Fix collection naming in Lightroom after Aperture import

February 28th, 2015

I’ve created another open-source project, which helps you fix the collection names created by Lightroom when you import from Aperture.

It’s a pretty basic script, although it took a while to figure out all the hoops to jump through. Hopefully this will help someone else!

Get it at https://github.com/fredsherbet/lightroom-aperture-fix

After using Adobe’s Aperture importer, you’ll find all your Aperture projects have become Collection Sets in Lightroom, with a collection called ‘Project Photos’.

Fair enough… but then when you sync them all to Lightroom Mobile, all the collections you see on your iPhone/iPad are called ‘Project Photos’. Hardly helpful!

So, this script fixes it.

  • Every collection called ‘Project Photos’ is renamed using its parent collection set
  • Projects imported from Aperture that had no sub-albums are turned into a simple collection, rather than a collection set with one child collection.

Feel free to tweak the script to behave differently!

MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR CATALOG BEFORE RUNNING THIS SCRIPT

Mass deleting photos from Google+ and Picasa

February 28th, 2015

I’ve published some open source software!

I had a problem – I’d uploaded all my photos to Google+ (it’s super-easy to upload them with the Google Plus Auto Backup program. But I did a bunch of them at full res, and was stuck paying for extra Google storage. I decided having all my photos on Google+ wasn’t that great after all (it’s not very good for browsing/searching, and it’s story thing never seemed to work well – all the photos were muddle up despite me being careful to have good metadata on my photos)

So I wanted to stop paying for extra storage, and started looking for a way to get my photos deleted from Google+… turns out it’s a painstaking process! You have to manually delete one album at a time (I had 2500 because it creates an album for each day) or manually highlight all the photos (which would have involved scrolling through 120,000 photos – a process that would have taken days).

Even the help says:

Scroll all the way to the bottom (it may take a while, depending on how many photos you have).

A “while”?… yes. A long while!

I found Google have APIs, and wrote a Python script to do the deletion for me. I’ve now published the tool, so it’s a pip install PicasaDeleter away!

More information about PicasaDeleter here and the source code is on github too

The Mac Pro’s Future

November 8th, 2011

The market for powerful computers, like the Mac Pro is now, isn’t going away any time soon, but the question is whether Apple will leave that market behind (for others to take). I don’t believe that’s what we’re seeing, although that also wouldn’t surprise me.

I believe that in the same way the iPad will increasingly replace our MacBooks, the MacBook Pro and iMac are replacing our Mac Pros. The more portable, less expensive computers are stepping up to the demands traditionally made of their big brothers.

Apple’s position and direction

November 4th, 2011

Things have been looking rocky for Apple’s most powerful computers ever since Steve Jobs likened traditional computers to trucks.

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.

What’s happening to the Mac Pro?

November 4th, 2011

I own a Mac Pro, and my brother has been considering getting one for HD video editing of amateur/no-budget movies. The market for the Mac Pro has been shrinking for a while with many people that would have previously chosen a Mac Pro, choosing an iMac or MacBook Pro. The recent rumours of Apple considering ending the product line has given me pause to consider what the future might be for computer users with high needs.

I’ve written a series of articles exploring the future of the Mac Pro. I’ve split it to consider the wider context separately from Apple and the Mac Pro itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-browser transparent backgrounds

September 30th, 2011

I had some trouble getting transparent backgrounds to work in ‘all’ browsers, so here’s how I accomplished it. Read the rest of this entry »

Using AJAX with WordPress

September 28th, 2011

There’s already lots of places to learn about AJAX, and probably lots of plugins for WordPress to enable AJAXy features. I’ve been working on adding some AJAX to bypuk.com‘s home page, to pull in summaries and links for different movies without interrupting the showreel video. I did it by customising the site’s template. The least documented part of the puzzle was getting plain HTML snippets and post lists from WordPress. Read the rest of this entry »

MarsEdit

May 23rd, 2011

I’m trying out MarsEdit, after seeing Shawn Blanc’s post ‘An Ode to Software’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Simpler comments system

August 20th, 2010

I was watching the most recent TWIT special, which is a collection of young adults talking about entrepreneurship. Most of them entrepreneurs themselves. It was a good, inspiring watch, so check it out at http://twit.tv/specials32.

One of the young entrepreneurs is Joey Primiani, and he’s made a simpler commenting system, that I’m trying out on my blog.

I was using Disqus, but it adds a big blob of busy-ness at the bottom of each post, so I wasn’t too keen on it. Joey’s comment system is clean and simple, but only ties in to twitter. You put your twitter name in, and your comment. It pulls all your details, including your avatar, from Twitter.

Making vi more colourful on the mac

February 19th, 2010

I don’t know why, but vi on the mac doesn’t highlight syntax by default. Searching Google was particularly hard to find the answer, so I’m adding it here (particularly for when I forget how I did it.)

An aside: apparently vi actually just redirects to vim in Snow Leopard.

This site has lots of useful configuration options to consider to make vim more useful. Read the rest of this entry »