Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

I am now using Kavasoft Shoebox and thus this whole entry is obsolete and kept only for historical purposes. It is interesting to see one of my requirements anticipated Aperture’s stacks.

Introduction

I am in the process of migrating from Windows to Mac OS X as my primary home computing environment. IMatch is one of the key applications I need to migrate, but it is not available on the Mac. Ghola is an attempt to reproduce the key functionality of IMatch, and possibly go beyond. It is also a good way to learn Cocoa programming (my last programming experience on the Mac goes back to Think C 4.0 accessing raw QuickDraw calls).

Use cases

1. Assign categories to images or a folder of images.
2. Search for images matchin an expression of categories.
3. Restructure a category (e.g. splitting a category grown too large into multiple, more manageable subcategories).

Requirements (incomplete)

The following are the key features from IMatch that need to be carried over:

• The flexible set-oriented category system.

• Support for RAW images (CRW and NEF).

• Fast retrieval performance.

• Extensible metadata.

• Offline media support.

The following are the requirements for Ghola beyond IMatch:

• Ability to group very similar variants of an image together. This would allow to group an image original, retouched versions, cropped and resized versions, or multiple very similar images taken in succession, yet manage them as a single logical unit. The role of each image in the group would be identified as well as part of its group membership, and each group would have a leader used by default.

• Manage assets beyond images, such as PDF files.

• Highly efficient categorization user interface.

• Scriptable in Python.

• HTML gallery generation, integrated with Mylos.

Implementation directions

The system core will be implemented in Python, and C if necessary. It should be as portable as possible. Possibly even multi-user and remotable.

SQLite will be used as the core database. Fast, simple, easy to manage.

GUI front-ends will use the native toolkits (PyObjC) whenever possible for optimal user experience and Aqua compliance.

A command-line UI could be more efficient for category assignment, if it is augmented with features like completion.

We may have to use bitmap indexes for efficient category indexing. Boolean operations on Python long integers are surprisingly fast, and C might not be needed at this point.

Colophon

The System name is a reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune (the original series, of course, not the opportunistic add-ons by Brian Herbert. It has the nice side benefit of not being already used by another open-source program.

Henry Wilhelm is a well-known authority on preserving photographs. He pretty much wrote the book on the subject, and it is now downloadable for free in PDF format from his website.

In a nutshell:

• No widespread color process is really archival, unlike black & white
• Fuji good, Kodak bad

Wilhelm has contributed greatly to making photographs last by raising the public’s awareness of conservation issues, at a time when manufacturers like Kodak were engaging in deliberately deceptive marketing implying that color prints would “last forever”, when they knew the prints would not exceed 10 to 15 years (Fuji has put far more effort in making their materials last).

That said, his simulated aging testing methodology has been criticized as too optimistic, and in one embarrassing instance, Epson Stylus Photo 2000 inkjet photo papers he highly rated for their durability turned out to be very short-lived because they were very sensitive to very common ozone pollution. For an alternative, more conservative, take on inkjet print longevity, Stephen Livick’s website offers a valuable counterpoint.

My take on the subject: I almost exclusively use black & white film because it has a distinct character and is archival without special equipment or active attention. Color film relies on dyes (that fade over time) rather than silver, and fades quickly or suffers from weird color shifts even when kept in the dark. The exception is Kodachrome, which keeps a very long time in the dark despite being also dye-based, but Kodak is not enthusiastic in supporting it and its future availability is uncertain. Given that, it makes more sense to use digital, which has more than caught up in quality, and at least has the potential for lasting images if managed properly (a big if: imagine you were to disappear tomorrow, would your heirs know how to retrieve your digital photos from your computer?).

And of course, I boycott Kodak, a company ruled by bean-counting MBAs whose only concern seems to be how to cut corners in silver content at the expense of product quality, much like Detroit automakers behaved before American consumers wised up to the shoddy quality of their products. Then again, Kodak’s current management is stacked with former HP executives who are turning the company into a HP-wannabe, thus predictably accelerating its slide into irrelevance.

I bought lunch from a store in the newly renovated San Francisco Ferry Building. The Ferry Building is one of San Francisco’s landmarks, but it had fallen on hard times after being cut off from the city by the Embarcadero expressway (which was demolished after sustaining severe damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake).

