Prosumer digital image management has not progressed to our advantage

Every so often the software market fails. I've had this happen to me a few times. From 1997 to 2007 I used a variety of PalmOS devices for what we used to call "personal information management" (PIM) - including Contacts, Notes, Tasks and Calendaring. My many PalmPilot/Palm handheld stylus devices synchronized by cable connection with Palm desktop software.

PalmOS died around the time the first iPhone came out. That original iPhone was both revolutionary and crappy. Functionally it was a huge regression from PalmOS Calendaring and other PIM solutions, but it was immediately clear that the iPhone was the future (seriously, there were no honest skeptics). Palm had been ailing already, but at that moment it was utterly dead.

It took three years for the iPhone to develop useable solutions for the "PIM-4" that worked across devices (often using either Google or Microsoft Exchange). During that time I had no handheld solution; I returned to using a paper Franklin planner. Finally, in 2010 or so, I was able to transition to the iPhone and iOS.

The market failure of digital image (and video) management has lasted longer and there's no end in site. This means something.

Things were actually looking pretty good for image and video management in 2015. Apple had consumer (iPhoto) and prosumer/professional (Aperture) applications that (mostly) shared the same image library. Things were not perfect -- Aperture had had years of horrible bugs and performance issues, but in retrospect this was a golden age. SSDs were fixing the iPhoto/Aperture performance issues and there were several reasonably priced alternatives including Adobe Lightroom. We didn't know how well we had it.

And then 2015 was when Apple killed both Aperture and iPhoto. There was no replacement for Aperture; users were left stranded with limited ability to migrate to another platform. Photos replaced iPhoto, but in most ways it was a functional regression. There was only one Photos advantage -- it promised a cloud-centric approach to image management with some limited backup features. If your iPhone or laptop was lost or destroyed your Apple Cloud images were probably safe -- as long as you paid for storage or didn't get locked out of iCloud by a phone thief.

Several alternative prosumer image management solutions emerged. But they all had the same problem Aperture had -- they all had severe data lock. If the software were to be discontinued, as happens to most products, there would be no way to extract one's images, image edits, and image metadata (ratings, keywords, titles, descriptions, albums, and on and on). In addition, perhaps inspired by the power of this data lock, many vendors moved to a subscription model. Adobe Lightroom now costs $120 a year, if you don't pay your photo library is essentially dead. Adobe can, if they wish, double or triple that price and customers will simply have to pay up. (I don't know what happens to the image library when a subscriber dies.)

I hoped Apple Photos would mature and develop more advanced features, but it has essentially languished. Recently Apple introduced a "Shared Library" model that is complex to use and, in my experience, has weird bugs and permission problems. (Lesson to users - if you ask Apple for something be prepared to regret your request.)

Eight years after Aperture died there still is not a great prosumer photo management solution for macOS customers. All the options have Hotel California Syndrome -- you can check-in but you can never leave. Apple's only option, the most natural fit for a macOS users, is dreadful and may be deteriorating. Many choices are subscription based and it's very easy for vendors to raise costs.

It's not hard to create a new standards and file based photo management solution. The file system does much of the work. Adobe has an open specification for image metadata management (XMP). Image to album, project, folder relationships are simple row triples. We've known how integrate external image editors for decades [1].

It's not hard ... but it hasn't happened. No vendor has decided to disrupt the marketplace and no open source (really open data structure is what we care about) solution has emerged.

Why not?

My best guess is that the Cloud is the problem. We've only gradually learned how to build responsive synchronizing Cloud products and they are not intrinsically file based. Development is much more challenging and the data lock advantage is irresistible for incumbents.

In the absence of a decent solution vendors are starting to build around the Apple Photos framework. This week Power Photos has a migration and access project. CYME Peakto is some mixture of Photos extension and standalone management solution. Houdah Photos Workbench adds a minuscule number of missing features to Photos.app. I can sort of imagine who these products might work, but Photos is a terrible foundation on which to build.

It's easy to image ways Apple could help, but they've been butchering photo management for a long time. They appear to be broken. The more realistic hope is that it will become easier for open source and other vendors to implement a standards based Cloud solution that would allow library migration between cooperating vendors - either through direct Cloud-Cloud communication or (better) a file based interchange format (what's a TB or two between friends?). I would be happy to pay a $200/year subscription fee for that kind of data freedom solution.

I've spent 7-8 years sitting on Mojave preparing to migrate to Apple Photos. The more I use Apple Photos the less I like this idea.  At this point I expect to convert my beloved 2015 MacBook Air to a non-networked Aperture machine and purchase a new M2 machine for my other work. Since Ventura Photos.app no longer supports importing Aperture Libraries. I'll be looking for other migration options over the next one to two years. Maybe some vendor will decide to disrupt the data-lock. In the meanwhile I'll test Power Photos migration by periodically migrating my Aperture library to Photos.

[1] For each image store original, the proprietary image editor non-destructive edit recipe, and the most recent edited version in a user-defined format (lossy or lossless). If the editor is or changed the edit recipe is useless, bu the edited version is good.

Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

The obsolete world of photo sharing

I made another stab at sharing images to Facebook Groups. It didn’t go any better than my previous efforts.

