Dave Daniel Photography

Ever try to open an Adobe Lightroom catalog from a network drive?  You can’t.  This wonderful design feature of Lightroom has been frustrating users since the product hit the street.  Here is my simple solution that allows you to use network-based Catalogs.

Adobe’s design requirement to use a local drive sucks for those of us that use network drives such as a NAS to manage our media files.  The way Lightroom works requires the Catalog to be on a non-network drive.  The use of multiple computers managing image information means separate Catalog files on each.  Adobe’s suggestion for a work-around was to copy the Catalog to each workstation prior to use (ugh).  This creates the real scenario of multiple Catalogs with different data.

I’ve tried a variety of solutions with either moderate or no success.  The SUBST command is a possible alternative but has limitations that didn’t meet my needs.  For those that want to try:

• SUBST G: P:\Media\CatalogPath

This places the contents of the P:\Media\CatalogPath to new drive G.  This may or may not work reliably, as LIghtroom may still see the new drive as a network resource since G: isn’t a BIOS-installed drive.  To me, solutions that don’t always work aren’t solutions.

My UNIX background told me I need the UNIX equivalent of the SYMLINK command on my Windows system  (for those that see another opportunity to flame Windows, find me Lightroom that runs on UNIX).  To my surprise, I discovered that recent versions of Windows has a symbolic link command called MKLINK!  Use the MKLINK command to create a symbolic link within your local drive structure.  For example, to create a Catalog folder on my C drive that actually links to the catalog folder on my NAS:

• MKLINK /d “C:\Catalog” “P:\Media\Catalog”

Again, this assumes the NAS is mapped to the P drive.

This does a good job of providing the Catalog from a network source, convincing Lightroom that it’s dealing with local-drive data.  But, it presents a problem with the image files being mapped to different network drives on different workstations.  Setting up the images and the catalog directories under a common, shared directory provides a solution.   For example, the Media folder contains both the “Images” and “Catalog” folders.  To create the symlink:

• MKLINK /d “C:\Media” “P:\Media”

This presents the entire NAS drive’s \Media subdirectory on the local C drive.  Again, Lightroom is convinced that the C:\Media folder is a local data store.  But remember, that folder is actually pointing to the data contained on your network.  It doesn’t copy the data.  The data being manipulated at C:\Media is really the data sitting on the network drive.  So please be careful wiehn deleting or modifying anything.  As always, using a “working” directory while maintaining an unmodified directory of your images is extremely important….and ALWAYS make regular backups!

The above symlink solution still requires the correct drive mapping (drive P in our example).  To bypass this and reference the network directory as an explicit source, use the following:

• MKLINK /d “C:\Media” “\\ServerName\Share\Media”

You can place the MKLINK command above in a batch file or add it to a script that runs to map the network drives and create any symlinks.  Once created, the symbolic link will remain in your filesystem until explicitly removed.

Hope this helps!

Here’s something that should prove to be a timesaver for my blogging habit. As you may know, I recently updated my photo site from its homebrew codebase to one that uses WordPress as the site engine. Couple that with the pervasive use of Facebook by my friends and family, I thought it would be fun to use one to create posts in other. So, rather than post in my weblog, then post in Facebook, and then post in _____, I want to post once and push the info to the other systems.

Integrating systems isn’t a new exercise for me. For example, I am hosting my own instance(s) of WordPress on servers located at the house. This gives me the option to use my NAS drives as the site repository for images posted to the weblog. Why do this? It saves disk space, it saves time uploading files to site folders, it takes adavantage of the backup capabilities inherent to the NAS software. And, it seemed like a “fun exercise.” (recall, I am an uberGeek).

I had attempted a solution using Wordbook, available at the WordPress site.. The solution didn’t perform as expected, as the entries only appeared on the notes page. Not what I wanted, so onward to another solution.

With Brett’s help, who had been down the same path, we configured Facebook to subscribe to my weblog’s RSS feed. And, it works great! The only problem was that it imported all the entries at the same time, tagging them with the current date. It should behave as expected going forward.

So, for those of you that tried your best to stay away from my weblog…..I gotcha either way!