The Ferry Building is home to a Farmer’s Market and a gastronomic food court. Interestingly enough, the building was reopened with little fanfare in June of this year, and the shops have been slowly opening. The economic melt-down of the Bay Area probably has a lot to do with the low-key approach, but it makes it hard to figure when the food court will be completely operational (the lunch options there are still limited). There are a number of interesting organic and gourmet food shops, however, and I think it is already worth visiting even if not all shops are in place yet.

One of my favorite actresses is the dark and brooding Marie Trintignant. Tragically, she now lies in terminal coma after being injured in a violent argument with her partner. I am not a “People Magazine” kind of person, but this strikes me as particularly sad. If you get the chance, see her in the dark comedy Cible Émouvante

I visited the San Francisco Costco yesterday, and they have replaced their Fuji Frontier 370 mentioned here with a Noritsu QSS-3101 (PDF). This generation of Noritsu digital minilab uses a laser rather than the MLVA (LED) technology used in earlier Noritsu minilabs, and it should have equivalent quality (I will know for sure this coming Thursday when I get my prints back – it seems the word is out and Costco now has quite a backlog).

The nice thing is they now have a self-service Noritsu CT-1 kiosk where you can upload your photos from flash cards or CD, albeit with a slightly clunky interface. They also support 8×12 rather than 8×10 now, and more interestingly larger sizes such as 11×14 ($2.99), up to 12×18 (also $2.99 apiece).

Fortunately, the paper used is still Fuji Crystal Archive rather than the inferior Kodak alternatives Noritsu is usually associated with (Kodak resells Noritsu minilabs, and allegedly some Agfa minilab components as well).

Update (2003-07-30):

I picked up the prints this evening. Unfortunately, contrary to what the guy at the counter said, they did crop the photos instead of adding white margins. The end result? Many prints with partially decapitated people, and those that have been spared are too wide to fit in my 8×10 album.

The prints are sharp, but significantly darker and less saturated than my proof on-screen (I calibrate my monitor with a ColorVision SpyderPRO). The Fuji Frontier was much closer to the sRGB space, it seems. I have no idea why Noritsu calibrates its machines to some completely different standard than sRGB despite the fact the latter is the industry standard. I will take a calibration target when I go to have them redone tomorrow.

I consider myself quite knowledgeable about computers and digital photography, and I can cope with manual resizing of pictures to prevent brain-dead cropping, or working with custom profiles to work around poorly calibrated printers. I am sure 99% of the digital camera buying population will be unable to go through these unnecessary hoops. They will just get dull, oddly cropped photos back and naturally think the technology is at fault, and go back to using inkjet printers even though they produce grainy prints with poor durability, all for a king’s ransom. Fuji, Kodak and the rest are already playing catch-up in the digital printing space, they will definitely lose the race if they do not improve their firmware and require digital minilab operators to calibrate their units.

Update (2003-09-24):

I gave them a lot of 25 11×14 to print on Monday. Mindful of my previous cropping fiasco, I first gave them a trial run of 6 last week (3 “lustre” and 3 glossy), as well as to test the Dry Creek Photo color management profiles. The prints came out fine, with reasonably accurate color (within the limits of the printer’s gamut). They had a half inch white border on top and bottom, as the Noritsu’s native output size is 12×14, and the lab technician told me they were expecting a trimmer next week.

Unfortunately, when I retrieved my prints yesterday (insert mandatory joke here about “someday, my prints will come”), unlike the trial run, they expanded the print to the full 12×14 paper area (thus trimming off about 1 inch on each side from the print, and ruining the composition). Costco disabled 11×14 and 12×18 prints from the CT-1 interface. They must be running the printer on manual for these print sizes because the software on the CT-1 is brain-dead about cropping, but it seems all operators are not equally well trained with the new equipment, and I suspect the user interface is confusing enough to allow them to shoot themselves (or me, in this case) in the foot.

Conclusion: color management profiles are a must for this Noritsu printer, and be very specific about cropping instructions as their workflow is inconsistent from operator to operator. And it’s a good thing they have a money-back guarantee…