First I tried using Facebook’s Album advanced image uploader in Chrome — the “Add Photos” icon was persistently “grayed” (faded) out. Then I tried Safari — with the same results. Depending what (obsolete) reference I checked the problem had something to do with Java (obsolete) or Flash (obsolete).

Sure, I can use (obsolete) Aperture to upload images to my personal Facebook album, but I couldn’t find an Aperture plugin to upload to a Facebook Group.

I found a $3 Mac App Store app called “Dropbook” that claimed to support Group photo upload - last updated in March 2014. There are no directions and no real UI, but after I gave it complete rights to do anything on Facebook it did let me drop a pile of images on it. There was no progress dialog or any indication of activity, but something was happening. A post was being created for each image. I killed Dropbook, deleted the app, used Facebook settings to delete access and changed my password.

Smugmug has Facebook integration to Personal “page” and to “Pages” — but not to Groups. Flickr has even less integration. Picasa? Nope.

Oh, by the way, Smugmug doesn’t allow album downloads in the paid account I use — I’d have to pay significantly more to get that feature.

Which reminds me … a few months ago rumor had it that Google Photos was going to drop its G+ requirement. Hasn’t happened yet - but we don’t hear much about Google Photos. Much less Google’s (obsolete) Picasa Web Albums.

Indeed, I rarely see anything about any photo sharing services at all, not even from (obsolete) publications like MacWorld.

Hmmm.

Are you seeing a pattern here? It’s almost as though Facebook doesn’t really want to host large storage sucking collections of shared images for free. Indeed, it’s almost as though everyone has lost interest in photo sharing/storage/distribution.

PhotoCard 1914

I'm a fan of Bill Atkinson's PhotoCard.app;  I send one weekly to my father, currently in long-term care. I love the fusion of ancient Egyption and modern American tech.

So I appreciated discovering a 100 year old PhotoCard in my father's effects. This print is a (way) pre-photoshop overlay of my father's Uncle Max and his mates on an 'ISOLATED' image.

On the back of the print is the stamp that made it a 1914 PhotoCard - with a section for postage and for a note. (In this case it was never stamped).

Hard to believe there will still be postal delivery in 100 years, but maybe Amazon will stick them in packages.

Apple kills yet another photo sharing service - and generally screws up iOS photo management

I expect Apple to screw up anything related to long term data management, but this is extreme even by their standards. GigaOm, in language restrained by fear of Apple, tells us of another Apple datacide and botched product transition.

In the article quoted below “iPhoto” is iPhoto.app for iOS. Given the timid language, I’ve added some inline translation in square brackets …

https://gigaom.com/2014/09/27/where-are-my-photos-how-to-use-the-new-photo-management-features-in-ios-8/   

[iPhoto.app has been removed from iOS, replaced by Photos.app with fewer capabilities, including loss of iPhoto Web journals.] 

… In November of 2010 .Mac HomePages gave way to MobileMe Web Galleries. Then in June of 2012, MobileMe Web Galleries ceased to exist as iCloud came online. Now the most recent successor, iPhoto Web journals, is being shut down, or at least that is how it appears. With each transition, users of the previous online journaling feature really had little to no options available when it came to migration to a new or replacement feature. [users were totally screwed and lost hundreds of hours of work with no recourse] 

… you could add titles, insert comments, include maps, weather and other information intermingled with your photos. Users of journals would typically spend a good amount of time personalizing the delivery of their online photos by telling a story alongside their photos. 

The problem this time around is that there was very little notice and there really is no recourse or action that can be taken to preserve your iPhoto projects. … “Photo Books, Web Journals, and Slideshows are converted into regular albums in Photos. Text and layouts are not preserved.” And thats it, no more iCloud scrapbooking per Apple. 

… Apple has finally removed the concept of the Camera Roll …  all of the photos you have taken, whether they are on your device or not, now show up in the same “Recently Added” folder. This is not just a simple name change, it is a completely different experience. All of your photos are now synced across all of your devices, or at least the last thirty days worth. 

… iOS 8 has actually made it even harder to delete photos stored on your device [image capture delete all no longer works]. Tap and hold a photo in your “Recently Added” album and delete it from the album. It will move into the newly created “Recently Deleted” album …  delete it again from the “Recently Deleted” album…

Apple is a bit of a serial data killer -- usually with no public response. I still miss the comments I'd attached to iPhoto albums that were lost in the transition to Aperture.

Speaking of Aperture, both iPhoto (and Aperture) for Mac have been sunset, though Aperture is still sold. All three are eventually to be replaced by “Photos.app”, which may be an improvement on iPhoto but is certain to be a disaster for Aperture users. We can expect a large amount of personal metadata to be lost. (No, Lightroom is not a migration path.)

New users may be transiently better off once all the pieces are finally in place -- until the projects they invest in disappear. This is a cultural problem with Apple, not a bug that will get fixed. Never make Apple the owner of your data.

Bill Atkinson's PhotoCard.app for iOS - weekly messages to my Dad in his nursing home

I plan to expire at 85, 10 years later than Ezekiel Emanuel [1]. My Dad is a bit less directed; at 92 he recently moved into the longterm care unit of the veterans facility in Ste. Anne’s Hospital, Montreal island [2].

