I just found about the export plugins for Picasa and Flickr:

http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/lightroom-picasaweb/
http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/lightroom-flickr/

Awesome! Thanks Jeffrey for putting these together. This of course would not have been possible without Adobe's Lightroom SDK, which is pretty cool in itself.

What I'd really like to have is a plugin that emulates Apple's iPhoto Digital Photo Access Protocol (DPAP) protocol. This way the other Macs in my home can view Lightroom's albums as a regular remote iPhoto. Apparently some people reversed engineered this protocol and have an implementation available in Perl.

Hopefully future versions of the Lightroom SDK will include the ability to run plugins at all times in their own thread, as well as have the ability to use server side sockets.

I use Adobe Lightroom to organize my photographs, both digital ones as well as the scanned slide films I take. Lightroom is working great for me and I've written about my disappointment with Apple Aperture in a previous entry.

Yesterday I was looking for a way to take a subset of the pictures I have and convert them to JPG. I want to use the JPGs on a small Mac Mini to make presentation in FrontRow using a newly acquired Canon SX7 digital projector (more on this in a later entry).

Unfortunately Adobe Lightroom does not offer such a functionality. You can export all the pictures in a directory to JPG, but there's no way to take a directory, and recursively export all the pictures within it to JPG while maintaining the directory structure they are in.

I could have written a small shell script to do this, but I have a mixture of TIFF, JPG and RAW images that had to be processed. I wanted to get the image processing capabilities from Lightroom or Photoshop, instead of using dcraw. Adobe Lightroom doesn't have a way to script it, so I looked at Photoshop CS3 to do it.

Photoshop can be scripted in JavaScript, in addition to AppleScript. I came up with a small script that does the conversion.

To use, download the script, install it in /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Presets/Scripts and restart Photoshop CS3.

After restart, the script is available under File -> Scripts. When you select it, the script will ask the source directory containing the images, and the destination directory where the JPG images should be placed. The script has been tested in Photoshop CS3 running on MacOS X 10.4.10. It seems to be able to process TIFF files produced by my scanner, CR2 RAW files from my 5D and the older 20D, as well as JPGs from various digital point-and-shoot cameras.

If you stop the script, the next time you restart it on the same source and destination directories, it will not process the files that have already been processed.

Note that if you process a lot of files, Photoshop ends up using a lot of the disk space on your scratch disk. I could not figure out why this happens. Quitting Photoshop seems to reclaim the scratch disk space.

The script is public domain, feel free to use and modify it as you wish. If you do end up using it and fix various bugs, please let me know so I can incorporate them in my script.

Rome is a beautiful city with an extremely rich history. We rented an apartment in Trastevere for 10 days and visited the numerous places and museums packed in a relatively small area. The area of the city enclosed within the old Roman walls is 23 square miles, about half the size of San Francisco. You can walk literally everywhere, you can take the highly unreliable public transportation or get a taxi to quickly go somewhere else.

One major downside in Rome is the huge number of tourists. To take the above picture of my son in San Giovanni in Laterano, the mother church of the Roman Catholics, I had to wait some 20 minutes.

Yesterday was another miserably cold day at Marina. While in Bay Area temperatures finally dropped from the high 90s into low 70s, Marina saw a lot of fog, wind and cold weather. The autocross at Marina was nevertheless very rewarding, this time with a very interesting and challenging course. I ended up 5th in my car's class. While the result was pretty good, I could have done a lot better.

The most challenging part is recognizing the mistakes you make and try to avoid them in a consistent manner. This is easier said than done, as the course's features come at you very fast, and a mistake in a turn happens usually because of another one few turns before. So concentration is key, as well as a good understanding of what your car can do. I still have a lot to learn, but it's fun.

In a previous weblog entry I measured the disk access performance on MacPro. Few days ago I decided to change my two 750GB drives configuration from RAID 1 (mirrored mode) to RAID 0 (stripped mode).

I backed up the RAID disk on an external drive and I recreated the RAID setup. To destroy the old RAID disk I had to boot the machine in safe mode (hold down the "Shift" key during computer boot-up). Otherwise DiskUtil would not be able to unmount the drive. After creating the RAID 0 disk, I restored the disk from the backup.

I ran the same commands as I did few months ago:

$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=<file> bs=1024 count=1048576

$ time cat <file> | wc -c

One thing I did notice is that running the cat to /dev/null (as I did in the previous entry) yields a really low number on MacOS X 10.4.9. This indicates a possible optimization in the operating system. I changed the command to count the number of bytes using wc. This adds a negligible CPU load, and probably some inefficiencies in how the stdin data is read by wc, but overall should not influence much the result. Here are the results combined with those from the last run:

So clearly setting up a RAID 0 disk improves the performance of your disk! In real life Adobe Lightroom takes a lot less time to start up than before. Other applications may benefit as well from this, but it's too early to tell. My previous recommendation remains: use an external USB or Firewire drive for backups only, and optimize the internal disk system for performance.