600 w/s Studio Strobes

They use standard Bowens-type attachments, which is a real plus considering the complement of light boxes that I already own.  I would hate to have to replace the speed rings for another brand.

In use, I am very happy with them.  Checking output with a flash meter indicates consistent output on multiple flashes.  Once the capacitors were tuned with a heavy warm up, I was able to get consistently fast recycle times.  The onboard flash sensor works very well, including the pre-flash setting which ignores digital SLR TTL pre-flashes, but still allows use of on-board flash to properly trigger the strobes.

I am somewhat disappointed that the bulb protector isn’t usable with the modeling lamp in the unit – that’s just plain stupid.  Another faux-pas is the tightening wing for the mount bumps up against the housing, precluding a full-circle tighten.  It has a spring release, but it would be so much easier make the design right from the beginning.

The only missing feature would be built-in PocketWizard radio remote capabilities, but that would add significantly to the price.  All in all, a good purchase.

You might have noticed a few changes to the site, most notably the site design.  What you don’t see is an entirely new engine powering the blog.  I’ve converted over to WordPress, and my initial response is very favorable.

I was approaching the time to rewrite my weblog, not just because it was old code, but a number of security vulnerabilities have cropped up.  For example, I had to disable my guestbook and commenting features due to bot spamming.  It’s a true shame that people feel the need to be parasites on someone else’s property.  I could easily have added captcha capabilities to slow down the spamming, which led me to the conclusion that is was likely time to rewrite.

So, I thought I’d look at a 3rd-party package to handle my site.  The requirements:

• Appropriate for my site (see content demands below)
• Up-to-date code base
• Secure
• Modifiable presentation tier
• Database driven
• Low or no cost
• Runnable on my own infrastructure
• OS agnostic (Windows or ‘Nix)

Of course, it has to be able to be able to serve up a variety of site content, including:

• Formatted text
• Inline code display (can it display HTML snippets)
• CSS-driven
• Flash pages
• Photos
• Off-site content, such as YouTube
• Secure content upload capabilities

The shopping list really isn’t any more demanding than my old site could handle (and handle quite well, except for the security component).  During my review, I considered a wide number of options, from the packaged .NET sample sites, the Nuke variants, and a number of others.  I finally landed on WordPress, which easily met ALL my needs, with a very simple yet powerful code base.  The only negative I could see was that it was written in PHP (my opinion is that a scripting language is not as secure or powerful as a compiled language such as .NET or Java).  It comfortably met all my other demands, and more.

I won’t go into all the installation details, but will mention that I’ve got my Windows 2003 web server box running PHP and MySQL to run the site.  Since MySQL is now available, I also took time to install and configure a wiki install that you can see here.

I’ll be writing more about the install and tweaking of the site in the near future.  For now, I’m going to take the time to figure out how I can import my old data into the site.  It is supposed to be able to take an RSS import, but for some reason it is not behaving with my feed.

Enjoy!

I was preparing  to create some code for creating on-the-fly thumbnails for my photo submissions.  With an Apache install on a nix box, this would be virtually automatic, with GD already installed with PHP.  However, in a Windows box running IIS, it’s a slightly different case – the main issue being that you have to find the appropriate dll and properly reference it in the configuration files.  The following assumes you already have PHP properly installed.

1. Open up your php.ini file and search for the line: ;extension=php_gd2.dll and uncomment it by removing the semi-colon (’;’).  If your ini file was like mine, the ;extension=php_gd2.dll line doesn’t exist.  If not, just type it in (without the semi-colon.
2. Copy C:\PHP\php.ini to C:\WINDOWS\php.ini. If you wish, you can probably get away with creating an alias (symbolic link) in the C:\WINDOWS folder that points to the original php.ini file. It is important that there is a link or the actual file though, since this is where IIS will look for the configuration file.
3. Finally, for each extension you enabled in the php.ini file, locate the corresponding dll file in C:\PHP\ext\ and copy it into the same directory as php.ini (C:\WINDOWS\).  Again, my install did not contain the dll file, so Google for the file and download from a safe location. I would recommend grabbing it direct from the PHP site.  Drop it into the C:\PHP\ext\ folder, as well as the C:\Windows\ folder.

There you go!  It does work, at least on Windows 2003, with IIS 6, in September.