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 trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents.

Have you ever considered just how portable those documents really are?

What’s wrong with PDF?

It seems strange to question the portability of these files, doesn’t it?

For the past ten or fifteen years Adobe has been providing Acrobat Reader and singing the wonders of their new universal document format. And it seemed to be all that, too—regardless of the audible groan we give when Acrobat launches after we click a link, isn’t it amazing that we can download press-ready copies of our income tax forms, that are guaranteed to look exactly the same when you print them as when I print them? Read on to see what dangers lurk within.

What’s the Problem?

In order to understand the nature of the PDF portability issues, one need only look as far as the web browser for an analogy. Consider how the web browser went from a barebones tool that could display a simple language, HTML, in a neutral way, fitting the web content onto each user’s screen, to a memory hogging behemoth that is an integral part of your operating system. It didn’t happen all at one; it has been death by a thousand cuts.

Mirroring the evolution of web browsers, the PDF document standard has adapted over the years to include many bells and whistles such as embedded audio, video, and JavaScript. It is these features that chip away at the core purpose and raison d’être of the PDF standard.

An example: Font Issues

A simple example of the weakness of these extended PDF features is the humble text font. When your application generates a PDF document, there is the option of using 14 standard PDF fonts, local machine fonts, or embedded TTF or Postscript fonts.

There are 14 standard fonts that should be available by default in each PDF reader. These fonts are Courier, Courier Bold, Courier Italic (Oblique), Courier Bold and Italic, Helvetica, Helvetica Bold, Helvetica Italic (Oblique), Helvetica Bold and Italic, Times Roman, Times Roman Bold, Times Roman Italic, Times Roman Bold and Italic, Symbol and ZapfDingBats® (source)

Guess what happens when you set your document in Mona Lisa Solid ITC and then print to PDF and send to all of your colleagues? Does your friend’s machine have a copy of this font? Maybe, and maybe not.

As I was writing this, I planned on putting together a cute demo by saving a document set in Mona Lisa Solid ITC in PDF from my Mac and then opening it on a PC. Much to my surprise (and delight), I found that the default “Print to PDF” functionality on my Mac does, in fact, embed the font within the document.

Regardless, if you have always just trusted that the fonts would be identical across platforms, you could get quite a surprise when your friend tries to print your beautiful document.

PDF/A Standard

Some time back, Adobe recognized the need for a more tightly controlled standard, for creating really portable documents, instead of mere portable documents. This standard, dating from 2005, is referred to as PDF/A, where the A stands for Archive.

A key element to … reproducibility is the requirement for PDF/A documents to be 100 % self-contained. All of the information necessary for displaying the document in the same manner every time is embedded in the file. This includes, but is not limited to, all content (text, raster images and vector graphics), fonts, and color information. A PDF/A document is not permitted to be reliant on information from external sources (e.g. font programs and hyperlinks). (Wikipedia)

Basically PDF/A forbids all of the flashy stuff and sticks to the basics: good solid document rendering.

Banned features include:

• Audio and Video
• JavaScript
• Encryption
• Nonstandard metadata
• Transparent images

In addition to the loss of several features, PDF/A documents can be somewhat larger, due to the embedded fonts, and they might have rendering issues with images that depend on transparency.

With all that, it still sounds like an enticing concept. Many PDF tools speak fluent PDF/A. Check out your own toolkit and see if you can future-proof your documents a little more

Here’s more on PDF/A documents

Long-term digital archiving with PDF/A (The PDF Blog)
PDF/A (Wikipedia)
PDF/A – A new Standard for Long-Term Archiving (PDF/A Competence Center)

My own choice for document format is almost always Portable Document Format (PDF), but rather than just state this, I would like to consider some of the factors involved.

This is the first of a series of articles covering document formats. This article focuses specifically on the distinction between works in progress and finished product.

Two Kinds of Documents

In general, we can consider two broad categories of documents: working documents (works in progress) and archived documents. You can call these by many different names, but the fundamental distinction is still there.

