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Posts Tagged ‘Management’

GearEye is an RFID-based gear management system

30 Dec

A new Kickstarter campaign is looking to fund further development and production of the GearEye gear management system. GearEye uses inexpensive, battery-free adhesive RFID tags, which are attached to all your equipment. This enables photographers to make sure that they’ve got everything that they need in their gear bag when going to a shoot and that they don’t leave anything behind when returning home.

The GearEye RFID reader comes in two form-factors, either as a stand-alone device, which you leave in your bag, or a phone-cover that doubles as charger. Once your items have been tagged and the reader is in place everything in your bag can be accounted for via a single tap in the GearEye smartphone app. If something is missing the system also helps you locate it within its range.

Additionally you can organize your equipment into customized lists. This way you can make sure to only bring the equipment you need for a specific type of photo shoot and leave unnecessary items at home, thus minimizing the weight of your bag. For this purpose the app tells you if there is anything in your bag which you won’t need. 

GearEye has been created with photographers in mind, but of course would work with any other type of equipment or tools as well. The project has already passed its funding goal, so if all goes well the first units should be delivered in July 2017. Until tomorrow you can still secure a GearEye standard pack by pledging $ 129. This gets you a GearEye dongle or phone case and 20 RFID tags. Larger packages are available for those who need to tag more items. More information is available on the GearEye Kickstarter page and in the video below.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Ricoh Keenai photo management system launches with smart tagging

07 Dec

Ricoh has announced the launch of a new photo storage and management service called Keenai. With Keenai, photographers can upload and store original resolution photos and videos, sync the content across multiple devices and share the content with others. According to Ricoh, Keenai features smart technologies that facilitate rapid image searches via smart tagging and image recognition, as well.

Once uploaded, photos and videos can be shared with others, including 360-degree panoramas. In addition to syncing across devices, Ricoh says Keenai stores content for offline access at ‘device-friendly resolutions.’ Each account allows an unlimited number of photos, including raw images, to be stored at original resolution, but only up to 300 15-minute videos can be uploaded per month.

Ricoh Keenai is available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, macOS, and Windows, and supports direct photo and video transfers from Toshiba FlashAir and Eyefi Mobi WiFi SD cards and WiFi-enabled cameras. The service is available for $ 4.99-per-month or $ 49-per-year. The service’s mobile and desktop applications are available here.

Ricoh Innovations Corp. Debuts Keenai, One-Stop Smart Photo Management for All the Latest Smartphones and Digital Cameras

Keenai automates the most tedious part of being a photographer: centralizing and managing your photos and videos; Keenai’s intelligent solution eliminates the frustration of managing photos and videos from different devices, and makes enjoying and sharing digital memories a simple and pleasant experience

CUPERTINO, CA–(Marketwired – Dec 6, 2016) – Ricoh Innovations Corp. (RIC), a Silicon Valley-headquartered subsidiary of Ricoh Company, Ltd., has launched Keenai, a smart photo-management service that keeps digital memories safe and organized. Available immediately in eight languages on all popular platforms (macOS™, Windows®, Android®, iOS™ and Windows Phone®), Keenai is the only photo service that connects all your devices and cameras, and unifies all your photos and videos for viewing and sharing on any device.

“Consumers are struggling to keep track of all the photos and videos they capture using the different devices they own. Keenai provides a smart solution to this problem, and is designed so that non-technical people can gain control of all their photos, share them with friends and family, and feel confident that their memories are safe,” said Toshinori Arita, senior vice president of Ricoh Innovations Corp.

Finally, an app that handles everything: all devices and platforms — photos and videos

Keenai is perfect for non-technical people with lots of photos (often, on different devices) who prefer to not be locked into any one vendor’s cloud services. Keenai delivers a beautiful, unified, cable-free photo sharing experience on every device. Plus, it is the only application that can transfer photos and videos directly from Wi-Fi® cameras, Eyefi Mobi, or Toshiba FlashAir™ Wi-Fi SD cards to all the latest smartphones and tablets (Android, iOS and Windows Phone).

Some of Keenai’s standout features include:

  1. Automatic cloud backup of unlimited, original-resolution photos and videos. Users can store an unlimited number of original photos (including RAW) and up to 300 15-minute videos per month in the Keenai service.
  2. Syncs collections of photos and videos so they can be enjoyed on all your devices. Keenai lets you bring your entire photo collection with you, wherever you go — online or offline. Keenai’s smart syncing keeps the originals safe in the cloud, and stores only device-friendly resolutions on your local device.
  3. Bring your adventures to life as mixed-media experiences for family and friends. Keenai provides sharing of stories as gorgeous albums that combine photos, videos and even 360° images. Albums can be privately shared with friends and family via email or shared links, and accessed via any web browser.
  4. Automatic image recognition and smart tagging for fast photo search. Keenai’s intelligent suite of applications does all the tedious tagging work for you, and makes enjoying and sharing your memories a simple and pleasant experience, every step of the way.

