Useful photo editing tools

It is quite often that I forget to change the timezone of my camera when I visit other countries and it bothers me that the EXIF datetime stamp is inaccurate! Or, if we don’t sync the datetime between the 2 cameras, when I use my P&S and G uses his SLR, it messes up the order of the pictures when viewing them.

If you are as forgetful (and particular) as me, I have been using ExifTool to timeshift my photos. I can’t figure out how to use it as a standalone Windows program so I use it from the command-line. Installation is straightforward – just extract the zip file, rename and move it to the Windows directory.

There’s quite a lot of details on how to use it and in fact, I find it quite complicated. Anyway, I managed to figure out the command for timeshifting photos. And you won’t need to know other commands unless you need to change other EXIF data.

Example: The following command timeshifts your photos by +1 hour.

exiftool “-DateTimeOriginal+=0:0:0 1:0:0“  C:\Photos\temp\

• Replace the  (plus sign) + with  (minus) - if you need to shift the timestamp backwards.
• The datetime fields signify respectively: years:months:days hours:minutes:seconds. Replace the numbers according to your needs.
  
• Replace the directory name accordingly. The program will process all the photos in that directory.
  
• The program automatically backs up your original photo in the same directory.

Another program to share is for batch lossless auto-rotating of JPEG. It is called JPEG Lossless Rotator and G found it! Previously, I was browsing through the photos using FastStone Image Viewer and rotate them individually.

It’s a breeze to use, basically you just specify the directory and it will detect the photos to be rotated, then just hit the Automatic button. Voila! It replaces the original photos so make a backup if you want!

Now, you don’t have any excuse to mindlessly upload unrotated pictures to Facebook.

Hope this is useful!

Those are the 2 things I would do before archiving my photos. Let me know if you know of other software for doing this!

feed readers

So, the question is are you reading this post via some kind of feed reader?

I’m subscribed to numerous feeds via Google Reader and I think it’s great to be able to follow blogs this easily. Gone are the days of bookmarking the blogs that interest me and then click on them every other day to check for updates! Yea, remember those days? It was also non-portable because one can’t possibly remember all these URLs!

Although I lament the lack of feeds on some websites, I do feel that feed readers take away the experience of surfing the actual website itself.

Feeds are very much content-focused and one can’t see the design of the page or any other links/pages that the author had created. It used to be that the design of the blog was something to note, perhaps even an extension of the personality or creativity of the author. Nowadays, I’m reading all these posts in my reader and have no idea how these websites look like.

Well, the reason for this trend could be the explosion of blogs in recent years coupled with the fact that now many blogs (including this one!) are hosted by service providers. It’s simple and fast to do so (sidenote: server can be hideously slow though!). I don’t think there are many who would purchase a domain and create a complete personal website that one would revamp with different design themes from time to time. As a result, there’s not much dimension of creativity or design to mention since it is really mostly all about hosted content on a pretty-much standard layout with some themes. Therefore, surfing the website itself doesn’t add value any more.

Or is it because I’m now in a different world and there are actually many people who are still doing that but I’m clueless??

Anyway, I also believe that interaction is reduced when one is using a feed reader because it means an extra step of navigating from the feed to the actual post before posting any comments. In contrast, surfing the actual website means comments / other posts have direct visibility. Moreover, one probably can see that there are many other new subscribed posts waiting to be read in the reader and would have a higher tendency to move on to them.

When was the last time you commented on someone’s post that you read within a reader?

Ok, by now you should know the reason why you can’t read the full posts of this blog directly in your reader.