Working Documents

These are documents that you are still writing. They share some characteristics:

• They must be retained in their original format, such as Microsoft Word.
• The formats are often very specialized. Quite often another tool can import such a document, but you usually lose something in the translation.
• You and your colleagues need to have the same editor software to view and modify the documents.
• They are often short-lived. This phase of a document’s life usually doesn’t more than a few months (though a template document might be kept for many years).
• A good backup strategy will need a short window between backups; these documents change often, so they should be backed up frequently.
• You may want to consider a document versioning strategy, so you can see how the document appeared at different stages during its life.

Here are some examples:

• Microsoft Word documents
• Visio diagrams
• Photos that you are still retouching
• Audio files that you are in the process of curating (e.g. applying ID3 tags)

Archived Documents

These are documents that are read-only, meant to be viewed but never modified.

• They often must be rendered in very precise ways, so each viewer sees the document as intended (consider a 1040 form from the IRS)
• They may be around for a long time.
• These documents should be less tightly bound to a particular software product. PDF vs. MS Word; JPG vs. Adobe Photoshop.
• They typically have a wider audience. You may share a work-in-progress with a co-worker or two, but a finished read-only document might be read by hundreds or thousands.
• Any user should be able to read these documents, with little effort.
• Your backup strategy is probably going to be more focused on longevity and less focused on frequency. These documents are in it for the long haul.

Why not start with a simple example?

Here is a screenshot of an application I use in my day job:

Just in case you did not recognize the unmistakable visage of this small molecule, I have labeled it appropriately.

This is an application called ChemDraw from Cambridgesoft, and unless you are a chemist you have probably never heard of it. My molecule is saved as caffeine.cdx in a format that only ChemDraw knows intimately (though there are other similar chemistry tools that can import this file format).

My point is simple: if your friend sent you a copy of caffeine.cdx, how exactly would you open it?

In contrast, here is a more accessible rendition of the same molecule in PDF format. Try it out; you should be able to view the molecule, and zoom in on details.

What if you had to show someone this document five years down the road? Do you want to have to chase down a possibly obsolete version of a very expensive application that might not even run on your operating system?

Obsolescence

Some time back I was sifting through some files on an old server at work that apparently had been written by me. Fifteen years ago I was attending night classes and writing many of my English assignments on a VAX running VMS at work (over my lunch break!). I was using some anemic version of WordPerfect that had been ported to VMS. This arrangement saw me safely through college, but was not conducive to long term document storage.

Do you have any idea what VMS directory structures look like? Maybe, and maybe not. Are these files compatible with the contemporary DOS versions of WordPerfect? Maybe.

Could I open these files on a Windows Vista machine in 2009 using Microsoft Word? With luck. What about using Pages from Apple iWork on my Mac running OS X? Doubtful.

Not only do we need to be concerned with special applications that only a select few (with expensive licenses) have, but we also need to consider that the file format might be obsolete beyond hope.

For an exaggerated example, consider the image of punched paper tape at the top of this article. I would have no clue what to do if I were given a roll of this tape.

Which do you keep?

Look at the characteristics of the document types listed above and see which one fits your document best. Quite often you will find yourself keeping both the original document and a PDF rendition. Indeed, this is what many professional document databases do.

If you can’t easily choose one, keep both. In most cases, I have found that I only need the PDF rendition for the long term and I couldn’t care less about the source document.

Summary

In the world of the paperless home, much of what we do is store digital copies of old documents for searching and possible reprinting some time in the future. Don’t make the mistake of keeping all of your documents only in their original editable format; you might just find yourself with a digital file that cannot be viewed!

The basic tool required to bridge the gap between the carbon-intensive paper document present and the greener electronic document future was invented in 1993 as a way to streamline communications between publishers and printers.

Today, the humble PDF file is the file format of choice for “final” electronic documents. Properly created and deployed, PDF alone serves a critical need in reducing both business costs and environmental impacts.

Duff Johnson of Planet PDF wrote an article about two of my favorite topics: PDF Documents and Paperless Offices.

In the article, he discusses several key motivating factors for fitting PDF into your own workflow, with the underlying goal of making your office a little bit greener.

