Entries tagged images

Every now and again the topic of SELinux arises locally.

I still believe it is:

• Theoretically interesting.
• Not ready for the prime time.
• Not something I ever consider using.

I kept quiet when the Should SELinux be standard topic was recently raised. But I personally believe the answer should be emphatically "No".

Anyway, change of subject. The recent "What do you look like right now" meme. I looked like this a couple of days ago. Today I have no hair.

In other news my mail scanning service has now reached a new record. Over the last 30 days it has rejected/archived ovr three million SPAM messages.

Three million messages over a month averages out at about 100,000 messages a day. Sustained. Nice.

Finally I really owe Runa a new letter. I will write it today.

ObQuote: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Tags: images, letters, mail-scanning, meme, pictures, selinux, stats | No comments

Over the weekend I bit the bullet and purchased a new camera, a Canon EOS 1000d (many page revie).

I've taken a few hundred shots with it so far, trying to get a feel for what it can do, and what I can do now that I couldn't before </Lady Teldra>.

As my first DSLR its a pretty significant upgrade and I'm enjoying it a lot - especially since I've managed to persuade a few local people to pose for me.

Now is the time to wonder how to store, share, and organise the pictures I've taken and will be taking in the future. Currently all my pictures are beneath ~/Images, replicated across a number of machines for redundancy. As a sample I have:

skx@gold:~$ ls /home/skx/Images/
Computer  Flat  Misc  Parties  People  Pets & Animals  Travel

Beneath these top-level directories I have more directories for specific items, such as ~/Images/Travel/2009/York, or ~/Images/People/kelly.

I think that I should probably be looking at using some image-manager application to allow me to tag, date, and export images more easily though.

Right now I'm not really sharing anything except a few sample shots:

• A bike
• Some feet

Those are quite nice shots, but I suspect sooner or later I will have pictures I do wish to share properly. So I need to come up with an URL scheme, or a library tool which will export specific shots and keep the rest of my archive private by default.

Any suggestions are welcome ..

ObFilm: The Dark Crystal

Tags: cameras, images, photos | 10 comments

Recently I've been spidering the internet, merrily downloading content for the past few days.

The intention behind the spidering is to record, in a database, the following pieces of information for each image it stumbles across:

• The page that contained the link to this image. (i.e. the image parent)
• The image URL.
• The MD5sum of the image itself.
• The dimensions of the image.

I was motivated by seeing an image upon a website and thinking "Hang on I've seen that before - but where?".

Thus far I've got details of about 30,000 images and I can now find duplicates or answer the question "Does this image appear on the internet and if so where?".

Obviously this is going to be foiled trivially via rotations, cropping, or even resizing. But I'm going to let the spider run for the next few days at least to see what interesting things the data can be used for.

In other news I'm a little behind schedule but I'm going to be moving from Xen to KVM over the next week or ten days.

My current plan is to setup the new host on Monday, move myself there that same day. Once that's been demonstrated to work I can move the other users over one by one, probably one a day. That will allow a little bit of freedom for people to choose their downtime window, and will ensure that its not an all-or-nothing thing.

The new management system is pretty good, but I have the advantage here in that I've worked upon about four systems for driving KVM hosting. The system allows people to enable/disable VNC access, use the serial console, and either use one of a number of pre-cooked kernels or upload their own. (Hmmm security you say?)

ObFilm: Chasing Amy

Tags: images, kvm, kvm-hosting, projects, searching, xen, xen-hosting | 15 comments

I've been trying to remember to post the pictures I like online for the past few months. So this is a reminder to myself.

This image below didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to:

• I was hoping for a nicer sihouet upon the lady's face.
• The tree-branch on the left irritates me.

But that said I keep on coming back to look at it. I like the lighting, and I love the way that the brick wall on the right hand side angles towards the building on the horizon.

Enjoy. Or not.

A similarly "not perfect" image is this outdoor shot. I have only one irritation with this shot - and that is that the trees are clipped at the top. Meh, such is life.

(I have two styles of photography; semi-random where I snap what is in front of me, and staged where I try to construct a particular picture - the two images above? One of each.)

ObFilm: Bound

Tags: images, misc, photography, random, soul-stealing | No comments

Recently I received a small flurry of patches to my blog compiler, from Chris Frey. These patches significantly speedup rebuilding a static blog when using Danga's memcached.

The speedup is sufficiently fast that my prior SQLite based approach is no longer required - and (re)building my blog now takes on the order of 5 seconds.

On the topic of other people's blogs I've been enjoying David Watson's recent photo challenge. I was almost tempted to join in, but I'm not sure I could manage one every day - Although I can pretend I recently carried out my my first real photoshoot.

I'm still taking pictures of "things/places" but I'm starting to enjoy "people" more. With a bit of luck I'll get some more people to pose in the near future, even if I have to rely upon posting to gumtree for local bodies!

ObFilm: Love Actually

Tags: chronicle, debian, images | 2 comments

Over the past few years I've amassed a collection of a few thousand images taken with a succession of digital cameras.

I'm pretty good at organising images, in a directory hierarchy which makes sense to me, in a few simple and broad categories:

skx@birthday:~$ tree -L 1 ~/Images/
/home/skx/Images/
|-- Misc
|-- Parties
|-- People
|-- Pets & Animals
`-- Travel

Beneath ~/Images/People, for example, I have subdirectories for specific individuals (or a "Debian/" folder for Debian-people who've been snapped but don't warrant their own folder.)

~/Images/Travel has things like Travel/Local/2010, Travel/Vienna/2008, etc.

In summary I have images of people, places, and things stored beneath what should be a reasonably discoverable directory hierarchy, however this just doesn't work. I still struggle to find images - for example images of myself might be located in ~/Images/People/Self/*, but in practise I'm often included in ~/Images/Travel/* as well.