How to get started with Keenai

All members start with a free trial of 30 days. Thereafter, membership costs only $ 4.99/month or $ 49.99/year. There are three easy on-ramps to Keenai: web, mobile app or desktop:

  1. Keenai Web Application: Create your account at www.keenai.com. No download required. After creating your account, simply visit app.keenai.com in your favorite browser for easy access to all your original-resolution photos and videos. You can upload and download photos and videos via the web application, and use intelligent tools like Smart Views and Discover dashboards.
  2. Keenai Mobile Applications: Use Keenai mobile applications to transfer images directly from your camera to your device, or upload photos directly to the cloud from your smart phone. Your entire collection is instantly synced with the cloud and can be browsed on all your devices — even later when you’re offline. Download here.
  3. Keenai Desktop Applications: Use the Keenai desktop utilities to upload photos and videos from your desktop collection to Keenai. You can also set up a folder to automatically sync your original resolution photos from the Keenai service to your desktop or networked drive. Download here.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google Photos for iOS improves Live Photos management

10 Sep

An update to the Google Photos app for iOS brings some of the features of the Motion Stills stand-alone app to Google’s main photo application. New functions allow for easier editing, sharing and stabilization of Apple’s animated Live Photos. Thanks to intelligent electronic stabilization algorithms Google Photos now lets you create animated images with moving subjects but frozen backgrounds, and sweeping pan shots. 

After editing Live Photos can now be converted into movie files and saved to the iPhone’s camera roll. This means with the update the files are shareable with Android phones and other devices which are not capable of processing Apples Live Photo format. Additionally, the improved version of the app includes some new photo organization functions. Images in albums can now be sorted chronologically and you can choose thumbnails for your friends’ faces in the People module. 

The update can now be downloaded and installed from the Apple App Store and should be available for the Android and Web versions of Google Photos soon. 

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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A commerical photographer accuses Taylor Swift of being a hypocrite, Swift’s management company responds

25 Jun

In case you missed it, Taylor Swift, one of the most successful commercial pop stars of all time, recently penned an angry Tumblr post aimed at the soon-to-be-launched streaming service Apple Music. She called for Apple to respect the rights of creatives. However, commercial photographer Jason Sheldon found this statement to be more than a little hypocritical. Read more

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Tips for Setting up a File Management System

23 Feb

As much as we love the art of photography, the organization of it is just as important. Yes, organization. It’s important that you have a system in place to access your photos when you need them. A few key things to consider are: date, genre, occasion, and subject. You also want to be careful of the locations that you are storing your images.

Save location

This is an example of a way to organize your photos. This is an external drive with various years. There is also a folder for miscellaneous photos and a folder for personal photos. Your system may not have as many years or may include different folders. It’s important to develop a system that works for you.

This is an example of a way to organize your photos. This is an external drive with various years. There is also a folder for miscellaneous photos and a folder for personal photos. Your system may not have as many years or may include different folders. It’s important to develop a system that works for you.

MDFileManagement-02 DayFileManagement-02

This is an example of a way to organize your photos. This is an external drive with various years. There is also a folder for miscellaneous photos and a folder for personal photos. Your system may not have as many years or may include different folders. It’s important to develop a system that works for you.

It’s important to have your image files saved in a safe place. You should consider using an external drive of some sort. External drives are ones that sit outside of your computer (some are portable for travelling), on which can store various amounts of data. Some people choose to store a backup of their files on their external drive, and a working copy on their computer hard drive. Either way is fine, just make sure you have your final copies saved and backed up in a safe place.

DayFileManagement-03

You’ll want to create a folder, or series of folders to save your photos. Your organization system should work for your specific needs. Start with a top level that describes your contents. For example, if you shoot fine art as well as portrait work, you might want to create two folders; one for your fine art work and another for your client work would be an option. Within those folders you could then sort your photos by year, then by project or client name. You’ll also want to create folders that represent the different states of your process. An example is to have a downloads folder, a retouched folder, a final images folder, and a blog folder.

File Naming

DayFileManagement-06

This is what the file structure looks like when open. This set of photos was shot in 2015. The date comes before the client name. There is also a designation that these are headshots. This makes it easy to find when looking at the folders. The term headshots was also used as a keyword during import. These images were being used to submit to a casting agency so the file name includes the description of the subject.