Since I live in St Paul Minnesota, and have a good number of child obligations, that’s a long way for a visit. Unfortunately, like many elderly men, he despises phones. He’s also resolutely low tech. 

Which leaves 2,700 year old technology — postal mail. 

The problem with postal mail, of course, is that the sending process takes time — and I don’t think Dad is into long letters anyway. Which is why I buy credits every few weeks with Bill (HyperCard, Paint, etc) Atkinson’s PhotoCard.app for iOS.

Atkinson developed this app in part to showcase his nature photography, but that’s now how I use it. I pick family photos Dad would like to have by his bed; I send one card a week with a short note of family news — and a reminder of the names and ages of 3 of his grandchildren.

I can reuse prior cards as a template, substituting a new photo and new text. The entire process from beginning to end takes about 2-3 minutes, I’ve a ToodleDo task that reminds me to send them weekly. I like the (rare) clarity of Atkinson’s pricing and the “buy credit” approach — my AMEX info never leaves the phone.

Cards are mailed from Silicon Valley and take 10-14 days to reach my father (Canada Post is notoriously slow).

I’m rather fond of this app.

[1] Obviously I approve of Emanuel’s essay, but I must say that by his logic most humans should be dead by age 20. His primary concern is to expire when he is past some absurdly high utility threshold; given his history and genetics a 75 yo Emanuel will still perform above the rest of us. I’m not worried about being vital or useful, I just want a 75% probability that I die in control of my life. So preventive care stops at age 75, cancer/cardiac interventions stop at age 80, antibiotics stop at 84, base jumping and cave diving start at 85.

That said, when I inspect Emanuel’s strategies I think he has rather good odds of making 82. If he really wanted to expire at 75 he’d need to be much more aggressive.

[2] WW II took a lot out of my father — who had more Aspie traits than I have. Maybe even a full diagnosis, though brains change a bit in 80 years. That’s not a good foundation for being a signalman on a frontline tank festooned with antennae (bullseye redundant). So whatever the Vets do now is small recompense. It does help he was a young Canadian in the war, and that Canada’s later wars were far smaller; he inherits facilities built for a lost generation. He’s been remarkably content there - so far.

Apple kills Aperture. Observations.

In an alternate universe….

Today in a terse but clear posting on the Aperture web site Tim Cook apologized for the difficult decision to end Apple’s competition in the professional and prosumer photography market. He promised to fully cooperate with Adobe on a migration path to Lightroom that would convert Aperture non-destructive edit metadata to Lightroom format. All image metadata would be preserved. Group, Album and Smart Album functionality would suffer, but Adobe promised to improve their tools to ease the transition. Aperture sales were immediately discontinued. Support through Yosemite and ongoing RAW image updates for new cameras was promised through 2016. Users were saddened but appreciated Apple’s professional approach….

That would be a pleasant universe.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the announcement that Aperture was dead, and that Apple was effectively abandoning professional photography, appeared via Jim Dalrymple’s blog. Aperture remained on sale in the App Store while muddled Apple clarifications showed up in various blogs. Some said saying there would be support through Yosemite, others hinted at helping Adobe with migration to Lightroom. As end-of-life announcements go it was a complete screw-up.

Oh - but users of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro “should not worry about their apps—they will continue as normal”.

Right.

The impact on heavy users of Aperture is heard to overstate. That’s why Gruber’s “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” earned his feed a Gordon-death-click. Maybe I’ll return someday, but The Loop covers the same ground and is a bit less irritating - albeit equally uncritical of Apple. I’m sure Gruber is devastated.

I won’t dwell on the migration path ahead, though it makes my excruciating transition from iPhoto look like a walk in the park. As of today none of my 20,000 or so non-destructive image edits will convert to Lightroom, much less album/image relationships, image/project, folder/image/project, folder/project comments, geo-tags and more. I won’t even mention Videos (which were never well supported in Aperture or iPhoto).

I’m not doing anything for a while, but one immediate impact is that I won’t be buying any camera that Aperture doesn’t currently support. If Aperture will indeed work on Yosemite then I’ve got years to convert — and I won’t be upgrading to Yosemite if there’s any doubt about Aperture support. (Which means no major Apple hardware purchases next year.)

Beyond Apple’s announcement fiasco, I was struck by the generally dismissive commentary — as though it were a trivial move to go to Lightroom. Happily, now that I’ve killed Daring Fireball, I can say the blogs I follow are relatively realistic about the impact of Aperture’s demise.

It’s not just Aperture users who have grounds to worry. Given Apple’s software record over the past 5 years (iBooks, iMovie, Podcast, Aperture 1, etc) what’s the chance Photos will be safe for serious iPhoto users before 2018? iPhoto users are back in Apple photo management limbo.

On a larger front I’ve written before of Data Lock, and of how the “Cloud” is making data lock even stronger. I knew the risk I took with iPhoto 2 11 years ago [1]; a path that has led to the dead end of Photos.app.

The way Apple executed Aperture’s termination is a rich lesson in the consequences of data lock (a risk I understood when I signed up with iPhoto long years ago). Does anyone think it will be possible to move from Apple’s next generation Photo app to Lightroom? That’s a far harder problem than moving from Aperture to Lightroom — and that’s nearly inconceivable at the moment.

