The West Ring » Software

Gallery – Slow Loading Thumbnails (Are No More!)

Iain — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:51:45 +0000

If you have had a browse around my gallery, you’ll probably have been annoyed by the fact that some of the thumbnails took an age to load. I JFGI’d but I just couldn’t find a reason. Well, it seems that, by chance, I have found a likely candidate.

With the last two albums (Cricklade Walk and Puppy Party) I used a different method to upload the pics and noticed that all thumbnails loaded immediately, as they jolly well should! It would seem that there seems to be some sort of issue with the Publish to Web from XP option, which is what I used previously. With the new method, they fly.

The upshot is that I’m afraid that old albums will still suffer, but new ones will be whizzy.

Photoshop’s Preview Option – A Top Tip

Iain — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:11:06 +0000

It might be that this is entirely obvious to everyone bar me, but I’m going to post it anyway! When you’re making adjustments using one of the pop-ups (levels: my new favourite toy ) actually use the preview option. Don’t just leave it checked, watch the changes and try and visualise the difference – de-select and re-select it. As you turn the preview off and on you’ll see the changes that you are making!

Genius.

How To Change a Photo’s File Date

Iain — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 22:39:00 +0000

A while back I realised that when I was editing a photo and saving it, the file date was being changed from the time it was taken to the time it was edited. Is this a problem? Well, perhaps only one of my making, You see, I found that when a photo was edited and renamed from something meaningless to, for example, “Ooohhh, I could crush a grape” it was causing problems when trying to order them for a slide show. Eventually, I realised there was an option within Irfanview to “Save with original date/time”, and I began to use it. What’s even cleverer is that once you tick it, Irfanview remembers the setting, which means that I don’t have to! The same applies to batch editing.

Anyway, back to the problem at hand, i.e. all the pictures with the incorrect file dates. I had read that one could edit the EXIF data, so I decided to try and find out if I could redate the file with the one from the EXIF. Time to JFGI. Initially I wasn’t having much luck because all the links related to changing the EXIF data, which isn’t what I needed. That’s when I thought of having a look through Digital Media Thoughts, a sister site to Pocket PC Thoughts, which I regularly read. Rather than goint to DMT, I decided to utilise Google’s inurl: search option.

Finally, I had the answer: Exifer. Among other things (read their site!) this gives you the option to redate the file using the last modified date from the EXIF. Splendid. Please note that there are some compatibility issues posted on their website regarding some software not recognising the EXIF data after an edit. Thankfully, despite PHP functions being in that list, I haven’t had any problems.

At this point in time I’m going to casually ignore the fact the ftp-ing the file up to the website changes the date…