I finally got around to replacing my aging Canon Powershot S100 with a G5.
The old Zoombrowser was OK-ish but the new version sucks royally. To make life worse, the old version doesn't recognize the G5 and the new version ignores all network drives. Of course I store all my image libraries on my network.

so to my question....

What image transfer/library do you digi-photo guys out there use that is not tied to a camera manufacturer.
This is for XP by the way.

I just use a CF -> PCMCIA adapter and plug it straight in. No need for any special software.

That is great for getting the images to the PC, but I am also interested in the library software. Zoombrowser does both.
The bits I like in ZB are:-
ZB auto tags the new files in the camera for transfer to PC
One button transfer.
Library display in pre V4 versions
ZB also handles the orientation correctly, XP just ignores it.

I like the fact that it treats files and folders as an integrated, indexed library with pictures. With XP its just files and folders.

Heh, we discussed this at great length a while ago. Some people liked some of the browser alternatives, I didn't like any of them. I'll never, ever understand why every one of these devices couldn't at least give you the option of having it show up as a mass storage device. I think they feel that after all this effort they've put into creating this software, all their customers must pay by being forced to use it. It just doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, I also use a card reader. I plan on getting a card reader bay that goes with my case once I can find it for sale in stores

I suppose the good bit is that the G5 does show up in XP as a Canon G5 and is accessible as a drive.
I still hate the std XP image folder view though

I, on the other hand, hate that kind of stuff. I don't want this forced software doing all that for me. All I do with my pictures is organize them into folders. That's all. I want them to be in their original form for any future use.

My girlfriend never installed the software for her Canon, and I did kinda like how she could just connect the USB cable, and the OS would automatically take the new pictures and put them in a new folder of their own. But that still wouldn't work for me. What if the new pictures span two events that I want in seperate folders? Then I have to seperate them myself anyway. And I still have to name the folders.

No way, I want control over this stuff. I don't want programs doing it for me.

I suppose the good bit is that the G5 does show up in XP as a Canon G5 and is accessible as a drive.

Really? I wonder why the switch... And I wonder if there's software that will allow me to do the same with my G2.

Count me in as one of those persons who prefers to use a cheap CF reader instead of ZoomBrowser or BreezeBrowser or BloatBrowser or whatever.

The "long discussion" linked above doesn't have me updating that I finally did throw out ZoomBrowser and got a $15.00 flash reader and never looked back.

It's much much nicer to just pop the card in and open it up in Windows Explorer for file management. Having to run a piece of proprietary management software for this task is just ludicrous.

Funny,
I have been re-reading that other thread and have got my requirements down.
I am thinking that BreezeBrowser maybe what I need.

Ah, I was wondering what you ended up doing. Yeah, it's so simple. Plus you can find any number of programs to do post-transfer stuff to your files.

Fortunately, the G5 allows me to just copy the files direct with no software. Just as well given that my old S100 ZB fails to see the G5 !
I hate using explorer though. It just doesn't give me all the information from the image files. The XP camera/image wizard is a joke that just takes up disk space, the image print wizard is the same.

I'll check out Breeze at home tonight. The web page builder looks interesting.

Yeah, I hate the automatic download. I tend to categorize by year/month plus specific categories.

I guess I like the catalog style apps because they expose so much more of the EXIF info and can act on it.
The latest breezebrowser give you all of the histogram and can edit it. It also does the RAW conversions.

The G5 also lets you voice tag images and cool stuff like that. Unfortunately, the XP camaera wizard junks all that. DOH!
There is an ideal solution out there somewhere, I just know it.

I'll never, ever understand why every one of these devices couldn't at least give you the option of having it show up as a mass storage device. I think they feel that after all this effort they've put into creating this software, all their customers must pay by being forced to use it. It just doesn't make any sense.

I guess the same goes for those nitwits who make MP3 players...

Peter

Well nothing personal, but yeah Although I'm not calling you nitwits

emplode is different, though. It's a big step up from explorer and all very straightforward. But Zoombrowser, Real, Musicmatch, and all these others are simply no good. Sorry

With the empeg/karma products, there is a clear advantage to forcing you through their database protocol. We get things like nearly-instantaneous booting, hierarchical playlists, instant access to all song search and catalog functions, etc.

With the Canon digital cameras, the files are already stored in a PC-readable format and all we care about are retrieving those files. So it's different to want mass-storage-class access to a digital camera.

Since everyone here seems hell-bent on converting you to just use a card reader and not give you any software advice...

I kinda like Picasa

It was mentioned briefly before here and here

I used to like the old version of zoombrowser too and then they made the crappy new version. What's up with that?

With the empeg/karma products, there is a clear advantage to forcing you through their database protocol. We get things like nearly-instantaneous booting, hierarchical playlists, instant access to all song search and catalog functions, etc.

????

None of those things, at least on Empeg or Karma, has anything to do with the choice between mass-storage class and proprietary protocol. The proprietary protocol is there for legal reasons only.