I can’t do much about the way Apple handled this transition — other than spare myself the temptation of a camera purchase. I can, however, reduce my purchases of Apple products — especially Apple software. I have no faith in Apple at all.

[1] From my ancient web page on digital photography: 

Problems: iPhoto 2 through 5

iPhoto has longstanding problems. I knew of them when I started with iPhoto 2, but I took the gamble that the large user community, and the prominence of Apple's multimedia iLife suite, would pressure Apple to improve the product. That hasn't worked. If you're a PC user you should not switch to a Mac for digital photo management, instead I'd recommend Picasa (free from Google). If you're a Mac user, take a close look at iView MediaPro -- though that's a risky choice too (small market, hard for vendor to compete against iLife).

If you proceed with iPhoto, know the risks …

Data Lock - You can check in, but you can't check out.
You can export images -- though it's tricky to export both originals and modifications. You can't, however, migrate your albums, smart albums, comments, keywords, captions, etc. etc. I thought iView MediaPro would take advantage of this and sell and import utility, but they haven't. So when you use iPhoto, you marry iPhoto…

Update 6/28/2014: Clark Goble responds with more eloquence …

as Apple pushes more and more the lock-in of iCloud, of iBooks, and of iTunes video, why should we trust Apple if they don’t have a way to get the data out? This is the thing that some activists have preached for years and most of us have discounted.5 But now I think it’s a real question Apple has unintentionally made very significant. Why should I trust Apple not to lose interest in iBooks if sales drop? (Which apparently they have) iTunes Music isn’t a big deal because there’s no DRM. But the rest? Why should I store files in iWork?

Can we trust Apple? The cavalier way Apple is responding is telling us, no we can’t. And that’s a shame because they could easily have made this announcement in a way that said we could

I particularly appreciated his footnotes…

… I remember Apple fans ridiculing people trusting Microsoft with Plays For Sure DRM when that product collapsed and people lost their data. Many of those same people are pretty flippant about locked data today. ↩

I doubt rumors of Apple adding a Lightroom export will include being able to port both your raw data files and the adjustments you made to the files. You’ll either have to export as TIFFs or lose your adjustments simply because the math won’t be exactly the same. Heck, I’m skeptical they’ll export anything beyond metadata and files… 

Lessons from Photo Stream Unlimited - Typhoon Mobile and is Apple going to make a prosumer camera?

For an old school technology geek, reared on local file stores and data cables and file formats and backups and (ugh) synchronization, these are challenging times. Our life is getting harder as the tech landscape shifts to fit billions of connected devices paired with humans who don't know a .docx from the proverbial hole in the ground.

Remember Cnut and the tides? He knew you can't fight City Hall. The best we can do is figure out which way the wind blows. (Ok, I'll stop now.)

So what does Google's mangling of old school email [1] and weakening of CalDAV support, Apple's ending of iTunes USB sync of calendar and contacts [2], Apple's Podcast.app disregard for iTunes metadata [3], Apple's mobile/Cloud retcon of iWorks [4] and, especially, Apple's very quiet Everpixing [5] of Photo Stream tell us about the wind?

It tells us that mobile has at last eaten the world. We knew this was coming, but we didn't know when. Hello Typhoon Mobile, good-bye the world we elder geeks evolved in.

The new world is transitory -- people don't keep photos any more. They walk away from Facebook accounts with barely a backwards look. It's Los Angeles all over.

The new world doesn't have cables. It doesn't really have local file stores or local backup. It rarely does power or complexity -- pro power is going to get expensive. Do you love your iTunes Smart Lists? Play 'em Taps while you can.

We can't fight this -- heck, even Apple can't fight this. At best Apple may support a rear guard action for its old school paying customers. Google, Amazon and Samsung ain't gonna be so merciful or so motivated. [6]

Maybe we'll meet at a bar sometime and raise a glass to the days that were.

Oh, and that camera? 

Well, if Photo Stream is as big as I think it will be -- just enough memory in the age of transience -- there's a nice little business for a Photo Stream compatible prosumer device that is to Camera.app as the MacBook is to the iPad. It's a natural Apple software/manufacturing disruption move. An iCamera they make that works with Nikon, Canon or Leica glass -- whoever makes the right deal. I'll buy one.

- fn -

[1] I just modified the wikipedia entry to say Gmail is an "email-like" service rather than an "email service". I doubt that will stick, but eventually it will. 

[2] So far on Mavericks. It's effectively ending for Podcasts and iBooks as well. After Apple stops selling iPods all cable sync is going to go.

[3] You can change Podcast titles in iTunes, but if the Podcast is available online those edits are ignored.

[4] Retcon is how comic books dealt with middle-aged superheroes that were born 60 realtime years ago; it's a recapitulation of how Greeks did mythology -- every town had its version of the stories, and they got frequent reboots. In software we once had "updates" that added features and capabilities or managed platform changes, now we have retcons that inherit branding. They come with new capabilities, but also substantial regressions. Apple has kinda-sorta apologized for calling iThing 13 iWorks, but they didn't have much of  a choice.

[5] Everpix was a photo service that claimed to store all images forever for all devices. They were so obviously high risk I avoided them, but it may not be coincidental that they died around the same week that Apple ended its Photo Stream image limit.

