Metadataring finished for a bit

This morning I finished writing descriptions for my latest batch of Korea photos, then I checked they were geo-coded properly.

Unfortunately Robogeo wouldn't handle my filenames with foreign characters in them, so I tried to see if there was any other software that could geo-code photos using google earth / maps in a similar way to Robogeo. Doing a quick google, I found a suggestion for Google Picasa: Re: alternative to Robogeo... So I downloaded Picasa to give it a try.

Unfortunately, you can't just drag and drop a bunch of files to Picasa like you can with Robogeo, you need to add the base folder to Picasa's library. After doing that I tried searching for JPEG and TIFF files in Picasa, but it seems that Picasa doesn't support advanced searching.

In Windows you can search for both with a query like .jpg OR .tiff. Advanced tips for searching in Windows.

When I tried the geocode and view in Google Earth options in Picasa, both of them did the same - just displayed thumbnails of all the images in Google Earth. What I wanted to do was to step through the images one by one in the order they were taken, checking that each image was correctly geo-coded. But obviously this isn't an option in Picasa.

So I uninstalled Picasa, and just temporarily renamed the filenames/paths with foreign characters in so I could check them with Robogeo. I did find a few that weren't geo-coded correctly, so I corrected these.

Unfortunately Robogeo doesn't support psd or psb files, so for JPEGs that were produced from a photoshop file. So for these files I had to geocode the JPEG using Robogeo. Then I had to export the XMP from the PSD using Adobe Bridge. Then I had to use ExiftoolGUI to copy the GPS data from the JPEG to the PSD. Then I had to re-import the XMP using Bridge.

The XMP exporting and then importing is because using ExiftoolGUI to write metadata to a file will make Bridge think that the XMP isn't UTF-8 encoded any more (this is a bug in Bridge).

When doing this I also found that some files had mysteriously become marked as 'hidden'. I have 'Show hidden and system files' ticked in Windows Explorer, so I could still see them, but they were at a slightly opacity to show they were hidden files. The only thing I can think that might have done this is Picasa.

Anyway, looking for a way to check how to search for hidden files, both Advanced tips for searching in Windows and Windows Search Advanced Query Syntax didn't seem to offer any way to find only hidden files. Reading this thread: Search for hidden files and folders in Windows 7, one of the commenters said that it is possible using the dir command at the command prompt.

After trying it, I couldn't get it to work properly, so I googled and found some examples with the correct syntax to use: Microsoft DOS dir command. So to search for only hidden files within a directory and all sub-directories, you cd to the directory, then run dir /ah /s

In the afternoon I finished checking the photos' metadata, and started uploading them to the website.

It looked like it was going to be a nice sunset, but I decided not to go out until the nice looking sunset actually started. I was glad I did this as actually a large cloud moved in front of the sun, and there was no sunset to be seen.

For the rest of the afternoon and quite a bit of the evening I was uploading photos to my photo website and working on a couple of articles (from articlesbase.com) for my photography tips website.

In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and Diddle Dude.