Photography

Picture of the Week: Billboard

Picture of the Week: Frost on rusty bolts

Picture of the Week: Crow

Picture of the Week: Profit from the Panic

I finished up the initial SmugMug version of imgup today. There are some things I’d like to add, but it’s good enough to stick in Docker and run locally as a drop-in replacement for the Cloudflare edition I’ve been using. The basic workflow of the tool is: You make a private (but not secret) album. You upload images to it. During the upload process you can set the title and caption properties....

oAuth is sort of a pain. Now that I sort of know how to plumb it in – enough that I’m going to make myself a little repo with a reference application – it has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities. The whole experience reminded me of when I was doing Drupal development for a job I took to get into tech and out of pure editorial. We needed to do some work migrating a bunch of content between sites....

I made a shortcut that pretty much does what imgup does, except from an iPhone (or Mac, I guess, if you want to pick an image from Photos instead of sending it via an iPhone/iPad share sheet. It just squirts an image up to the Cloudflare Images API, gets back a URL, and copies some pre-made Markdown to your clipboard suitable for pasting somewhere. Pretty simple to add a step to send it to a Drafts draft, etc....

Today I put the last things into imgup I need to just run it and use it. I cleaned up the result page, added a chance to enter alt text at the beginning, and made it clean up its tmp after it succeeds at uploading, which now has a cleaner error page for the most error-prone part of the app. I also have it using dotenv for configuration because that felt cleaner and more forward-looking than the YAML config thing....

This weekend I saw a few culture-clashes go by around the topic of photography that helped my thoughts gel. One involved a small dog-pile over charges of elitism, and one involved a putative professional talking down to someone who was just happy about their new camera. You could characterize those clashes as people talking down or talking up, but also just talking past each other. Sometimes I want to write a screed about photography culture and inclusiveness because I’m an outsider in parts of that culture and find parts of it as frustrating and tedious as any other human endeavor that can be gate-kept....

I’d like a way to lock images in Lightroom or otherwise add a tiny bit of friction to just editing something without considering a few implications. In Lightroom Classic you have the option to make a published collection with virtual copies. That’s handy, because if you’ve taken a bunch of time to get a collection into a consistent state, the virtual copies help ensure that you can keep it that way....