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For our October meeting we will once again be using our projector and screen for showing slide shows and video from our travels over the last year.
I hope as many of us as possible are able to attend and show images from holidays, days out, shows etc. The topic is really up to you!
Please bring along your own machines if you wish, alternatively we will have a number of PCs present that can play JPEGs and many video formats from USB stick.
Gareth
Our last meeting was an evening on how we edit, store and manage our digital photographs and hopefully served as an interesting precursor to the October Slideshow meeting.
Gareth began the evening with an overview of iPhoto on the Mac, which he has been using since last autumn on a trip to the US. Over the years Gareth has used a number of pieces of software on Mac and Linux, and even for some time used directory structures rather than management software, but has never found the ideal methods/tools.
iPhoto proved useful on the trip to the USA as it can manage the process from importing images from the camera, to sorting into albums and exporting in various formats. With the addition of a number of free plugins it also manages exporting albums to Flickr, FaceBook and other online social media, something that he used throughout the trip where there was free WiFi.
The software provides a single window interface with imported events, user created albums etc. down the left pane. The larger right pane contained the thumbnails of the event/album being viewed, or when an image was double clicked changed to a larger image with editing options.
The editing options in iPhoto are not as sophisticated as Photoshop perhaps but allow cropping, editing levels, removing red eye and straightening horizons to name a few. Editing is also performed in a none-destructive manner keeping the original within its file system on disk.
Importing a set of photos off a camera creates an event or events if it spans multiple days. It is easy to combine these events using drag and drop and also to name the event. From these events Albums can be created and stored separately to the main library of images.
Gareth has also evaluated the trial version of Aperture from Apple that is similar to Adobe Lightroom, but couldn't justify the expense of this or Lightroom over iPhoto for his level of use.
For sharing photos online Gareth uses Flickr, the photo website owned by Yahoo! With a Pro account this allows 2GB a month to be uploaded and therefore Gareth tends to store the full quality JPEGs online. There is also a free account, but that is very limited in the space provided.
An alternative to iPhoto/Flickr provided by Google is Picasa. This is a combined suite of software for Windows, Linux and Mac that is similar to iPhoto together with online photo hosting from Google. Picasaweb also supports geotagging of photos and can show on a map where in the world the photos were taken.
Peter first became interested in photography at the age of 11, and had a box brownie camera taking 8 photos per roll. Eventually he moved onto 35mm film with a Praktica camera. He also used to take pictures on slide/transparency film moving onto negative film for prints when he was married.
Before digital cameras Peter started getting CDs at the same time as his prints were developed and has a lot of discs from this era. In 2003 Peter went digital, buying a camera at Stansted at the start of his holiday trip getting his current Fuji camera. Like all of us he then found himself taking hundreds of pictures.
Peter still catalogues his images and events on the computer using a directory structure rather than a management application. All the editing is done on the RiscPC using Photodesk but the file and directories are also mirrored on the PC for backup. There is some duplication, as both events and whole full memory cards are indexed in separate directories.
Peter has also considered trying Picasa on the PC, but is concerned about it centralising and indexing all his historic photos... do we trust it??
Frank stores his images in a photos folder within My Documents on his PC. His collection currently exceeds 20GB but with a number of duplications and goes back to 2004 when he first got a digital camera. Frank maintains both the original images and a copy folder where he deletes unwanted images from the event, and also for editing the images often using !Variations on RISCOS. More recently Frank has also started organising using year, month, event subdirectory structures.
In the past Frank used Nikon View for showing slideshows. Frank now has Photo Commander 7 from Ashampoo from a special offer as he uses a number of their other system optimising utilities. Photo Commander 8 is now available but the discount price to Frank is more expensive.
Frank does not use the organisation aspects of Photo Commander as he does not want it to centralise his images and instead prefers to maintain the file layout himself. PC7 can batch rename images and search for duplicates within its library.
Gareth
Could I remind everyone that due to holidays and other commitments our November meeting to rebuild a RiscPC from the parts of 2 old machines has moved to Wednesday 24th which is the 4th Wednesday!
Gareth
| 2010 | ||
| 20 October | Slide show evening | All |
| 24th November (4th Wednesday!) |
"How to rebuild a RISCOS machine." -making one machine from parts of two Risc PCs. |
Frank, Gareth and Peter |
| 15 December | Gadgets and Party evening | All |
| 2011 | ||
| 19 January | Social Evening - Venue TBA | All |
| 16 February | Gigabit Networking , USB2 & 3 | All |
| 16 March | Linux update | Gareth |
| 20 April | AGM plus Games | All |
Meetings are now on the Third Wednesday of the month unless otherwise stated.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2·50. The membership fee is £20 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events, there is now a full list of meetings up to the end of the year on their website.
http://www.eaug.org.uk/mtg.htm
Tea/coffee/biscuits usually available.
Visitors pay 2.00 GBP for the evening, which is deductible from the normal joining subscription if you decide to join at a later date.
See the Membership page of the website for more information:
http://www.eaug.org.uk/mem.htm
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
They have now moved to the St. Andrew's Computer Club at Britannia Road, Ipswich. They have picked up a couple of people from the Church and are seeking to include people from the Parish.
There's not much about the Computer Club on the website (http://www.ourstandrews.co.uk), but there are a few words. (Ken Tew)
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk