Just in case it’s of interest to any current readers of this blog, I’ve created a sub-section where I’m fairly diligently (at least, for now) chronicling our adventures as we re-invent our lives travelling Europe for a few years in a motorhome.
Read about it here
Links for June 3rd through June 18th:
Flickr has a limitation that your photostream is ordered by the date you uploaded your photos, and this order can’t be changed. If you’ve done a big import of photos – say, from iPhoto – then they could show up in your photostream in any order.
There’s been some talk about the issue, with one suggested solution being to manually set the ‘posted’ date of every photo to the ‘taken’ date. A utility exists to do this, but it has some major limitations, including a difficult user interface and limitation that causes the process to fail if you have any photos that were taken before the date you set up your Flickr account.
So, I’ve made a utility specifically for sorting a Flickr photostream. It should be fairly user friendly, and provides the ability to backup and restore your photo metadata, in case you ever want to revert.
Check it out here: SortMyPhotostream
Leave a comment below if it’s useful to you. Continue reading
Flickrpress is a widget to display items from Flickr in the sidebar. This widget supports:
Other features:
Flickrpress uses the excellent phpFlickr library.
See the sidebar and footer of this site for a demo. Continue reading
Links for May 21st through June 2nd:
I just make a happy discovery: Flash stores videos it’s currently playing (eg. from YouTube, Megavideo, etc) within the /private/var/folders/.../ area.
Access it by hitting Cmd-Shift-G in Finder, typing in /private/var/folders and hitting enter, then navigate around until you see something like a TemporaryItems folder – within will be a file called something like FlashTmp0, which is the .flv file.
Copy it somewhere and rename it, and it’ll play in VLC or any other player that supports the format (like Quicktime etc with Perian installed).
Crucially important old growth forests in East Gippsland are, as usual, under threat or already being logged. These forests are habitat to several endangered species, vital carbon banks, contain many several-hundred-year-old trees and represent a valuable tourist attraction. Victorian Premier John Brumby promised that “a Labor Government will immediately protect remaining significant stands of old growth forest currently available for timber harvesting by including them in the National Parks and reserves system.” Despite the promise, bulldozers got to work late last year clear-felling the Brown Mountain forest.
Logging was put on hold for a year after much media attention was drawn to the issue when 300 protesters were arrested and charged with entering the logged area. A side note: $10 million compensation was granted by the Government to the logging groups, who then used the money to build roads into the area, in anticipation of the outcome. Said outcome will be heard soon, but environmental groups are not optimistic about the outcome.
More information at EEG, The Wilderness Society, Greenlivingpedia, …
Mr Brumby,
I write to you to urge you to carefully consider your 2006 election promise to “immediately protect the remaining significant stands of old-growth forest in Victoria“. So far, you have not held this promise, a fact I find deeply unsettling and angering.
I should not have to remind you of the value of the Brown Mountain forests – habitat for threatened species like the Powerful Owl, Spotted-tail Quoll and Long-footed Potoroo; critical carbon banks; biodiversity hot spots and with enormous potential for tourism.
These forests, and other critical old-growth forests in Victoria, must be protected.
With old growth forests on Brown Mountain hanging in the balance, I urge you to hold to your promises now. After two and a half years, you must show leadership and honour your Government’s commitment.
Regards,
Michael Tyson
Update: Andrew made a better suggestion in the comments below that I hadn’t thought of: De-authorise iPhoto from your Flickr account, then just delete the Flickr albums in iPhoto. Thanks, Andrew!
iPhoto ‘09 introduced Flickr support, so that you can post photos and albums to your Flickr account. Unfortunately for some, it has some issues: A tendency to perform mass-deletions on uploaded photosets after the initial upload. For example, for me, having uploaded several hundred images, iPhoto has deleted almost all of them on two separate occasions, requiring the photosets to be constructed from scratch.
For those who were considering using Flickr from iPhoto, don’t, and save yourself the hassle (use FlickrExport instead). For those who have and are seeking a remedy to keep iPhoto away from Flickr, read on.
I encountered the uncomfortable scenario where iPhoto had forgotten about three quarters of the images in the uploaded photosets, and upon launch, looked like it was going to delete the remainder from my Flickr account. Rather than let this happen, I force quit iPhoto, and performed the following steps to force iPhoto to forget about my Flickr account. This is a very complicated process, not for the faint of heart, but it was necessary for me to save my Flickr account:
AlbumData.xml and AlbumData2.xml:
<dict> and </dict>. There will be one of these dict structures for every photosetiPhotoMain.db within the ‘iPhoto Library’ package. To access the file, I had to copy it to my Desktop first, then open it there (back it up first).
SqPublishedAlbum table to see the contents. This lists all of the published albums, including Flickr, Facebook, etc. Find the entries with a publishedURL at flickr.com, and delete them. In Froq, I had to take note of their primary key values, and manually execute an SQL query (DELETE FROM SqPublishedAlbum WHERE primaryKey = 12345). Remember those primary key values, because you’ll need them.SqAlbum table, and delete the albums with the same primary key values – if you used an SQL query as above, you can just re-use the same query but change the table name to SqAlbum.AlbumsPhotosJoin table – in this case, you’ll need to delete entries with the sqAlbum field values matching the prior primarykey values. Something like DELETE FROM AlbumsPhotosJoin WHERE sqAlbum = 12345 will do it.iPhotoAux.db, after backing it up
SqAlbumSubclasses table. Something like: DELETE FROM SqAlbumSubclasses WHERE primaryKey = 12345.That’s it! Now, after starting iPhoto, the Flickr albums should be gone, safe at last. FlickrExport is a £12 plugin that provides better, more reliable functionality than iPhoto ‘09.
