Oh no another speed test : read thumbnail from raw

[Simon Knight]

Paul,

It all sounds interesting although you lost me with the different printing methods. As a boy my father use to take me around the news paper where he worked back when it was linotype machines and hot metal. I remember that when the presses were running they could be felt throughout the building and up close they were monsters as were the rolls of paper (elephants I think).

I'm with you on Adobe. I tried to help my daughter with Illustrator (industry standard ha) and found that while it was loaded with features the actual implementation of those features was often quite crude, for instance fine positioning of a control point on a curve was very hard work whereas in Affinity Designer it was simple. However, I should stress that I don't know what I'm talking about but think it is a pity that Universities perpetuate the myth that its Adobe or nothing. I had a quick peek at Esko website - looks good but I did not find any prices, so will mark it down as reassuringly expensive.

but I'd really LOVE for Adobe to have some real competition again!

. Well not that my code will ever be competition but my delving inside raw files is due to me refusing to rent Lightroom from them. Ever since "upgrading" to Catalina my 16/32 bit version of Lightroom has stopped working ; neat trick by Adobe the app is 32 bit but the installer and licensing app is 16 bit. Anyway I now using a collection of Apps to manage my image collection but I still needed something better than the Finder to move images from the memory card to the hard drive. The files have to be renamed and stored in sub folders according to capture date and I want to ensure images are not imported twice.

I'm just starting my third redesign and its partly your fault . I decided that my meta-data handlers should be in a library stack so I am now busy unpicking them from the main app. Also because the thumbnails can be read so quickly I am going to display all the images: who knows the app may be ready by Christmas!

best wishes

Simon

[kdjanz]

Hi Simon

Same boat with Lightroom and Adobe. I refuse to do the subscription thing when I have bought Lightroom and upgraded 3 times.

I went the Affinity route, and when they had the Covid sale, I bought the whole suite at half price. I'm finding a bit of learning curve compared to Lightroom, because I had my "recipes" and habitual sequences, and I have to re-learn how to get the same results while working in a new pattern. I think (and my brother who is Uni prof and uses all of them live in class with his students) that the power is there if I can learn to do it their way.

Please consider me for beta on your cataloging software. My raw files are Panasonic. My pattern had been to save my cataloged images in DNG format for archiving, but I may have to rethink that. Would your software work with DNG?

Thanks

Kelly

[Simon Knight]

Hi Kelly,

You are welcome to a copy of my app but its not cataloging but file renaming : I use a cheap App NeoFinder as my cataloging software but because I have been bitten multiple times by having to change catalog software I decided to uses a file naming convention that means I can always fall back on the file system.

In the past I have used various folder structures and am now saving images to a two level structure where the images are stored in a folder named after the date, so images taken today end up in Disc/Photo-Library/2020-09-04 and the files are named in a similar way : 2020-09-04-160824-KeyWordA-KeyWordB-P1047030.RW2.

The app performs the renames and copies the files to the correct sub-folder once the destination folder has been specified "Photo-Library" in my case. Before doing the copy and rename it allows batches of images to be allocated key words and these are added to the final name. When complete it will also check that the same image has not already been imported from the card by checking for the original file name e.g. P1047030.RW2 as I have a bad habit of forgetting to delete images from my memory card.

The app also copies and renames any xmp files or jpeg files that are on the card (or source folder) because sometimes I review my images with FastRawViewer which creates xmp files and I have also been known to do a quick review edit and create a jpeg while the images are on the memory card.

I'm using DxO Photolab to edit my raw files and I borrowed some code from their Lightroom to DxO plugin. This means that I can select a number of images in NeoFinder and right click to pass the images to a little app I created that wraps the DxO plugin. The app just passes the images to DxO for editing but it overcomes the problem where DxO spends ages creating previews of every image in the parent folder as the borrowed plugin groups the selected images into a date stamped "project" which are virtual folders.

So if any of that is of interest you are most welcome.

S

[kdjanz]

Thanks Simon.

I was renaming in much the same way via Lightroom, so our systems are pretty similar. I'm evaluating Neofinder now because I hadn't heard of it before. But I would love to try and experiment with your software whenever you feel it is ready.

One thing I know I will have to change is that I never delete a raw file off the camera card. Those are my "negatives" and are sacred. Once I fill a card, I flip the lock and put the card away in my vault for safe keeping. I'm not a professional photographer and cards are relatively cheap, so I can afford to only use a card once. So I would not want your option of erasing the files with the original name turned on for my cards. I can deal with that however.

Looking forward to trying something new.