Photo star power

I've been marking photos with stars for a while now but don't really have a system. I feel like my ratings drift over time but worse I sometimes don't put ratings on photos because I don't remember how I use the stars. This, of course, means that I am building a backlog of photos that are unrated. This wouldn't be a big deal except I am thinking of making a photo book for Grandma and Grandpa at the end of the year and I don't want to wade through a year's photos to choose the ones that should go in the book. So here's a scheme:
5 stars - outstanding photo
4 stars - photo that I like a lot but something is less than perfect
3 stars - photo that is a worth looking at again (best in a series where none were great)
2 stars - photo was a nice idea but didn't turn out well
1 stars - bad photo but one that I can't bring myself to delete

After asking Google it turns out others have thoughts too:
deeje cooley on rating systems in general
austinpreneur explains his workflow including ratings (very good write up)

I guess I'll try my system for a while and see how it goes but austinpreneur's might be better.

Photo management software for Macs

So I use a Mac... and I went out and got iLife '09 when it came out because I wanted Places and Faces. Both turn out to be pretty cool. But the face recognition isn't that impressive. It misses a bunch of faces and even with hints it seems to make obvious mistakes. For example, I import an album of 20 picutres all of which are the same 3 people. I'd think that after I confirm/add faces to the first few pictures it could do a much better job guessing that the same people appear in the remaining photos. But nope--it will still suggest a name that appears in only 2 other photos from 4 years ago. And I haven't been able to find a workflow that I like for tagging faces. The best I've found involves lots of switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse.

But what I really meant to post about is the decision between iPhoto and Picasa for Mac. Here's the deal. Almost everyone in my family has a Google account. So Picasa web albums is a convenient way to share photos. And perhaps most importantly it is what my Mom has learned how to use. (I am sure she would learn a new website or two (or 50) if that's what it took to see pictures of her grandson but none the less our history is with Picasa.) Likewise my in-laws are used to Picasa web albums and so there is a large incentive to stick with it.

Given that I am going to use Picasa on the web it would make sense to use it on my Mac too. It seems to be  a fine program.

Things I like about it (Picasa's Advantages):

• Good facial recognition.
• The "People" view showing only suspected matches to let you confirm quickly.
• The ability to rotate videos that were taken in portrait aspect ratio
• Integration with Picasa Web Albums
• The ability to load videos to Picasa Web Albums
• The print layouts are easier to understand (e.g., you can print 4 3x5s on an 8.5x11 sheet of photo paper)
• My wife uses it on her PC

iPhoto's Advantages:

• Integrated with the Media Browser on the Mac (file open dialogs, other iLife programs, etc)
• Tools for creating photo books are way better than anything I've tried on the web (Picasa has no built in tools--it just helps you get to web-based tools)
• All my tags, ratings, and Faces are up to date in iPhoto
• It has a 5 star rating system.
• Full screen editing mode
• Compare feature lets you view pictures side-by-side

Ideas for workarounds:

• You can create a 5-Star rating system in Picasa using tags
• You can buy an iPhoto plugin that says it will let you upload videos to Picasa Web Albums
• You can export photos from Picasa to iPhoto to make a book
• Write an Applescript/Automator routine to use iMovie to rotate videos

Sometime I'll make a decision. Right now I am squarely on the fence and using some of each.

(Updated: 1/2/11 to add the full screen and compare advantages to iPhoto)

Times Reader

I downloaded the Times Reader (Beta) for Mac a few months ago, when it was first announced. I played with it a few days and then deleted it finding that I preferred reading the email headlines and then surfing around NYTimes.com. But after a recent plane flight when I couldn't get to the website I decided to give Times Reader another look. Here are my thoughts:
- I wish that it scaled better. At the middle-sized font (they let you choose from 3) most articles are divided across 2 pages. But the Reader window is limited to a small portion of my screen. I am sure this is for some reasonable technical reason but it feels clunky almost to the point of annoying.
- Partly because articles are divided a lot of navigation is required -- the keyboard shortcuts help out a lot.
- It doesn't keep track of what has been read and they don't keep stories to a certain date. So I skimmed through the whole paper yesterday and today it is showing me a bunch of the same stories. Maybe I don't really understand how it works. On the 28th I went back to the 26th and found an article whose byline was the 27th??? Anyhow it doesn't give me a feeling that I am in control of my reading experience and that was one of the things that I really hoped to get from this application that NYTimes.com doesn't offer.
- The Most Emailed section is way better than the NYTimes.com version. It includes pictures and short summaries of the article whereas NYTimes.com just shows the headline.
- I don't know if it is Times Reader itself or Silverlight but the application seems to spend a bunch of time with the spinning beach ball. (I guess this might be a function of the app being in beta...)

I'll keep playing with it but as of now I am not sold

focus follows mouse

Steve Yegge gives this a much more thorough treatment on his blog. But if you want to fix Terminal.app so that focus follows the mouse between Terminal windows then this
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
does the trick.

Firefox vs Safari

I am not looking to write the definitive guide. I don't even consider myself a browser afficianado. But I do dabble and now I am finding that I forget why I choose one over the other.

I use Firefox as my day to day browser for a few reasons:

• phishing filter (no longer after Safari 3.2)
  
• adblock plus
• renders more sites correctly than safari
• force windows to open in tabs
  
• all my stuff (history, bookmarks, etc) are already there
• center click in safari doesn't open a background tab
• clicking on an RSS feed adds it to google reader (could I get Safari to behave this way?)
• when you cut and paste something into blogger it works on Firefox but not for Safari
  

Of course Safari has some things going for it too:

• respects the home/end key fix to make home go to beginning of line and end go to the end of the line