[6] Who is it that makes Office 365? Can't remember.

Update: A corollary of all of this is that we're never going to come up with a DRM standard for either eBooks or movies. We'll go instead to a pure rental model.

Where did Apple's Aperture 1.0 come from?

I've editing a summary post on my challenging iPhoto to Aperture migration. That's made me wonder, again, where Aperture 1.0 came from.

Aperture still doesn't use the native OS X tools for file browsing. It is the most un-Mac like product I've ever used.

The image framework was originally based on OS X Core Image, which was, I assume, a descendant of the NeXT imaging engine. So did Aperture start out as a NeXT photo management tool?

Unfortunately I can't find anything on the net about NeXT photo management software -- perhaps because NeXT died when the web was young, and also because "NeXT" is a useless search term (modern search engines are not case-sensitive).

Perhaps Aperture 1.0 was an acquisition, but I don't see any likely suspects on Wikipedia's Apple mergers and acquisitions list. Perhaps it was designed to be sold on Windows as well as Mac OS; but then why not emulate iTunes?

It's a puzzle. If I had to bet, I suspect it has roots in NeXT. I don't think it's de novo OS X development.

Weird moments in tech - what's happening to home video and photography?

In the past few weeks I've been fighting a two front software war. On the one hand, iPhoto 8 and Aperture 3, on the other hand digitizing and managing our videos of our family.

It's been a tough slog. I expected trouble with the video editing, but I didn't realize how much trouble I'd have following Apple's advice to "prosumer" photographers. The migration from Aperture to iPhoto is fraught with bugs and bizarre pitfalls. (For example, a cryptic import option mysteriously determines the fate of iPhoto image titles.)

These problems aren't hard to find, nor are they hard to fix. In some cases simple documentation would do the trick. So why aren't these problems fixed? Why aren't Apple's Discussion forums full of complaints? (They don't seem to delete those as aggressively as they once did.)

I have begun to suspect things are quiet because all but a few hard core geeks have given up. Perhaps the software doesn't get fixed because hardly anyone uses it.

So if Aperture and iPhoto are so troublesome, what's happening to those millions of photographs and videos shared every day?

I suspect they simply vanish from memory. My generation had photo albums. Generations to come may have nothing ...

My iPhoto miscalculation - whitewater world

iPhoto is dying.

That much is clear. iPhoto 11's launch bug problems followed the pattern of the past decade. Unlike past releases though, iPhoto 11 lost important capabilities -- just like iMovie and Final Cut Pro X regressed from prior versions.

That's bad, but what's worse is that, after seven years of sort-of trying, Aperture is still not an adequate iPhoto replacement.

Bad on bad news, but the real sign of a dying platform is the echoing silence. When users stop complaining, a software platform is dead.

Fortunately I had planned from this the very beginning. I knew, nine years ago, I was taking a big risk putting my photos and data into an Apple product. Even then Apple had a reputation -- it didn't worry much about customer data. I figured Apple might abandon iPhoto, but I also figured the Mac community would come up with a migration solution.

I was wrong. There's no migration to Lightroom, there is no exit from iPhoto that preserves data.

Where did I go wrong? I missed this ...

Of funerals, digital photos and impermanence — Tech News and Analysis

... Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting or someone you are with or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to Instagram every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there is a filtering problem....

I didn't imagine that geeks would basically give up; overwhelmed by rapidly changing technologies. I didn't anticipate that the 'prosumer' computer platforms would die instead of reforming. I didn't imagine that OS X would go into maintenance mode. I didn't imagine a technology regression of this magnitude.

I expected rough waters, I didn't expect whitewater.

See also:

• iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work 1/2012
• Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums 9/2011
• Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011
• Aperture Projects descriptions and iPhoto Event descriptions - what happens on iPhoto migration? 12/2010
• Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
• iPhoto 11 and Aperture 3 - more bad news 10/2010
• Aperture keyword hierarchy does not support inheritance queries 2/2009
• Aperture 2: consolidating two iPhoto Libraries 2/2008
• iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
• Aperture: can't import iPhoto Library 3/2006
• Aperture woes - and iPhoto 6 image export 4/2006
• Why are Apple products so risky? 1/2006
• Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement? 10/2005
• iPhoto: A Potemkin Application? 12/2003 - shipped before it was ready.

ISP travails: Forget buffer bloat, what about my upload speeds?

Cringely was right about BufferBloat. I give him full credit for that one - I've not seen anyone else describing this networking problem. Once again I miss BYTE; they would have caught this long ago. (Old guy thing - I'm fascinated by good stuff that goes away without replacement.)

That's not what bugs me though. My video streaming is good enough. I'm a lot more concerned about my upload speeds. I'm getting about 0.1 mbps (real data) over CenturyLink DSL (formerly qwest) with a 1 GB cutoff [3], even though my download speeds are about 10mbps (networking traffic, not real bits). Yes, my current upload speeds are less than 5% of download speeds. CenturyLink has boosted its download speeds to be more Comcast competitive, at the hidden cost of upload speed.

No, I'm not running a Torrent. I've got too much to lose to be pirating movies, besides, it's wrong [1]. I'm just trying to share 1.5 GB of our summer vacation photos [2].