Your file names should be descriptive and concise. You want your filenames to be easy to read. A great file structure should include the name of your project, and the date it was shot. You can add any additional descriptive information if you think it’s needed. An example would be Wedding-Johnson-May2014.jpg or Johnson-51414.jpg (inside the Weddings folder). These are just examples. Take into consideration the order you like to view your files. Having the date at the front might be a better option for you if you like to see them in numerical order.

DayFileManagement-05

Keywording

You want to make sure to keyword your photos. This is usually done at import. Both Adobe Bridge and Lightroom have the option to keyword. Most file organization systems have a keyword feature, so familiarize yourself with that. This is an important part of the file organization process that is often overlooked. Your keywords should describe your images and any details you might want to reference later. Think about the types of photos you might be asked to submit, or even want to blog about. An example is using the keyword “sunshine” as part of your family portrait import. You might not immediately think that this is something you even care about, but it will be helpful when you’re ready to submit to a call for photos that show sunshine.

MDFileManagement-03

Here is an example of a complete set. Notice there are folders for the original images, final images, sharing, and social media. Each of these folders leads with the date and client name. The image filenames continue this pattern and are numbered.

File organization can be as simple or as complex as you want it. The important thing is to just have a system in place. You may not have a lot of shoots to sort through, but in time they will add up. Your system will make it easier to find what you’re looking for in the future.

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The post Tips for Setting up a File Management System by Monica Day appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Large Library Management with Lightroom and Daminion [for Advanced LR Users]

13 Apr

daminion-opener

If you have Lightroom you might assume that you have all you need for managing your images. That may not be the case and many professional and keen amateur photographers benefit from combining Lightroom with the image management software Daminion.

Daminion is an image management solution which helps you do large library management with Lightroom. You can think of it as being the rough equivalent of the Lightroom Library module operating on steroids. Daminion’s biggest advantage is that it is true multiuser software so, with Daminion server installed, multiple users can access a single catalog. This is something that Lightroom is notoriously poor at doing and which Adobe has so far failed to address despite multi-user/multi-computer access being one of the top ten feature requests for Lightroom.

You can download a version of Daminion here using the Download link. At the time of writing the current release version is 2.5 and version 3 is still in beta. Daminion comes as both a standalone and a server version. The Daminion standalone Free version handles up to 15,000 images per catalog. The paid versions are Basic, Standard and Pro which give you 25,000, 75,000 and unlimited images in a catalog respectively. There are also multiple Daminion server versions, one for non-commercial use and others for individual professionals and small teams.

NOTE: Daminion is available for PC only and not currently available for Mac.

You can install both the server and client versions on the same computer – the server version will run faster than the client version so it has value when you have a lot of images in a catalog. When you consider that some Daminion users have catalogs of a million or more images, speed of accessing and filtering these images becomes important.

Setting up Daminion

Once you have downloaded and installed Daminion, launch it and you can create a catalog. Like Lightroom you must import the images you want to manage with Daminion into the catalog. If the Add Files dialog doesn’t open automatically you can find it by choosing File > Add Files and then select the folders to import from.

daminion-import

While you can create and manage multiple catalogs in Daminion, like Lightroom, you can’t search across multiple catalogs so you should be careful about how you organize your images in catalogs. What makes sense in terms of catalog organization will depend on how you work with your images and if it makes sense to have them all in one catalog or in separate ones.

Daminion will recognize and manage a wide range of file types including common raster and vector formats as well as camera RAW images, video, music, and PDF formats. This gives it a broader scope as a management tool for digital media collections than Lightroom which is limited to photo and video formats only.

You can copy the images to another location on import or import them from their current locations. You can also group images by folder, date or file type on import. As the images are being imported you can begin to work with those already imported.

daminion-work-while-importing

daminion-catalog-tags

Organizing and tagging

When you have some images imported into Daminion you can investigate the tools you have for managing and organizing them. The Catalog Tags panel on the left of the screen (see image on the right) is pre-populated with tags. Some of these are created from the image metadata, such as Camera lens and Camera Model, and others are those that you may have applied to the images in other programs such as keywords, ratings and color labels.

To filter the images by any catalog tag click the tag group and the tag to view and click the circle icon to view images that match that tag. You can perform AND and OR filtering using the Find dialog which you can find by clicking the Advanced link immediately to the right of the search box on the toolbar (see image below).

daminion-searches

You can also add tags and keywords to your images using the Catalog Tags panel. These can be written to the image XMP metadata so they will be accessible not only within Daminion but also in other applications such as Lightroom and Bridge.

