Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

I got a note from “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com today telling me that since I’d signed up in the early days, they were extending my account an extra year and doubling my upload capacity. I thought, “Gee, that’s real friendly of them!”

I was curious what deal new members were getting these days, and it appears that the Flickr crew have nearly halved their annual fee (now $25) and doubled upload capacity to 2GB. So, really what happened was they decided to be competitive with smugmug and others, they’d need to lower the price and increase the bandwidth. But they didn’t want to piss off the folks who’d paid $42 for a one-year account. Sly of them to spin this as “giving us a special treat” instead of “we decided not to screw you for signing on early, so we’ll give you the same deal anyone else can get today.”

True, they’ve also given me two free Pro accounts to give away, though as an early adopter, I’m sure they’re hoping I’ll use it to get more connector-type people in the fold to hold the line against “smugmug”:http://smugmug.com, which offers high-quality prints and control over your page’s appearance.

Inertia will probably be too much to get me to switch to smugmug, but if I were doing it again, I’d be hard-pressed to choose Flickr. With smugmug, I wouldn’t even have to host my own web gallery site. smugmug + blogger or typepad could be pretty compelling.

I may as well mention to my six readers that I am on the market again. I won’t write too much about the circumstances until things are resolved, but suffice it to say that I’m looking for a small, close-knit team whose members consider each other friends and who genuinely want each other to succeed. Either an individual contributor or lead/manager/mentor role would be great. Here’s my “r?©sum?©”:http://www.michaelmcdaniel.net/resume.

Let me know if you have any suggestions! Thanks.

For my first few years as a serious digital photographer, I used Adobe’s Photoshop Album. After a while, though, I started getting nervous about the fact that all my metadata was stuck in the Adobe database and not in my files. (Since that time, the same functionality has been added into Photoshop Elements on the PC only and a function to export the metadata into the files has been provided, but it’s not automatic).

So, I started looking for software that stored my metadata in the files themselves. This led me to Microsoft’s Digital Image Library 10 (included in Digital Image Suite 10). It stores the metadata directly in the files, so I thought I was home free.

Two weeks ago, I actually tried to read the data out using photoshop and it just wasn’t there! Photoshop only reads the IPTC fields, while Digital Image Library stores the metadata in extended EXIF fields. I got worried that there wasn’t anything out there to read the extended EXIF fields except Digital Image Library itself, and started looking for other organizers.

“Andrej”:http://andrej.mobileduo.com/ has been recommending “iView MediaPro”:http://www.iview-multimedia.com for years. I did a bunch of research and came to the conclusion that it’s probably the best thing for the job. I installed the demo, and voila: all my Digital Image Library keywords were already there! Whee! So now I can keep on using Digital Image Library secure in the fact that my metadata is being preserved. Now I just need to find something to upload to Flickr and Smugmug using my embedded data.

Oh, I *did* try “Picasa”:http://www.picasa.com, and it is great once all your files are imported, but it’s slow as molasses to get things imported. It was more than 10 seconds per shot when pulling pictures off of my CF card. Sheesh!

Moving to a new URL has caused my site to completely fall off of Google’s pagerank radar, so I’m not even on the first page any more.

If you read my ramblings here and want to be nice to me, link to the new url (www.michaelmcdaniel.net) from your site, and I’ll be happy to return the favor. Even better, would be if you linked using my name. Something like this: “Michael McDaniel”:http://www.michaelmcdaniel.net

Thanks for helping to feed my ego!

I’ve long complained about how lame Outlook is as an IMAP client. It’s truly sad that Microsoft has a great user experience in Outlook when used with an Exchange server, but point it at an IMAP server and it’s among the worst out there.

Every once in a while, I run a web search looking for better imap clients. I’ve used Outlook Express, which was way better, for a long time, but have been annoyed that it doesn’t support my preferred “deleted messages move to trash” mode instead of the standard IMAP “marked as deleted, expunge to really delete” mode.

This time, I came across a “great post by Omar Shahine”:http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/02/19/76061.aspx describing my gripes and talking about which readers work well. As a result, I’m now giving Thunderbird a test-drive.

Thunderbird also supports RSS reading, and if I’m giving up Outlook for IMAP reading, I’ll be giving up NewsGator as well. Sadly, it doesn’t support OPML import yet. Another quick search, though, finds lots of angst about that, as well as a “solution from Dougal Campbell”:http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2005/01/17/improved-thunderbird-opml which works just as advertised.

Now if only Thunderbird supported calendaring. Oh, if only I were “using a Mac”:http://www.michaelmcdaniel.net/2005/03/28/mac-lust/ — I guess Entourage supports it quite well.

While I hope I’ve rigged everything so all the old URLs will continue to work, I’ve converted the canonical domain for the blog to “www.michaelmcdaniel.net”:http://www.michaelmcdaniel.net, which I hope will be its permanent home. Please let me know if you see anything amiss!

“Boosman makes the point”:http://www.boosman.com/blog/archives/2005/04/webshots_vs_fli.html that Yahoo bought “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com for their growth rate, not for their current user base. Interesting point.

I’m using Flickr over “smugmug”:http://www.smugmug.com mostly because of the very same buzz and community potential, though I must admit that thus far, I would probably benefit more from the integrated printing and extra storage space over at smugmug.

The community is just really jazzed about the “FlickrAPI”:http://www.flickr.com/services, though. Just try finding a smugmug plugin for “wordpress”:http://www.wordpress.com!

Finally, I’ve been playing with “BaseCamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com and “Ta-Da Lists”:http://tadalist.com lately. The “37 Signals folks”:http://www.37signals.com have got web design just right. Imagine if Flickr had this sort of interface!

And thanks to “Josh”:http://joshp.typepad.com for getting me really curious about their next site: “backpackit.com”:http://www.backpackit.com.

“Google maps”:http://maps.google.com now has satellite views of the world. Higher-res in urban areas, it’s still pretty neat.

“Here”:http://maps.google.com/maps?q=half+moon+bay,ca&ll=37.524791,-122.516162&spn=0.014291,0.018561&t=k&hl=en is one of my favorite places to go tidepooling, for example. Neat!

Update: Looks like their satellite data is of varying quality, and shows up some flaws in their maps! “Here”:http://maps.google.com/maps?q=950+25+road,81506&t=k&hl=en is a satellite view that shows I 1/2 Road stopping at 25 Road, but the “map”:http://maps.google.com/maps?q=950+25+road,81506&spn=0.012726,0.017659&hl=en shows it continuing East of there (the satellite view is correct). I guess MapQuest et al have some time to catch up, after all.

Okay, you can call me a bleeding heart liberal if you like, but how can an enlightened country like Canada permit the semi-annual “baby seal hunt”:http://www.ifaw.org/ifaw/general/default.aspx?oid=21446 to go on? It’s just sickening.

Last year, more than 300,000 baby seals were clubbed or shot. And why? For their fur, which is in demand in China, and the few other countries who still permit the products of this gruesome event to be imported. Thankfully, the US prohibits import of such products.

The Canadian government says the “hunt” helps local fishermen to survive. That’s agricultural subsidies. Come on folks! If there’s not a market for what you do, go do something else!

Clubbing baby seals. Geez.