Scribbles and Snaps

Despite the fact that I’ve been living in Aarhus for almost 18 years, I often get lost in my own city. Last time that happened, I discovered this vintage door sign. According to the missus, the sign dates back to the 30′s. What makes it particularly interesting is that a different font is used for each line (except the first two words). In case you wonder what the sign says, here is the translation: Dealing, begging, carrying goods up the main stairs, and parking bikes and prams is prohibited

The photo is published on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Door_Sign_(Aarhus).jpeg

While I always schlepping around my trusty Nikon D90, I enjoy snapping photos with my Samsung Galaxy S II (or whatever Android device I currently use). Of course, I use digiKam for processing and organizing my snaps.

I applied the cross-process effect (as described in the digiKam Recipes ebook) to the photo above and sharpened it a bit.

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stacked_Colorful_Plates_(Closeup).jpg

If you happen to use Piwigo to publish and share your photos on the web, you’ll appreciate the brand new Piwigo app for the Android platform.

This app is designed to help you manage your Piwigo gallery from the convenience of your Android device. As such it doesn’t allow you to browse albums and view photos (to do that you might want to give the ReGalAndroid app a try). The app itself is pretty straightforward in use. First off, you have to connect the app to your Piwigo instance, which is done in the Settings section. The Album view lets you select an existing album and change its permissions, create new albums, and upload photos.

Before you can upload photos, you have to select them in the Photos view. Here, you can also edit the title, author, and description for each selected photo. Once you are done, press the Upload button and the app will do the rest. That’s all there is to it. The Piwigo app is not exactly overloaded with features, but it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.

You don’t need a fancy camera with a built-in GPS receiver to geotag your photos. An Android device with the Open GPS Tracker app and digiKam can do the job just fine. The app lets you track your route and save it as a GPX file which you can then use to geocorrelate your photos in digiKam.

Geocorrelation is a relatively simple process which assigns geographical coordinates from the GPX file to the photos based on their time stamps. So for this technique to work its magic, you must sync the time on your Android device with your camera. When you head for a photo walk, launch Open GPS Tracker on your Android device and start a new tracking session. When you are back home, stop the tracking session, and use the Share Track button in Open GPS Tracker to save the recorded track in the GPX format on the SD card or send it via email to your machine.

Offload then the photos from your camera to digiKam, select them, and choose Image » Geolocation » Correlator. Press the Load GPX File button and select the GPX file. digiKam should then automatically assign geographical coordinates to the photos. By default, digiKam can tolerate a 30-second gap between the time settings of the camera and the GPX track. If the gap is longer, the application may fail to assign geographical coordinates to some of the photos. In this case, you can increase the time gap in the Max time gap field. Press then the Correlate button to refresh the geographical coordinates. This makes geocorrelation less precise, but you can use the Edit button to adjust the coordinates manually. Once you’re satisfied with the result, press the Apply button to save the assigned coordinates in the photos’ metadata, and you are done.