So what's the problem? I can just switch ISPs right? I'll just Google those sites that compare upload speeds. I remember using them only five ... ok ... ten years ago.

Not so fast. I can't find those handy comparison sites any more. The American ISP industry has consolidated so much there's not much point in doing comparisons. Locally my only alternative option is Comcast, and while it's probably better that CenturyLink it's not much better.

Cue the ominous music, because there are logical reasons for uploading to suffer in today's market. Most customers don't care about it, or don't realize that speeds are asymmetric so are baffled by mpbs marketing. On the other hand, Torrents are enemy #1 for most ISPs. Photo sharing and online backup services may simply be collateral damage of anti-BitTorrent wars.

I can live without sharing full sized images; almost nobody I share with wants a 6MB JPEG. I can also go without online backup -- I don't trust online backup anyway.

Even so, it's a bummer. Monopoly sucks.

[1] Sort of wrong. Given the legislative conduct of the IP industry there's a definite Robin Hood angle to stealing movies.
[2] Big JPEGs. A downside of today's monster DSLs, combined with some unfortunate side-effects of processing JPGs in Aperture. 
[3] Throttling? Automated nightly modem reboots?

Update 1/7/12: I did hear back from CenturyLink. Basically, 300 kbps (100 kbpbs real throughput) is as good as it gets. If I want a different balance of upload and download then I need a "business" line. Sadly, this makes sense. I'm more like a business customer than a consumer customer.

Nimbophobia: 4 more reasons to fear the cloud

It's been a gratifying week for my fellow nimbophobics. Our numbers are growing by leaps and bounds. Consider just four examples ...

• Apple MobileMe transition and iCloud: Those beautiful online albums of thousands of images and videos? Kiss them all good-bye. Your massive web site? Sayonara.
• A few weeks after being caught dissembling about their encryption keys, Dropbox accidentally removes all security for all accounts for four hours.
• Google is shuttering its hugely hyped Google Health Personal Health Record. Hope you weren't relying on those online medical records you entered.
• My longstanding and much appreciated Google Custom Search pages are, as of today, abruptly overwhelmed with copious top and side Google ads.

These stories range from appalling (Apple) to annoying (excess ads in custom search pages). The Google PHR fail would be the worst, but it's somewhat mitigated by the data exit options they provide and by the two year warning. Those options include CCR XML migration to Microsoft's HealthVault [1].

Friends don't let friends rely on the Cloud. Don't put anything in the Cloud unless you have a way to move your data to an alternative platform. That's as true for your business processes as it is for your family photos.

[1] Any health informatics students looking for a semester project or an easy publishable paper? Create a PHR in Google Health Records. Export as CCR XML. Import into Microsoft HealthVault. Write a paper on the data loss.

Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11

The state of OS X photo management is mixed.

It’s not so bad for customers who aren’t invested in iPhoto. Much of Adobe’s OS X software is lousy, but Adobe Lightroom is a singular exception. It still, for example, uses Apple’s installer instead of Adobe’s malware installer. It’s a professional level product with a learning curve, and it shares Adobe’s uncertain future, but it’s the best choice for a new user.

Apple’s professional product, Aperture, used to compete with Lightroom, but it lost that battle. Aperture has been unreliable, slow, and buggy – which professionals and prosumers can’t tolerate. Aperture’s only future is to be an upgrade path for iPhoto. That’s where things start to get grim. Apple claims there’s a smooth migration path from iPhoto to Aperture, but Apple lies (yes, they do). Aperture has nowhere to store much of iPhoto’s event and album annotations

So what about iPhoto? Ahh, that’s where the really bad news starts. The latest release, iPhoto 11, has a “bug” – it can delete images. Tens of thousands of images. This would be bad even if everyone had backups – but backup is an unsolved technical and social problem. It’s likely that iPhoto 11 also deletes images in a less obvious fashion, which, if you think about it, is worse than deleting all images all at once.

Image deletion is a bit of a nasty bug, but it doesn’t affect me personally. I know Apple. I never use their software until the beta testers early adopters are done. I am, however, impacted by Apple’s product direction. They are making iPhoto more of a true consumer product, removing functionality and foreclosing features I want (like detached library management).

iPhoto power users are on a sinking ship, and the Aperture life raft comes with mandatory limb removal. We’re left in the sad situation of hoping Adobe will bail us out with a Lightroom migration path, but I suspect they no longer have the resources to build one.

Yech. This sort of thing happens much too often these days. I’m in a similar situation with my Google hosted blogs. So, what can I (we?) learn from this? Here are my take home lessons:

1. It’s very hard to live between markets. This is true across many domains, from power tools to software. There’s a stable market for costly professional products, and a market for lowest denominator consumers. The in-between “prosumer” market is unstable.
2. The “consumer” market isn’t a good place to be. Consumers have short memories – they upgrade to Apple’s new products despite a long history of major data destroying bugs. Consumers, by and large, don’t care enough about their data.
3. Apple doesn’t have a culture of quality because their customers don’t demand quality. They do have a culture of design. If you’re like me, and you love both design and quality, you’re in trouble. There’s no easy answer, but don’t forget the tradeoff.
4. There’s no fundamental reason Aperture couldn’t be changed to support more of iPhoto’s metadata…

The last one, to me, is the most interesting question.

