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I am currently playing around with the trial version of Aperture 2.0. As the Canon G9′s RAW format was not supported in Mac OS X until very recently, I kept the JPEGs in iPhoto, and the RAW images in folders somewhere else.

Aperture can show the JPEG + RAW of the same picture as a single image, so they do not take up unnecessary screen real estate. The RAW or JPEG master can be selected through the context menu:

But I couldn’t find a way to re-combine the JPEGs I had imported from iPhoto, and the RAW files from a separate location, though it worked fine when importing directly from the camera. A workaround would of course be to use stacks (easy, thanks to auto-stack), but that would mean that stacks are pretty much unusable for other purposes.

I tried throwing JPEGs + RAWs together in a folder, and re-import them, hoping that Aperture would then recognize them as belonging together. Didn’t work. In the end it turns out that Aperture only creates a combined master if the modification date of both files is exactly the same.

This can of course easily be done in Terminal (my RAW files were still unmodified and thus had the original date, so I used those as the reference date, it would of course also work the other way round):

for f in `ls *.CR2`; do touch -r $f `basename $f .CR2`.JPG; done


I’m still glad that I don’t have years of such files to re-combine, but at least it is a lot less annoying than using stacks for them. If anyone knows of a better way, please let me know

My updated key can be found here or on your favorite key server … same procedure as every year, I guess

Today is the first day of the European Youth Meeting in Geneva. This post is written from an iMac in the “free blogging corner” in the meal hall. Greetings to everyone who couldnt come (where on earth is the apostrophe on a Swiss keyboard?!?). Enjoy your the rest of the holidays!

Update: I’m back from Geneva! Happy New Year to everyone! Some (unsorted and unprocessed) pictures are in my photo album.

I’m in San Francisco for this year’s WWDC. Looking forward to meeting all of you there

Went to the Haight Ashbury Street Fair today … here are some pictures I took.

Two years ago, I posted a Happy New Year greeting shortly past midnight on January 1. I attached a picture of fireworks I had taken just that night. Not even a particularly good one, but for some reason I still decided to include a link to a high resolution version of the picture.

Over the coming year, that high res version of the fireworks photo shot up to be search result number 3 on Google Images for the search terms “Happy New Year”.

Then, one year later, “the clueless” started to flock in. Or should I say “hot-link in”? People started including the photo in their new year’s greetings on MySpace and other sites. And they didn’t just go and copy it, but they hot-linked the full resolution version, using <img> tag attributes to scale it down to about 300 pixels width (what a shame!). While guestbooks and forums were certainly the worst offenders, people also hot-linked it from official city web sites and in their emails to their office mates. I often got 100 or 200 downloads from the same company with an email referrer.

The first year, I tried to decrease bandwidth use (and the level of fun for the clueless ) by serving a 30 pixel black and white version of the image to the worst hot-linking offenders. It didn’t help, so this year I tried serving an image with a polite message to please not hot-link. It seems people just don’t care. In fact, there’s websites out there that consist of nothing more than an endless list of hot-linked images taking forever to load. I now removed the high-resolution version entirely, after my usage graph looked like this for two New Year’s straight.