Consilience

I recently (end of November) bought myself an early Christmas present: a Nikon D3100. I did this mostly because our first child was due on December 10th (he came December 11th! – photos).

Now, as you imagine, as a crazy happy new dad, I’ve been taking a lot of photos. And I’ve been especially good about making sure they are all backed up. I have them on my laptop, my external RAID array, and now on my in a different state colo’d server.

But, since that D3100 is a DSLR I’ve been playing around with RAW images, and those can be pretty big. So far, just since I got this camera around November 30th I have about 17 gigs of photos already. My harddrive, which is an SSD, is going to fill up soon enough and it would be full now if I had imported all of my previous photos from my previous camera(s).

So, I’ve been looking for a smart way of dealing with large photo collections where part of it is on my laptop and part is ‘archived’ on an external harddrive or in the cloud or wherever.

What I see as a perfect work-flow for this is:

1. Take photos with camera
2. Import photos to Photo Management Software on your laptop
3. Process, tag, export, publish, etc
4. Repeat 1-3 many times
5. Use a ton of your computer’s harddrive space
6. Archive all photos except the last 60 gig/3 months (whatever) to an external harddrive, or nfs share, or cloud storage, etc
7. The Photo Management Software knows where those photos are, their metadata, and has a small thumbnail for them as placeholders in the timeline

The killer feature here is the Archive button. Admittedly, Google revolutionized webmail with that button (while getting tons of other things wrong with GMail*), who is going to revolutionize photo management with it?

Do any photo management applications out there do this without having to do stupid painful things like this (which makes me remove photos from one library and add them to a ‘backup library’ where I can’t see them all in the same Shotwell session).

* Like non-threaded email, non-standard IMAP server, etc

Last week I was interviewed (.mp3) for the very awesome, very fun Lococast hosted by the always enjoyable Rick Harding and Craig Maloney. We hit on many of my various interests including: copyright, open data, open educational resources (OERs), Creative Commons, community management, the Michigan LoCo team, and Ubuntu more generally,

It was great fun sitting down with Rick and Craig for about an hour; they always make it enjoyable.

Today was the International Open Data Day Hackathon and I helped coordinate a group of people in Ann Arbor, MI to participate pretty last minute. There was a post to the School of Information’s (my alma mater) mailing list saying, effectively, “Short notice but this looks cool.” I replied with “Yes, short notice, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything!”

With a quick rallying of the troops, notably Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library and Ryan Burns of a2geeks, we had a free space to have the event with free wifi and electricity (what else do you need?). I sent out the announcement that same day (Nov. 29th, 5 days ago). Even with the last minuteness, end of semesterness (Ann Arbor is a college town), and the holidays right around the corner we had a really good turn out. Including myself there were 8 people in attendance.

What we did:

• Added some datasets to ckan.net, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.
• City of Ann Arbor Purchase Card Transactions
• City of Ann Arbor’s Data Catalog
• Explored what datasets other cities offered (like San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Vancouver).
• Most importantly we began building our own webapp using some of the data from the Ann Arbor data sets.

This project has A) a name (CitySpender), B) a git repository, C) a license, D) and code that does stuff that isn’t yet checked into the repository :)

All in all I think this was a big success. Met some great new people who I’ll continue to work with on this project (we’ll be at the next Coffee House Coders in Ann Arbor this Wednesday night).

Expect more updates…..