Why doesn’t Aperture support more iPhoto metadata? It’s in Apple’s business interest to migrate iPhoto users to Aperture, why not make that work properly?

I don’t know, but I think this is one aspect of a general problem with software. There are a million good paths to take in software development, but you can really only take one. If you take ‘em all, you get a symphony composed by committee. Software development requires a tyrant, but it takes a long time to do good software. It takes about 5-10 years.

Ten years is a career. It’s too long a tenure for modern business structures; it doesn’t match career or business models. Tyrants can’t last in large businesses – unless the tyrant owns the show (Jobs). It costs too much to devote very talented tyrants to maintaining and building something like Aperture when iOS development returns far more value.

I’m hopeful we’ll eventually figure out a solution for problem 4. I’m hopeful that the OS X App Store and its FairPlay DRM will make small company software more viable. If that happens Apple could sell Aperture to a company that could make a good profit migrating iPhoto customers – and Apple would still earn 1/3 of the revenue from App Store sales. That could be a win-win for everyone.

In the meantime, OS X iPhoto users need to stay with iPhoto 9 and wait for a solution.

Prague as seen by superman

In addition to his well known x-ray vision, Superman could use his super-vision to zoom into small details. Details such as this teeny-tiny spot on a monstrous 360 degree panorama of Prague ...



The Panoramic photo site (w/ blog) describes the photo ...

... This is a super high resolution photo. Use your mouse to zoom in and see a startling level of detail. This image is currently (as of 12/2009) the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world. ... When it’s printed, it will be 16 meters (53 feet) long at regular photographic quality (300dpi). It was shot in early October 2009 from the top of the Zizkov TV Tower in Prague, Czech Republic. A digital SLR camera [jf: Canon 5D] and a 200mm lens were used. Hundreds of shots were shot over a few hours; these shots were then stitched together on a computer over the following few weeks...

It seems inevitable that one day, when we look something up on our phone, we'll be able to pan these photos as quickly as my relatively modern (new) machine does today. It's mind-boggling to zoom around Prague on a 27" monitor.'

The image creation used surprisingly average technology ...

...Canon 5d mark 2 and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a robotic device which turned the camera in tiny, precise increments, in every direction....a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM... .... The final image exists as a 120 gigabyte photoshop large (PSB) file. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints. The panorama online exists as a few hundred thousand small tiles (in JPEG format), and they take up about 1 gigabyte of disk space.....

The tiled JPGs sum to only 1GB. That would fit on an iPhone.

I'm going to be following the site blog from now on.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

iPhoto - Apple's stupidity burnz

Size of typical JPEG image in iPhoto '09: 3.5MB

Size of identical image when exported at "Maximum" quality JPEG: 6.9MB

So why did the size of this JPEG image double when it was exported?

 

There’s only one possible explanation. In order to do the export iPhoto is first decompressing the image, then re-compressing it using a 99% or near-lossless JPEG algorithm. This doubles the image size while degrading image quality. (You can’t improve the quality of a JPEG image by recompressing it.)

In older versions of iPhoto the app simply copied the image. Now iPhoto behaves like Aperture.

I suspect this back-asswords behavior is related to a surprise of a few months back, when people who thought they were archiving their images to MobileMe learned that Apple's "full resolution" was in fact a high-quality JPEG (about 97% compression). iPhoto was presumably doing a similar decompression/compression cycle on upload to MobileMe. (Supposedly this was "fixed". I'm skeptical.)

Apple's heading for a fall.

Update: If you export as "Current" you avoid the perverse "maximal quality" degradation. Apple should have made "maximal quality" JPEG the same as "current" for images that are already JPEG.

Photo sharing – a vast generation gap

My son’s 5/6th grade camping outing was about done, so I offered to do a class picture. They lined up well, and I zipped off about 15 shots with my fancy Canon lens and dSLR.

Then all the kids ran forward, asking for pictures to be put on their camera. I know the teacher wanted to get going, so I declined. After all, it would be easy to share my fancy picture.

I knew as I said it that I was wrong, but I didn’t know I was twice wrong.

Firstly, I was wrong because I’ve had lots of personal experience that photo sharing doesn’t work – with the one exception of Facebook. I’ve put thousands of photos on Picasa, SmugMug and my own servers, but I think the vast majority have been neglected. Very few, if any, have ever been downloaded for personal storage.

There are too many hurdles for traditional image sharing to work. Only geeks like me can manage downloading images and storing them in photo libraries. Beyond the software issues, a surprising number of families have barely functional computers (XP virus infested typically) and either no net service or one that’s effectively out of order. Lastly, there’s a personal element to acquiring an image – a sense of ownership and obligation that a shared image lacks.

Facebook is different – images I share there are viewed – but only by Facebook users. Very few of the parents or teachers of our 5th and 6th graders do Facebook.

I knew that much, but it wasn’t until the bus ride home that I learned there was another dimension of incomprehension.

I watched a 5th/6th grade girl share her pictures. She held up her camera for all to view. Not surprising, except these weren’t pictures from the camping trip. She had what seemed like years of pictures on her camera. She flipped through her camera album as though she was playing the piano, effortlessly zooming, panning, and navigating a large image collection.