A few times I've looked at using f-spot, digikam, and similar tools to perform image-organisation (but not editing, or timelines, or anything else. Just organisation). I've found I didn't like being locked into their formats, didn't want them to copy my images to a second location, and other gripes. In the end I've forced myself to come up with a Steve-Specific-Solution. Not for the first time, but I think I have just cause...

I'm now using the User-Comment field in the image's EXIF data to store tags. (When it comes to EXIF data I keep camera-generated fields, but sometimes update/set "Copyright", "Comment", and "Title" fields. So UserComment is one I've never used until now, and thus I run no risk of trashing existing meta-data.)

I've put together a simple perl script, called itag, which will:

• Index the tag information from all images beneath ~/Images into a DBM file.
• Show the filenames of all images matching a tag, or tags.
• Allow me to add tag(s) to an image (which both updates the EXIF data and updates the DBM "cache").

This is enough for me to be able to see all images of "Edinburgh", via:

~$ qiv --fullscreen --slide --delay 5 $(itag --search=edinburgh)

Similarly I could find myself:

~$ itag --search=steve --search=people

I'm not sure it is useful to others, mostly on the basis that people probably fall into their own routine when it comes to filing, and I suspect that people with vast collections of images will just get annoyed by the obscenely slow indexing process I've got. (Hint: run "exiftool" on every /.jpe?g$/i file..)

Still its a simple enough idea and I think it should scale in the future - I can even see myself writing a wee GUI to do tag exploration and similar. Just not today.

ObFilm:Aeon Flux

ObRandom: Apologies for people waiting on email - it's been that kind of week.

Tags: exif, images, itag, perl, photography | 9 comments

So previously I introduced the idea of my image-tagging system. There seemed to be at least a little interest. So here's a brief introduction and real update.

There is a command line tool, itag, which will index the UserComment field from a hierarchy of JPG files. (This field is compatible with digikam, by happy accident).

Additionally there are a pair of GUI tools, both very nasty in terms of code quality and extensibility:

itagview

This presents a list of all the tags which are found, (by invoking "itag --tags"), and allows you to view thumbnails of all images with a single specific tag. Double-click to launch the image full-sized.

itagger

This is a GUI tool which will present thumbnails of all images beneath a given directory, recursively, and allow you to enter tags either on individual images, or on multiple ones.

This doesn't update the DBM cache file that itag uses though, so you'll want to re-run that aftward.

Anyway enough pimping, if you like the sound of it visit the itag page. If you're optimistic, abhor reading, and just wanna play then there is an itag package for Lenny.

Patches welcome, especially to the nasty Gtk2 code...

ObFilm: The NeverEnding Story

Tags: exif, images, itag, perl | 1 comment

I'm an amateur photographer, although these days I tend to drop the amateur prefix, given that I shoot people for cash at least once a month.

(It isn't my main job, and I'd never actually want it to be, because I'm certain I'd become unhappy hustling for jobs and doing the promotion thing.)

Anyway over the years I've built up a large library of images, mostly organized in a hierarchy of directories beneath ~/Images.

Unlike most photographers I don't use aperture, lighttable, or any similar library management. I shoot my images in RAW, convert to JPG via rawtherapee, and keep both versions of the images.

In short I don't want to mix the "library management" functions with the "RAW conversion" because I do regard them as two separate steps. That said I'm reaching a point where I do want to start tagging images, and finding them more quickly.

In the past I wrote a couple of simple tools to inject tags into the EXIF data of images, and then indexed them. But that didn't work so well in practise. I'm starting to think instead I should index images into sqlite:

• Size.
• date.
• Content hash.
• Tags.
• Path.

The downside is that this breaks utterly as soon as you move images around on-disk. Which is something my previous exif-manipulation was designed to avoid.

Anyway I'm thinking at the moment, but I know that the existing tools such as F-Spot, shotwell, DigiKam, and similar aren't suitable. So I either need to go standalone and use EXIF tags, accepting the fact that the tags I enter won't be visible to other tools, or I cope with the file-rename issues by attempting to update an existing sqlite database via hash/size/etc.

Tags: images, itag, tags | 15 comments

Some brief notes, between tourist-moments.

Temporary file races

I reported some issues against the lisp that is bundled with GNU Emacs, the only one of any significance related to the fall-back uudecode option supported by tramp.el.

(tramp allows you to edit files remotely, it is awesome.)

Inadvertantly I seem to have received a CVE identifier refering to the Mosaic web-browser. Damn. That's an old name now.

Image tagging

A while back I wrote about options for tagging/finding images in large collections.

Taking a step back I realized that I mostly file images in useful hierarchies:

Images/People/2014/
Images/People/2014/01/
Images/People/2014/01/03-Heidi/{ RAW JPG thumbs }
Images/People/2014/01/13-Hanna/{ RAW JPG thumbs }
..

On that basis I just dropped a .meta file in each directory with brief notes. e.g:

name     = Jasmine XXX
location = Leith, Edinburgh
source   = modelmayhem
theme    = umbrella, rain, water
contact  = 0774xxxxxxx

Then I wrote a trivial perl script to find *.meta - allowing me to create IMAGE_123.CR2.meta too - and the job was done.

Graphical Applications

I'm currently gluing parts of Gtk + Lua together, which is an experiment to see how hard it is to create a flexible GUI mail client. (yeah.)

So far its easy if I restrict the view to three-panes, but I'm wondering if I can defer that, and allow the user to handle the layout 100%. I suspect "not easily".

We'll see, since I'm not 100% sold on the idea of a GUI mail client in the first place. Still it is a diversion.

Finland

I actually find myself looking forward to my next visit which is .. interesting?

Tags: emacs, images, security | No comments