Tag: Apps

Introducing: Lightroom Preset Renamer

As you may know, besides software, I do photography. In fact, on my photoblog, I’m approaching 15 years of posting a new photo every day (as of this writing, that’s 5448 days of new photos). My main tool for managing, organizing and processing my photos is Adobe’s Lightroom (Classic), which I’ve used since version 1 when I started my “modern” photography hobby/side-business in 2007 (I’d done photography in the past, but had pretty much stopped after college as I no-longer had access to a darkroom, was too busy/poor/had other priorities/obligations for film and digital wasn’t cheap enough/good enough for what I wanted to do).

One of the key features of Lightroom is the ability to create and use presets, which apply develop settings to the selected image, adjusting exposure, color, crop, etc., without user intervention. Some photographers are adamantly against the idea of presets, as they view each photo to be processed as a clean slate that requires careful finessing of values to process. On the other end of the spectrum, you have lazy people who apply a preset without any additional work, export the photo and call it a day. However, most Lightroom users lie somewhere in the middle—using a preset as a starting point for processing an image, followed by fine-tuning it to perfection. 

I am one of the latter Lightroom users. I’ll often open a photo and scroll through my presets looking for a good starting point for the “look” I want a photo to have. Besides creating my own presets, I like to explore other people’s presets they’ve shared in the Lightoom (Cloud) or Mobile app (note that Adobe has two confusingly-named Lightroom applications…one is the professional version (Classic) that most serious photographers use and the stripped-down, amateur/mobile-focused Lightroom (Cloud) that doesn’t, in my opinion, have a place in a professional’s toolkit). In Lightroom Cloud, there’s a “Discover” section that allows you to browse shared presets and download them to use for yourself:

If you filter by “Preset downloadable”, you can scroll through the photo grid and download the preset for any photo:

Lightroom Cloud will then save it to your account and it can be used on any photo in Lightroom Cloud or Lightroom Mobile (the presets will sync to the Lightroom app on your phone).

At this point, however, you can’t use them in Classic, yet. Since the Lightroom Cloud presets don’t sync to Lightroom Classic, you have to do some work to get them there. 

(Note that the following instructions are for MacOS, but should be similar on Windows)

  1. Find your Lightroom Cloud library (~/Pictures/Lightroom Library.lrlibrary)
  2. Right click and select “Show Package Contents”
  3. In that folder, there are 4 subfolders. One has a bunch of random characters; the others are profiles, TemporaryEdits and user.
  4. Click into the random characters folder.
  5. Find the cr_settings subfolder and click into it.
  6. The .xmp files here are your presets.
  7. Copy these to where your Classic presets are stored (should be something like ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/Settings
  8. Restart Classic

Voila! Your presets should be there in the Presets pane in Lightroom Classic. The problem with this is that Adobe saves the presets to your local drive as a guid rather than a human-readable name:

If you’re like me, though, this is unacceptable. I want to be able to read the names of the presets while in Finder. So, to solve this, I built a tiny MacOS application I call Lightroom Preset Renamer. This is how I use it:

  1. Copy the .xmp preset files you found in the Lightroom Library.lrlibrary file to a temporary folder.
  2. Run the Preset Renamer application and choose this folder by clicking the “Choose Preset Folder to Process”:
  3. Once you’ve chosen the folder, it will automatically process any .xmp file in that folder, renaming it to it’s “proper name”, while preserving the original file by changing the extension to “xmp_old”:
  4. Now, copy these .xmp files to the CameraRaw/Settings folder as outlined above and then reset Classic.

A couple of notes: 

  1. This app isn’t signed, so you may need to follow the instructions here to run it. Or, if you’re adventurous and have to run unsigned apps often, you can disable Gatekeeper by following these instructions.
  2. If you’re concerned about security, you can inspect the source code and build the app yourself in Visual Studio Mac by going to this Github repository.
  3. Since this is built on .Net, I plan on building a Windows version soon…stay tuned!
  4. You can download the application at the link below:

Download the latest release here

Posted on by Matt 0

EXIFViewer, Redux

Last year, I wrote about a small photo EXIF data viewer I’d built. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really given the project much thought since then, especially since it was written to run on Windows and late last year, I switched back to MacOS. 

Recently, however, i’ve been toying with idea of porting it to MacOS, especially since Microsoft’s Xamarin lets you write .NET code and compile it with MacOS as the target OS. However, to do so, I needed to rewrite for the Windows platform.

The first problem is that the original was written in Visual Basic.NET, which is great for rapidly-building applications, but is not a modern language and is on its way to being deprecated by Microsoft.

The second problem, and this is somewhat-embarassing considering that I’m a software development manager and solutions architect at my day job, but the application was poorly-built (I threw it together in a couple of hours). No modularity. No proper design patterns. Logic intermingled with UI. Lots of global variables. 

