Photo Management

Something occurred to me last night, as I moved yet another Aperture project over to my ZFS share: the ability to arbitrarily relocate projects to different storage platforms essentially gives me a manual version of the buzzword from yesteryear, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). In essence, old data (projects) can be moved to slower disks, where speed isn’t as critical, and active data can be kept on the faster disks. This way, the project you completed last year that you haven’t touched in months won’t be filling up the platters of your high speed drives.

It does suck that the granularity level for Aperture relocation is projects, not at the file level or even the album level. Perhaps Aperture 3.0 (or Aperture X, if the rumors are to be believed) will include that? While we’re dreaming, it would be really nice to be able to tell Aperture that it could use a number of disks or locations, and to move files around based on usage patterns, and implement a real automatic policy. For example, a preference for moving anything not viewed in a month to the slowest storage, anything used in the last month but not in the last 48 hours goes on your regular disks, and files used in the last 48 hours get moved to the SSD or 15K SAS drive you have for Photoshop scratch space. I know most users don’t have 15K drives in their machines, or even performance SSDs yet, but it would be a way for Apple to raise the bar on Lightroom. It would also allow photographers to free up swap space for Photoshop and other image manipulation programs, which would also help the appeal of Aperture to the professional photographer.

Back in the real world, I’m considering what it would take to setup an iSCSI volume on a zpool made of a mirror of fast disks current projects on, and move them to a regular raidz backed CIFS share once they are no longer active. About $200 would get me a fast 320GB pool for active projects, accelerated with an SSD and with mirroring for failure protection. Not a bad deal. Makes me understand the appeal of the Hybrid Storage Pool a little better.

ThinkTank Camera Bag

As a birthday present, my wife got me a new camera bag – the one I mentioned a few days ago – the ThinkTank Digital Holster 40. As I was unwrapping it, I was a little nervous, as it didn’t seem all that big. But I’ve taken it out for two long walks now – attached to the belt of the Ergo baby carrier. With the boy on my back, the dog in my hand, and the camera on my hip it all worked out very well. I managed a signifiant percentage of crisp 200mm shots, and after walking the 2 mile ‘long loop’, nothing hurt. In the past, a two mile walk with the camera+70-200 hanging around my neck would have been a recipe for neck and shoulder pain. The only problem with the walks was that by the end of each there wasn’t enough light to shoot lower than ISO 800 – and ISO 800 looks pretty bad when you’re zoomed out to 200mm.

My only complaint about the bag is that the rain fly is pretty bulky, and sandwiches the camera in a little too tightly for my tastes. Handily, it’s removable. I’m going to have to play with it a little to see if I can make it work though, as the rain fly will be very useful to have, especially when hiking or camping.

Aperture versus Lightroom

I’ve begin the horrid task of relocating all of my master images from Aperture to a ZFS CIFS share. It’s slow and painful, but it needs to happen, as it’s one of the steps in the chain to make my photo management a little more sane. Right now, my Aperture library has grown to 550 GB. This is with all of the master images, plus all edits, databases of metadata, tags, and multiple revisions of files. It’s impossible to backup, and it’s chewing up far too much disk space when viewed as a monolithic block.

By relocating the master files to a network share, they become easier to access and therefore easier to backup. The image files will be separated from the Aperture data, making each easier to maintain and manage. I can also use other image manipulation programs on the files – possibly even setting up a photo sharing web application, hosted from the file server itself. The other thing this will allow to me to is to evaluate Adobe Lightroom. I love Aperture, and it’s not missing any features per se, but it’s been a long time since it’s been upgraded. Not nearly as bad as the 10 years that Hypercard sat as an inactive product on Apple’s website, but still. I want to know that I have options. This won’t preserve my edits, but at least I’ll be able to get at the files themselves.

The other issue: ZFS is getting deduplication, soon. Hopefully this year. Which means by moving the image files to a ZFS share, I can take advantage of block level deduplication for my image files. This may not get me terribly much with different files, but I know I have a lot of copies of the same images. It would be excruciating to try to get rid of duplicates by hand. ZFS will make this a whole lot less bad.

Shipping is a feature

The new server status page, which is a front end to a Nagios 3.0.6 installation, shipped today. As in, it went live on the work servers, and it’s now the primary view for the health of our servers. It’s been months of work, debugging and network discovery to get where we are today.

Some of the features that were planned for the 1.0 release didn’t make it. But, shipping is a feature, and it’s the most important one. The other important thing is I’ve spent a lot of time making sure that the architecture is sound, so we can scale out with more monitored devices, and up with richer tools and features.

Keyboards

Have you ever used an old IBM typewriter or one of their Model M computer keyboards from the 1980s? The ones that weighed twice what a laptop now weighs, and feel like they were cast out of a solid block of stone? The ones with the loud clicky keys, that had proper tactile response as you hit the keys, letting you know damn sure that you had gotten the key pressed all the way in? They are, arguably, the best keyboards ever made. Other people have tried to emulate their keyboards, finding buckling spring switches and other esoteric materials, but they usually wind up costing huge piles of cash. And while the keys themselves are very nice, they don’t have the ruggedness of the old IBM slabs.

I’ve lusted after a Model M for years. The problem with them is they were made with the dominant interface standard of the time – the PS/2 connector. It’s hard to get a computer with that port that will run a modern OS, and I’ve never heard good things about the PS/2 to USB adapters on the Mac.

There’s good news. PCKeyboards has the Model M, in all it’s retro glory, fitted out for USB, for $69.00 +S&H. That’s not bad, especially considering that the next best USB keyboard, the Matias Tactile Pro (which is out of production again while they spool up for their 3rd generation) usually costs well north of $150.