Pillars of Gold.

Toronto City Hall, Canada

In Space No One Can Hear You...

The Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, Canada

Riding a Rainbow

The Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, Canada.

Flickr's new slideshow tool

Embedded slideshows.... thanks Flickr folks!

Someone's Having Fun

The Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, Canada.

Bold Colours

Toronto, Canada

Green Arc

Toronto, Canada

Lightroom 2 Bug

Its been an overall very good experience after stepping up to Adobe's Lightroom 2 the day of its release. Dual monitor support and regional image editing are great, but there's an annoying bug.

My preferred way of sorting images is to go Capture Time, Descending.

This puts my most recent images at the top, which saves scrolling down to the bottom all the time, especially in a folder with 1000's of images.

But... if you go into the View menu and try and select Ascending order, both Ascending and Descending get selected at the same time. Check out the screenshot to see what I'm talking about.

I can't select Descending at all, and trying to deselect either of them once ticked is impossible.

This is happening on my two installs of the software on an XP desktop and a MacBook, so it's not just me.

It's not a killer bug, but its a strange oversight and really affects my workflow. I find I open up Bridge more often now to get images sorted properly which defeats the content management goals of Lightroom.

C'mon Adobe, what's up with this?

Sync Stress

After getting a NAS [Network Attached Storage drive] recently for local backups and sharing of media, I had the problem of what to use for regular backups from my desktop machine to the NAS.

A key requirement for all my backups over the years has been for them to be 'in the clear'. That way I can hook up any external drive or put any disk into any machine and start reading the data. Not special backup software needed.

For years I've used a program called Folder Match. Unfortunately the main site for the software isn't active anymore and that's not a bad thing. The program works well for syncing files but it hasn't been updated for a while and new, free options have emerged.

I have toyed with Microsoft's SyncToy. Version 2.0 is tagged as being in Beta, which makes me nervous, and it's s_l_o_w. Maybe it gets faster with each use, but so far I haven't been patient enough for it to run a full backup.

Getting Window's task scheduler to trigger SyncToy never works reliably for me either.

So today I've settled on Allway Syc which is free for home use. It's fast, has a clear interface so you know what it is copying/deleting across the synced folders and has an easy built-in scheduler.

Now I feel like my precious photos are being looked after reliably and can sleep a little more soundly.

In Loving Memory

St James Cathedral Church, Toronto, Canada.