There are benefits to using Daminion for image management and filtering in preference to Lightroom. Daminion provides multiple ways to categorize your images including Categories, Collections, Events, Places, People and more. It also supports hierarchical tags, with no limitation on nesting levels. So you can configure hierarchical tags for categories, people, places, keywords, events and so on whereas in Lightroom you can create hierarchical keywords only. You can also create your own custom user defined tags in Daminion to categorize images by criteria that are meaningful to you. Daminion can write metadata directly into the RAW images rather than needing to do so to sidecar .xmp files, and it makes it easy for you to filter your image collection by writing complex searches using Boolean (AND/OR) operators.

daminion-boolean

Viewing your images

You can view your filtered images in one of a number of ways. You can sort them using a range of sort options including by shutter speed, file size, file name and so on. You can also view the images as thumbnails, using a compact view, details or filmstrip view.

daminion-compact

In Thumbnail view you can customize the information displayed above and below the image so it is easy to see the image properties that are meaningful to you. At any time you can view an image full screen by pressing Enter or click View.

You can select any image and view and edit its properties using the Properties panel. While Daminion is not an editor you can use it to rotate your images.

daminion-properties

As you work through your images you can drag images you want to do something with into the Tray. The Tray stores these images until you are ready to work with them such as by sending them to an external editor or using the multiuser checkout feature. The checkout feature helps you manage multiple people working with the same catalog, it maintains an audit history and gives you the ability to undo changes if, for example, a newer version of an image is replaced by an older version.

One handy feature of Daminion is the ability for you to publish images from Daminion direct to Dropbox so they are viewable on your iPad or other device. The Publish panel can be set up to convert and resize images including raw format images and then export them to a Dropbox folder on your computer. When this folder syncs to Dropbox the uploaded images can then be viewed on other devices.

daminion-publish

Is Daminion for you?

If you’re looking for a way to allow multi-user access to your image collection then Daminion is a great tool. It can be used along-side Lightroom for managing and organizing images which you then develop in Lightroom. The metadata changes made in either program can be easily viewed in the other program and the two work in tandem very well.

Do you also need some Lightroom organizational help? Try these:

  • Use Lightroom Collections to Improve your Workflow
  • 8 Important Things to know about Lightroom Collections
  • Why Lazy Photographers Should Use Lightroom Smart Collections
  • Organizing Images in Lightroom 5
  • Seven Pieces of Advice for New Lightroom Users

The post Large Library Management with Lightroom and Daminion [for Advanced LR Users] by Helen Bradley appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Carlson School of Management Flash Mob, Deck the Halls

22 Dec

The Carlson School of Management received a surprise visit from a saxophonist…and nearly 300 of his friends from the University of Minnesota’s School of Music this November. “Deck the Halls” arr. Francisco J. Núñez and Jim Papoulis from “Coolside of Yuletide” Special Thanks To: Greg Wrenn (saxophone), Campus Singers Maroon, Gold, and Mosaic; Men’s Chorus, Women’s Chorus, University Singers, Kathy S. Romey (coordinator), Judy Sagen and Kelley Sundin (choreography), Phillip O’Toole (audio), Boosey & Hawkes, Northern Lights Video, Michael Teachout, Bryan Koop (director of photography), Steve Rudolph (producer) For more information on the Carlson School of Management visit www.CarlsonSchool.umn.edu
Video Rating: 4 / 5

 

Martin Evening: Using Lightroom’s Import dialog for better image management

25 Aug

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom offers workflow benefits that can make it easier to organize your photo collection. Pro photographer and Lightroom expert Martin Evening gives an overview of ‘best practices’ for managing the import process itself. Click here to find out how to make the best use of metadata, file renaming and custom templates during the image upload process, in his four-page article. 

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Former CEO Woodford quits Olympus board to call for new management

01 Dec

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Olympus’ former CEO Michael Woodford has resigned his position as director of the company and called for a shareholder meeting to dismiss the rest of the board. The company’s share price had started to recover some of the 88% value it had lost in the weeks since Woodford was removed as CEO for highlighting unusual payments by the company (he remained a director). Since then the company has admitted using these payments to cover up losses on earlier investments. An independent committee established by the company has reported it has found no evidence of the rumored involvement of organized crime syndicates in the deals. However, three board members, including the President and Vice-President have resigned over the issue. (via Reuters)

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Dilbert Animated Cartoons – Alice’s Gift, Office Hallucination, Bungee Boss and Drive By Management

06 Aug

www.dilbert.com by Scott Adams. RingTales presents Dilbert Animated Cartoons. Alice is angered by bad grammar and run-on sentences. The Boss is seeing things. A new Boss flies in… and then out. The Boss manages on the move.
Video Rating: 4 / 5