Peter

I didn't know that. I thought that in order for the database to work properly, things had to be FIDs instead of willy-nilly randomly-named files.

But you could have a mass-storage interface. There's nothing to say that what's presented via mass-storage has to be how it's laid out on the device itself. Of course, the obvious drawback is that Windows would have no good way to have tracks be in multiple playlists. Or maybe it could have understood both hard links, soft links, and Windows shortcuts and presented them properly to whatever host-type it was attached to.

I really use Gallery for the organization being talked about, but I've installed cam2pc as an interface for my wife. I think it does organizational stuff, too.

The Ipod has all the things you mention (well, as many of them as Karma officially does) and it's mass-storage class.

Peter

Of course, the obvious drawback is that Windows would have no good way to have tracks be in multiple playlists. Or maybe it could have understood both hard links, soft links, and Windows shortcuts and presented them properly to whatever host-type it was attached to.

You could always use playlist files (.m3u or whatever) instead of directories. I don't know what actually happens at the structure level when you mount a FAT filesystem under Unix and make a symlink on it -- I bet it doesn't make a .lnk file -- but yes, it'd certainly be helpful for a mass-storage player to understand whatever it is.

Peter

Count me in as one of those persons who prefers to use a cheap CF reader instead of ZoomBrowser or BreezeBrowser or BloatBrowser or whatever.

You can use BreezeBrowser/Downloader with your CF reader, it isn't an either/or situation.

Having to run a piece of proprietary management software for this task is just ludicrous.

It would be if the only think Downloader did was copy the files, but it does more that that. If I didn't use downloader pro I would have to do all the following tasks manually or with another tool:

- losslessly rotate all the jpegs based on the orientation sensor info from the camera
- set all the files created dates to the image capture time from the EXIF data
- create a text file for each image with all the EXIF data
- set the DPI size to something sane
- sort all the images into date named folders (and yes I sometimes have to then separate them out more than that, but at least it does most of the work for me)

Obviously if you don't need to do these tasks when transferring images from your CF card then you don't need something like Downloader. If I didn't use Downloader then I would have to write something that did what Downloader does for me, because I'm not going back to doing everything by hand.

I copy the images to my computer and then use jhead and jpegtran for the auto rotating and setting timestamps. I usually organise by event so I don't need the sorting part. jhead can save all the EXIF data to a text file if you wish as well.

I keep the full sized originals on my computer and use irfanview to create 640x480 copies for my gallery and then upload those using FTP.

Thanks Matt!
You are correct, I never had a problem with getting the images into the PC.
All I wanted to replace the browser itself
BreezeBrowser does look good with the auto web page generation. That way I can auto save my nice new photo pages to my webserver.

Having to run a piece of proprietary management software for this task is just ludicrous.

It would be if the only think Downloader did was copy the files, but it does more that that. If I didn't use downloader pro I would have to do all the following tasks manually or with another tool:

But that's not what he's saying. We're talking (at least I was) about simply getting the files off the card. So the program can do other things, that's great, but that's not the point. I want the files off my card and into folders based on a method I choose. These other programs are forcing me into using a method of their choosing.

But I appologize. I wasn't aware that ashmoore wanted a Zoombrowser replacement program, not replacement solution. He asked for an "image transfer/library," and I believe Tony and I were offering our opinions and suggestions on half of that. There isn't anything saying you can't put the files on your machine, then use another program for viewing or whatever you want. That is what Trevor is suggesting and I think his method is the best and gives you the greatest amount of control.

I especially like the lossless orientation based on the camera tag. XP happily warns me that I will lose image data if I rotate the image, I can't see how that could ever be good.
I have just been reading up on cam2pc, it seems to have similar functionality to breeze. I guess I will have to try both.

I gotta add that the clearness of most of my posts has never their strong point!!!

Not a problem. I guess I was just venting because I dislike that Zoombrowser program so much. I have a way I like to do this, you have a way you like to do this, and I just wish the manufacturers would give us a choice is all. Why can you use BreezeBrowser with these cameras and we can simply mount them as mass storage devices? All I'm asking for is a choice of how I use this device I paid $700 for. Doesn't seem outrageous to me!

You could always use playlist files (.m3u or whatever) instead of directories.

That's a good point, and while I won't say it isn't doable, it does increase the complexity of the system quite a bit. Would you upload all the files to their initial proper locations and then add .m3u files? That'd mean that you'd have to manually create files with the correct references, which could easily be different than the references on the initial filesystem. It'd probably be easier for the manufacturer to provide a playlist creator app. And what would happen when you moved the original file? I guess that the player would have already abstracted it out to change those initial uploads to putting the data in a filestore and creating playlists based on where it was "uploaded" to. Maybe it could detect the upload of a duplicate file and create a playlist entry based on that. But I don't know if it would be possible for a mass-storage device to do a non-error abort of a file transfer, which would be the best way to do that, so as to not have to upload an entire file that's going to get thrown away and replaced with a link.

