of sites that compare the different online services (they sell stuff too—take their reviews with a grain of salt).

Pick the service that best fits you

I usually have all of my photos printed by Winkflash because they are remarkably cheap and I am satisfied with the quality. But, I print my fancy-schmancy photo albums of our vacations directly from Apple iPhoto, at a substantially higher cost.

A friend showed me one of the photo albums printed from Winkflash, and we laid it alongside an album I had ordered through iPhoto: the print quality was substantially better in the more expensive album. Consequently, I am willing to pay a premium for Apple to print the album because it is extremely convenient to create the album in iPhoto and the quality is top-notch.

Photo printing is pretty inexpensive, so go ahead and try a few of the services. Print the same shot if you want, so you can compare finishes and quality.

By the way, I seem to recall talk that Apple used MyPublisher to print their albums. I don’t know if this is still true, but I have albums from iPhoto and from MyPublisher and they are identical with the exception of the themes and Apple logo. They are both quite good, though MyPublisher is cheaper and it works on the PC!

To be continued…