Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here!
I’m having a wonderful time but you prob’ly don’t want to be here because I lie. I’m not anywhere near that waterfall. Alas, my main view today is the street in front of the Landfill, where the sky is, once again, a hazy shade of winter. Except today it’s not all foggy and beautiful. Just kinda blah. Like this blahg was gonna be today. Until Not Plain Jane came over with her Bali pics! Not Plain Jane is the youngest and cutest Fin Family Moominbeach G3 cousin and I don’t know what you were doing on Thanksgiving but NP Jane was on her way to Bali for a two week visit in honor of a friend’s birthday. NP Jane, who is leaving a smaller footprint on the earth than your favorite blahgger, has so far resisted the urge to become the owner of a digital camera. Or a cellular telephone or computer, for that matter. But she knew that the Landfill might have an extra camera or other piece of digital crap lying around that might be borrowed. And of course we did and I was more than happy to lend it to her. You go, girl!
After weeks of snafus about getting together — illness, postponements, work, holidays, you name it — we finally managed to meet up this morning to retrieve the pictures from the camera and get them onto a computer. It was not easy. The memory card for that particular camera is bigger (I mean in physical size, not gigabytes) than the one for my camera and the reader that reads the card was across town at the GG’s home away from home. There is a USB cable that goes with the camera but it doesn’t work without some special software from Canon and we tried to download that but the download took f-o-r-e-v-e-r and ultimately failed. WHY do they do this stuff to us???? The only person that I know of who has successfully been able to use that stupid cable and Canon software is Mouse. Hmmmm. Wait!! Mouse’s computer is here! And so, we were able to retrieve the pictures, transfer them over to my iPhoto, and burn a CD. Today was the first time Jane had seen them on anything bigger than the little camera screen.
With Jane’s permission, I’ve posted a random selection of her Bali pics. This is just a small fraction of all the photos she has, which I think is something like 362. I haven’t captioned them. I don’t even know what all these pretty pictures are of and anyway, it isn’t my story, it’s Jane’s. She has plans to make a Flickr account and post them there and when she gets them up there, I’m sure she’ll send a link. For now, click here or on the pic for a little break from the hardland of the winter.
January 13th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Mac OS-X has a little utility called “Image Capture” (in Applications=>Image Capture) – I can thank Valdemort for pointing me in that direction some time ago when I was having some problems trying to download from a camera to iPhoto.
BTW – I have never loaded the Canon software on either of my Mac-Laptops, and have had no problems downloading photos from my Canon cameras.
January 13th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Since Jane is conspicuously absent from the beautiful pictures I am not sure I believe she really went.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Canon ZoomBrowser for Window$ – Great idea
Canon ZoomBrowser for Mac – Choppy slow bad bad bad
ImageCapture works. On Pre-Leopard Macs, though, iPhoto will download your AVI files. However, you have to make sure your preferences are set such that iPhoto will recognize your Canon. It should do that automatically, but if you’ve disabled it at some point you probably have to go through some sort of rigamarole to reset it.
Still not a fan of iPhoto — I do NOT like how the images are displayed in the main Library folder and you can’t move the root files to specific event folders. I don’t like being forced to create “folders” to point to my image files. Yes, it’s great in many cases, but not for photos. When looking for something with Finder, I’d much rather go to a photo folder (when using PhotoShop, for example) that I’ve sorted through iPhoto by event instead of rooting through folder trees organized by date to find what I’m looking for.
Hmmmm. Time to go look for some FOSS photo programs . . . SourceForge, anyone?
Rant over! Sorry Anne!
January 14th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Hi guys. Lemme see…
Jay: Yes, Jane really did go. She has *lots* of people pics. I didn’t post them because I haven’t met any of the other people in real life. Also, I figured it was her story to tell. 🙂
Cameras and image managing software and cables and all that stuff:
1) I’m not sure why our particular canons (powershot A series, I think, no cam in front of me here) do not talk to the computer via the cable and canon software. It is not a new problem here. It doesn’t seem to matter what application you are running (image capture, iphoto, finder, whatever), the computer cannot see the camera. Cross my heart, I had the Household Hacker (hmm, GG? HH?) working on this all morning yesterday while NPJane and I ate bagels and gabbed.
2) Our computers *can* read the *memory card* from the camera. From any application. The problem we had yesterday was that the card reader that fits the card in the cam that Jane borrowed was over at the EPA. Behind the big steel vee-hickle eater and all.
3) I have no idea how Mouse was able to set up her computer to access the camera via the cable and Canon software.
4) iPhoto vs. other ways of managing photos: Holy Wars! In the end, who cares? 🙂
January 14th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
LOL! While Val D’Morte doesn’t care for iPhoto – and I cannot *dis*agree with some of her arguments – I sorta like it…but then I kinda *think* in the same fashion, so it winds up making sense to me.
Although for a certain individual, it did NOT make any sense, and he wound up deleting photos, thinking they were duplicated and taking up valuable space on the drive…. That’s the danger of iPhoto’s logic.
January 14th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
iPhoto is not a perfect thing. I used it enthusiastically back in 2003 (yikes!) when I got my cute little first-generation 12″ screen G4 powerbook. It melted down after about, what was it, 1200 photos? I mean melted down and I was on the phone with a support geek for a while ’cause my whole operating system got hosed or whatever. Bad news. But nowhere did they state, “DO NOT PUT MORE THAN 1200 PHOTOS IN HERE!!!!!!!” I was pretty pissed off and I sure shied away from iPhoto for a LONG time. But things change and iPhoto is more robust now, and last summer, watching Sam and jcb use iPhoto to sort photos encouraged me to try again. I’m pretty good at remembering where I’ve stored things myself but definitely not perfect. Wish I was better at tagging things…..
I DO have duplicate photos — up the wazoo — and it is HARD to keep track of all that. The ol’ boy was operating on a different plane the last year or whatever but I understand his frustrations. And heck, he wasn’t even managing audio or video (I don’t think), which typically take up even more space than photos.