08.18
For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to participate in Project 365. For those that don’t know about it, it is the idea of taking one picture a day in order to accomplish.. something. I’m mainly just doing it for fun, and in order to improve my picture-taking skills with my camera phone. I have it walking around everywhere basically, so when I see something interesting, I try to have my phone at the ready. Some times I just take pictures of random stuff, but others are more interesting.
I’ve found that it’s pretty useful for me. If you see the set, you can almost notice a perceptible increase in quality of the photos. It may just be because I’m taking 2-3 photos per day and choosing the best one, or I may be actually improving in my photo-taking abilities. Hopefully by the end of the year, the set of mine will actually have more than 300 photos in it.
The idea of taking a picture a day is quite interesting to me, if only because if you asked me what I was doing last year this time, I would probably give you a general idea because my life is basically boring – I work in an office, even when I’m at school. This way I might have some idea or get reminded.
I do have a couple of kinks that I would like to work out when I’m doing it though – when I download my photos through Bluetooth using my phone, it sets all of the creation dates to the time that I transfer the photos instead of the time that I took the photos. This means that I need to fiddle with the “taken on” date when I finish uploading the pictures – there’s no way to use the Flickr Uploadr to set the date. This, and the horrible VGA camera that I have in the phone make it tempting for me to buy a new phone with a better camera and tools for transferring. Also, some days I just stay in, and don’t do anything interesting, so I don’t have anything interesting or different to take a picture of. I’m thinking of just taking a self-portrait on those days, but I’m not sure that it would be interesting enough.
About having accurate “taken on” dates: you could try uploading your pictures directly from your phone. Flickr gives you an email address that you can send pictures to, and I have used the one for my account successfully, including the picture subject and description. I don’t know about your camera, but mine has a “sent” option that pops up immediately after I take each picture, so this ends up being a pretty efficient strategy.
Your other hope will be to set the EXIF date for the picture. Most cameraphones don’t use EXIF data, but there are a lot of tools that allow you to add/modify it. My favorite command-line tools are jhead and exiv2. Flickr will read the EXIF date as the “taken on” date. If you really want a complete process, you can also look to set the IPTC headline, caption, and keywords in the jpeg. Flickr will read these and automatically import them as your picture’s title, description, and tags. I like this approach, but there aren’t many free/open-source tools that do it well. Care to write one, Mike?
Michael,
I have been battling with the problem of date taken with my camera phone for a while.
My phone a Nokia 6710 takes reasonable pictures (1Mb), but does awful things with the dates. I have however found that while the pictures are on the phone, the date/ time is correct against the specific jpeg image, but that once you either forward via bluetooth or copy via bluetooth the date then gets set to the copy date, which isn’t much use.
There is an option, in exiv2 that allows you to set the EXIF tag to the creation date tag, once you do this then you can copy as many times but the EXIF tags remain intact. The trick is to change the date while the file is still on the phone file system. I have a removable mini-SD card in my phone, so I can accomplish this by mounting the SD card in my laptop, run a script to set the EXIF date and everything is good. Although a little labour intensive..
Wrt, opensource tools to set IPTC tags, I find digikam is very good as you can tag photo’s in a gui, including comments and digikam will then save in the IPTC fields. digikam does also have a flickr uploader, but that does need some work!
Btw, I am one of the digikam Debian maintainers…
Dude, can you fix your blog so comments posted to entries aren’t posted to planet debian? That is kind of lame.
I have just fixed this tonight. Apparently the old style is what caused it. That’s kindof lame of serendipity to let the style of the page hijack your RSS like that.