For her, her camera was the photo library and the camera back was her display. She can’t do anything with a shared digital image – except perhaps take a picture of the screen displaying it.

I wonder what she does when she finally hits image 2,000 or so, and fills her 4GB SD card? Probably deletes those she’s less interested in, gradually evolving a set of 2,000 very high value images.

No backups of course, but this generation seems comfortable with ephemera.

Next time, I won’t pretend anyone else will be able to use my picture.

* They seem nothing like 5th grade boys. “Mainstreaming” special needs children is relatively straightforward compared to educating boys and girls together.

Google storage isn't so free any more ...

Remember when Gmail storage was supposed to be "infinite"? That didn't last long, but at least the storage seemed to grow all the time.

Not so now. My Gmail storage is pretty static. When I started using Picasa I had to pay $20 a year to store my images with a 10GB limit.

I'm nearing the limit, and the next step is "40 GB ($75.00 USD per year)".

Ouch!! That's comparable to the cost of MobileMe, and it's just storage.

Google is getting to be expensive.

Update 9/6/09: I looked over a few of the usual suspects. I have a five year old SmugMug account, but their iPhoto uploader is awful. (PictureSync, which I used to use with them, has been abandoned.) I considered Flickr, but I don't want yet another service. MobileMe is about $70 for 20GB, so it's about the same cost as Google's services once you factor in its other features.

Through DreamHost (KATEVA is my promo code) I have unlimited storage that I'm already paying for, and automated installation of ZenPhoto. I have to export my images from iPhoto and upload them via FTP or sFTP to DreamHost. The downside is there's no provision to pass on any iPhoto metadata, but then that barely works with any of the alternatives. (Maybe MobileMe is better, but Apple routinely screws up anything to do with the intertubes.)

I'm still turning this over. For the meantime I'll use Facebook more (low res images) and use Picasa selectively to reduce my storage drain. Maybe Google will come up with a better approach in the near term

Whatever I do the good news is that I've long used a private blogger blog to track where photos go. So even if I change providers there's a single index to all of our albums.

Update 11/11/09: Google gave us a 75% drop in storage costs. About six months late, but very welcome. So I'm cool with Picasa now.

Kodak to customers: We have your children. Send money now.

You sent your children's images to Kodak. They've been happy frolicking there, free of all charges.

You didn't listen to mad Uncle Gordon and his "data lock" ravings.

Now Kodak has the children, and if you ever want to see them again you'll send money now ...

TidBITS Tech News: Kodak Gallery Joins Parade of Free with Payment Services

... Kodak Gallery (originally Ofoto and later Kodak EasyShare Gallery) becomes the latest firm to make this seemingly sensible move. The online photo-sharing and print-ordering service has no limits on the size of photos uploaded (it notes that 10 MB is the highest size beyond which improved print detail won't be seen), nor on what you store. (Sadly, the service also dropped its film processing service that combined photofinishing and digital scanning.)

In the past, photos were stored by Kodak indefinitely at no charge. Now, Kodak has imposed the equivalent of a yearly service fee made through a purchase. Storage is free for 90 days after creation of an account. For accounts with less than 2 GB of stored photos, you must spend at least $4.99 over 12 months; more than 2 GB, $19.99....

There would be two ways to do this honorably.

Kodak could institute the policy only on new photos, but that wouldn't bring in much revenue.

Alternatively, Kodak could add the ability to transfer an entire photo library, with comments, titles, album names and other metadata to any "standards compliant" rival, such as Google's Picasa Web albums. Of course Picasa already charges for storage (I pay), but that's a healthy market with competition.

At the very least, and it's not enough, Kodak could provide a way to ship an entire Library, with all metadata, on one or more DVDs (for a reasonable fee).

They're not doing any of those things though.

They got your (virtual) children by offering free "child" care. Now, if you want the little tykes to keep breathing, you pay.

That's one way data lock can work.

Try to remember. Support Google's Data Liberation Front.

Dear Canon Camera - are you listening now?

Dear Canon,

I don't think you were listening last January when I told you that I don't give a flying damn about your megapixels.

I want ISO. Screw the pixels. Give me light sensitivity and I'll buy another Digital Rebel.

Otherwise, you know, this isn't a bad time to save money.

Maybe you're listening now?

Cameras Too Expensive For Christmas This Year: Canon's Profits Down 91% (CAJ)

Japanese high-tech giant Canon Inc. warned Wednesday the economic crisis would drive down profits by two-thirds in 2009...

... Canon logged a net profit of 11.62 billion yen (130 million dollars) in the fourth quarter of 2008, well short of the previous year's 127.85 billion. Operating profit fell 81 percent to 35.83 billion yen...

... "The rapid deterioration in the economic environment since the autumn has triggered a global slump in individual consumption. This has caused damage to the digital camera market beyond our expectation," [Canon managing director Masahiro Osawa] told reporters...

I'll bet Nikon's profits didn't fall by 81%.

Give me reasonable sensor noise at ISO 1,200 for $550 and we'll talk some more.

Yours,

A currently thrifty former customer.

PS. While you're in a listening mood, your computer division needs to fire the outsourced operation that develops the OS X device drivers for your scanners and printers.