I don't know what actually happens at the structure level when you mount a FAT filesystem under Unix and make a symlink on it

It doesn't let you do it at all:

ln: creating symbolic link `test.link' to `system.1st': Operation not permitted

at least under Linux.

Actually Bitt, you have just reminded me of the other part to my fuzzy question.
I use XP now, but I have just added another disk so I can install Linux.
My server has been running linux forever, but I have never got around to using it as a workstation.

Having the same functionality on my linux workstation would be really cool. I have the feeling that gimp would prefer running in that environment as well.

For what it's worth, my current pipeline looks something like this.

I use ZoomBrowser with an external USB card reader only so far as to import pictures into directories named with the date. I then convert the RAW images to JPEG and exit ZoomBrowser.

Second, I rename the directory to something more useful (e.g., from "2004_04_02" to "2004_04_02 - Beautiful Sunrise"), such that it will still sort numerically, but will also give me a clue as to what's inside.

Third, I use ACDSee or sometimes the Windows XP built-in photo browsing stuff to look through pictures, and Photoshop to dork with them. I've recently upgraded to Photoshop CS, which includes its own visual browser that understands CRW files. Adobe's Camera Raw plug-in looks to be a much better RAW converter than Canon's, so I'll use that if I'm for some reason unhappy with Canon's default JPEG conversion.

Then, when I've nearly filled my 1GB card, I'll copy it directly to a burned CD with the same DCIM subdirectory and associated cruft. This means that ZoomBrowser is entirely happy pretending that these burned CDs are really just memory cards if/when I ever put them back into the machine.

There are plenty of other tools out there if I was willing to shoot JPEG, but if you're into RAW, then you need tools that understand it. Since I only minimally use ZoomBrowser, it works well-enough for me that I don't feel the need to get BreezeBrowser or some other commercial tool. Photoshop and ACDSee do all the heavy lifting I need.

Out of curiousity, since many people here seem to sort their images the same way, what do you do when you take pictures of two completely different events in the same day?

different events in the same day?

Generally, I create two different directories:

2004-04-09 Event A
2004-04-09 Event B

I generally organise my photos into Parties, Holidays, etc. as well, which works for me.

My pipeline looks like this:

1. Get the photos off of the camera. I don't care how. Generally I'll use a CF reader. Sometimes I'll use ZoomBrowser.
2. Organise them into directories. I don't worry too much about orientation at this point.
3. Upload them to Gallery, using either Gallery Remote or the Windows XP Publishing Wizard. Sometimes (if it's not many photos) I'll use the Gallery upload form.
4. Further organise and rotate them once they're in Gallery. It uses jhead and jpegtran for all the things that I'm interested in.

I've played with Gallery, and found it useful for splatting a large number of photos online. It's not as satisfying as custom web pages, of course. One of the features of newer Photoshop versions is that you can select the images you care about, in the Browser thing, and say "make me a web page" and it does everything, resizing, HTML generation, even color space conversion (e.g., from Adobe RGB to sRGB). My "new" pipeline for web production is probably going to be using Adobe's tools to generate its web page, but then I'll throw out Adobe's HTML and write my own for the summary screen (and my shell scripts will write wrappers for the zoomed-in images).

Haven't played around with it much myself yet, but just thought i'd throw this one out there:
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/products/index.html#Media

I've been watching Rob use this with his D2H and he seems to love it. As soon as i get my Mac i'll be looking into it more.

Thats what I love about this place (meaning the BBS)
I had never considered the file copy thing a problem, of course my camera then couldn't do it so it never arose. Now that my G5 can let met directly copy files is when I am considering the options.
And lots of you guys out there have already been there.

As luck would have it, one of my friends has just donated an un-needed version of Adobe Elements, so as it is free to me , I will give this a try first.

Adobe's Camera Raw plug-in looks to be a much better RAW converter than Canon's

Interesting. The main reason I haven't been taking anything in RAW is I have no software to handle it. I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip.

Thought I would update with this.....

After much effort expended installing and deinstalling numerous image browser editor packages, the realization struck me.
1. They are all slower the Win XP windows expolorer.
2. They are all crap in someway.
3. The ones that are less crap cost too much money
4. The included editors are all mostly crap as well.

So, my final solution will not be overly surprising to Tony and Matt et al.
I ended up with direct file copies from the camera, windows XP explorer for browsing and the gimp for my photo editor.
The only Canon software I used was the photostich and print program.

Oh well, sometimes you just can't be told

Interesting. I didn't think about speed. Sorry you couldn't find a package that worked out for you. I know how frustrating when you can't find a program that falls into the exact parameters that work just right for you. It's wonderful when it works, but it so rarely does.

And hey, you're one up on me. You don't have to take out your CF card and put it in a seperate reader to get your images off