Read it all here: PDF is green tech for your office

Printing Documents

In a perfect paperless world we would never have need for dead trees. But that isn’t about to happen—there will always be a need to reprint certain important documents, and occasionally one may wish to print something for use away from a computer (e.g. a recipe).

Unless you want to print photo-quality Helvetica and Times Roman, you now are looking at using a traditional document printer, such as a laser printer or an inkjet printer. These days you may well have an all-in-one printer that combines a scanner with printer and fax.

The main problem I have with any of these printers is cost. Good laser printers are expensive and the cheap ones are just loss leaders to get you to spend $$$ on the toner cartridges. Worse still, those giveaway printers that come with new computers are the epitome of loss leaders—they make their profit on ink. Some have posited that the ink cartridge manufacturers have programmed their products to expire before the ink is exhausted.

Printing Online

For those who only have occasional print jobs, why not print your documents online?

For this article, I looked at two services: Staples Copy & Print and Fedex Office (the Copy Center Formerly Known as Kinkos). I selected these because they have a very large brick-and-mortar presence. Though you can have your documents mailed to you, you really want to go there and get them right now, don’t you?

As always, do a quick Google search to see the current lay of the landscape.

Staples

I started by going to the Staples Copy & Print web site.

Then I clicked on Create Copy Project. There was no need to log in at this point.

I was prompted to choose a local store; I entered my zip and clicked on a store.

After this, I provided a job name and quantity and started adding documents:

After a minute or so I had uploaded both my document on Creating a Basic NAS with Ubuntu Linux and my Secret Missile Plans (sorry, no link for that one!).

Staples supports printing several dozen different document types. Even though my missile plans appear to have a PDF icon below, you can rest assured that I uploaded a Microsoft Office .docx document.

The next step guided me through choosing options for each of my documents. There are plenty to choose from such as single-side/duplex, paper type, layout, folding, stapling, and so forth.

I chose some nice pink paper and set it to duplex.

Beware: The Color option was selected by default. I imagine this feature has earned them substantial $$$ from people who were just printing black and white documents. Sneaky.

Once my settings were all chosen, I was given an opportunity to review the print job before adding it to my shopping cart.

At this point I decided to spare a tree and I emptied my shopping cart.

Fedex Kinkos

The experience with Fedex Office was similar.

I started by going to the Fedex Office Print Online website.

Like Staples, I went through the process of uploading my documents and choosing options.

Beware: Again, the Color option was chosen by default. Make sure you choose B&W if you are printing black and white.

Here is the preview of my Linux document:

How was the Price?

With my basic settings, printing 38 total pages in full duplex, Staples was fairly cheap, coming in at just under $3.00, while Fedex came in about a dollar more.

These prices reflect a per-page cost of between 8 and 12 cents. This is not bad at all, considering I don’t need my own printer!

Note that the different features you choose are à la carte, adding little bits to the cost. If you think the price seems a little high, go and fiddle around with the options you selected.

Beware of that color copy trap. Shame on both Fedex and Staples for making color the default! I suspect that they may have consulted some of those ink cartridge guys for their business model.

The Fedex site openly references a Volume Discount, and it is likely that Staples would have something similar.

One More Option: Sneakernet!

One final technique that I have not mentioned until now is good old-fashioned Sneakernet. You can always put your documents on a thumb drive and stop by your favorite office center and ask them to print them. You will pay similar fees to their per-copy charges. Not bad, especially if you want them to use high quality paper and a top-notch laser printer.

And don’t forget that Sneakernet works as well for photos. Many chain pharmacies and supermarkets have a carry-in photo printing service. Just bring in a thumb drive or a SD card with your photos on it and they can print them for you. It won’t be as cheap as Winkflash, but it’s still a better deal than the old days.

Use common sense here. If you are handing over an SD card that has the only copy of your photos on it, you should probably use your thumbnail to flick the little “read-only” lever on the card.

Summary

In these two articles I have provided several options for handling photo printing and document printing, online or in the store, without ever having to curse at another printer again. I hope that you are able to find something useful here. If you have any advice or feedback on different print services, let me know!

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…