So, to port to MacOS via Xamarin, I’d need to rewrite the code in C# (since VB.NET isn’t supported) and I’d need to make it more modular, so that the processing/backend was abstracted away from the user interface. This way, I could use the codebase that extracts the EXIF data in my Mac version without modification and will only need to build the UI elements for MacOS. 

At any rate, I’ve started making my first stabs at writing the Mac version, but until then, the Windows version is available on GitHub here. You can download the installer here.

I welcome feedback, contributions and pull requests!

Posted on by Matt 0

Badly Drawn Dogs

Quick post today, since I’m lazy and burned out from work and haven’t had time to properly author an exciting and engaging post.

I recently got a promotion at my day job and, to celebrate, I upgraded from my old iPad Air 2 to an iPad Pro 12.9. And, using some incentive points I had saved up, I got the Apple Pencil to accompany it. 

Since I had a stylus and a tablet, I downloaded the digital artist’s iOS app of choice, Procreate, and thought I’d take a metaphorical stab at sketching. 

I used to sketch fairly often. I started out in college as an architecture major with dreams of being the next Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava or Frank Lloyd Wright , and thus thought I needed to be able to sketch out ideas as they came to me. But those dreams were dashed and my college career progressed from architecture→computer engineering→management information systems.

So, consequently, I stopped sketching and haven’t really sketched anything in over two decades (also, I was just shocked to realize I graduated from college over 20 years ago!).

So now that I’ve picked up Procreate, I’ve started to familiarize myself with its myriad of tools and, I must say, I’m quite impressed. There’s a ton of different drawing tools/brushes available, from sketching to charcoal to painting. And, with the Apple Pencil, they’re extremely accurate and pressure-sensitive. You can tell that the engineers behind the app are artists as well. 

After a basic familiarizing, I gave a try at getting back into sketching by doing a quick two-minute sketch of our youngest dog, Etta, lying on the floor. To quote Dylatov, it’s “not great, not terrible“:

3.6 roentgenI then took a shot at some portraits of the other dogs:

Millie:

MillieBonnie:

BonnieOur beloved departed Winston:

WinstonAnd finally, back to Etta:

EttaMan, that was rough. My skills are not-so-great. But I plan on keeping at it, improving my sketchiness and learning the tool. If I improve enough, I’ll try these same sketches again in the future and share them here.

Posted on by Matt 1

A Lightweight EXIF Data Viewer

If you’ve read the title of this post and are wondering “what is this EXIF thing?”, then here’s a bit of information. EXIF is an acronym for EXchangeable Image File Format. And, no, I don’t know why it’s not “EXIFF”. Basically, it’s metadata tagged onto a digital image that contains information about that image. This, along with another group of metadata, IPTC, is used by digital photographers to keep track of information about such things as camera/lens settings, geographic information and copyright of a given photo.

Some photographers post their images online with this information intact, while others will strip it out when posting, keeping their secret sauce to themselves. For myself, I keep it intact as I hope it might be helpful to other photographers to understand how a photo was capture as well as being an aid in enforcing copyright. Most, if not all, photos on my photography site have this data tagged onto them and the basic data can be viewed by clicking the “View Photo Data and Location” button under the photo:

Basic EXIF data on 75CentralPhotography.Com

However, there are a lot of times that I want to view this data locally for unpublished photos on my PC. To make this easy, I wrote a simple Windows application that will display this data for a selected photo:

Main Interface

It displays the most-commonly used EXIF data on the main interface; and, if there’s GPS information embedded in the metadata, it shows a button to view the photo’s location on Google Maps. If you want all the EXIF data, you can click “File→Show All EXIF Data…” and a dialog will appear showing everything:

Everything, Everything

This application is written in VB.NET and the source code is available on GitHub. If you want to install it, you’re welcome to download it here.

A couple of installation notes:

When downloading the installer, you may get this warning:

Because this app hasn’t been installed enough times for Windows to “trust” it, Windows Defender wants you to really think about it before installing. To continue, click the three dots and choose “Keep”.

You might then get another warning:

Go ahead and click the down arrow next to “Show more” and click “Keep Anyway”. Then, navigate to your download location and doubleclick EXIFViewer.msi to install. You might get another warning:

Click More info and you’ll get the option to run anyway. At this point, the installer will launch and you can install the application.

A lot of rigmarole to install an app, but it’s for most people’s own good, as Windows tries its best to prevent you from installing malicious software using Defender Smartscreen. In this case, you’re going to have to trust me that this isn’t malicious. You have the option, of course, to review the source code at the Github repository listed above. And you know where to find me. If enough people install, Windows will eventually allow it past Smartscreen without complaint.

If you download and use the EXIFViewer and have any feedback or find any bugs, please submit an issue here or send me an email at matt@75central.com.

 

Posted on by Matt Harvey 2