Recovering from iPhoto '11

I spent 48 hours in recovering from the mess made by iPhoto '11. If you are suffering from the upgrade, you are welcome to try the remedies I used.

iPhoto 11 sucks - do not upgrade!

I made a big mistake last week. I hastily upgraded to iLife '11. Who wouldn't be attracted by Apple's slick marketing? Apple used to design applications keeping the end user in mind. Clearly that is not the case anymore. Apple now designs applications to throw in more features and releases applications without any proper testing. Net result - iLife 11 is a SHODDY JOB. This is the clumsiest interface that I've ever seen.

I shall not even begin to describe the nightmare I'm facing. To my dismay, my Time Machine backup disk failed, so I don't have a proper backup and can't roll back to iPhoto '09 easily. I am faced with a terrible task of having to downgrade my iPhoto library almost manually, since I clearly cannot live with iPhoto '11.

So dear friends and readers, sit out on this version of iLife and iPhoto '11. It is definitely not worth it. Let Steve Jobs get back to the bloody Mac and get his act together. For now, they seem to be just an iGadget company.

Flickr Set Manager

From time to time, I stumble across something innovative and useful. My recent find was Flickr Set Manager from dopiaza.org. This is something Flickr should have implemented on their own. I have a feeling that Flickr's gone a bit lazy even though they are making money by charging $25 a year for their pro services.

Anyway, back to Flickr Set Manager. FSM is something like "smart sets" for your photos. FSM manages your sets on a daily basis. You can choose the kind of pictures to be included in your sets based on keywords, interestingness, location, tags, text, etc.

I use it for maintaining a set of my most "interesting" photos. I highly recommend this for all Flickr users.

Looking for details? Get the FAQs :)

Preview of Flickr Uploadr 3.3 for Mac OS X

A couple of weeks ago, I posted my woes about the current Flickr Uploader (v 3.2.1) and ended up patching it myself. Now, there's a new better maintained version already in Flickr's App Garden. I wish the Flickr staff would test it and make it an official version.

Direct download link here.

Application page here.

Update: I tried it out and it works very well! I love the photo zoom slider feature on it.

Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X - fixed

I upload all my Flickr photos using Flickr Uploadr for the Mac v3.2.1. Things had been working fine until two days ago. On September 18th, Flickr Uploadr crashed upon launch. Every time I tried to launch it, it would crash within five seconds. I use Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4. I am pretty sure that it wasn't the software update that broke it, but something else.

I tried all the usual "software first-aid". Delete preferences, caches, application support settings. Re-install the application. Nothing worked. In fact, Flickr Uploadr would crash even before it signed into Flickr!

I wasted almost 12 hours over a period of two days trying to figure out how to fix things. Flickr Uploadr is Flickr's recommended desktop uploader of choice. However, they haven't updated the tool since June 2009. The only documentation that exists is in form of users pouring their woes out on Flickr forums. I loathe forums. One has to sift through piles of clueless rubbish to actually figure out what the proper issue is. And then, there's a 5% chance that the forum will have a proper solution in it.

Here is a forum thread where other users have complained about the same problem.

Flickr staff have washed their hands off the project with the following statement:

The desktop Uploadr is not in active development at this time, so it might be best to try one of the 3rd party applications in the App Garden if you would prefer to use a desktop client rather than our web uploaders

I decided to look under the hood and try to fix things myself. After some debugging, I realised that the component at fault was XULrunner - a framework upon which Flickr Uploadr is built. I then replaced the XULrunner framework with the latest version (v1.9.2 as of this writing).

And to help out Mac users in the Flickr community who are heavily dependent upon Flickr Uploadr, I have created a ZIP file of my "stabililzed" Flickr Uploadr which can be downloaded from:

http://saumil.net/howto/flickruploadr/Flickr_Uploadr_saumil19092010.zip

Unzip the file and copy the Flickr Uploadr App into your Applications Folder. Hopefully, it should work. Note - this application has only been tested on my Mac (Mac OS X 10.6.4 - Intel). I would appreciate it if you can confirm whether this works or not.

iPhoto Flickr and Geo-location

Today I tried using iPhoto 09's built in Flickr upload feature. Setup was easy. I had to add iPhoto as a trusted application in my Flickr account, which was automatically prompted for when I enabled the Flickr upload feature.

After uploading my first set of photos, I noticed that the geographic location data associated with the pictures didn't make it to Flickr. Upon searching, I found that I needed to enable Flickr to "Automagically import GPS information as geo data" in my account settings. Once that was done, Flickr picked up iPhoto's location data from the pictures.

Firefox 3.5/3.6 Color management - a step backwards

For whatever stupid reason, Firefox 3.5 and the upcoming 3.6 beta have decided to drop proper ICC4 colour management in their rendering engines. Firefox 3.5 only supports ICC2, and apparently, ICC4 support is still missing from Firefox 3.6.

So there we are, back to mismatched colours, back to the dull shades, back to what IE used to show. I personally have no idea why the "geniuses" at Mozilla decided to take this step backwards, and I don't think they're going to do anything about it either. Their reason states that the new colour management engine - QCMS - doesn't support ICC4 yet. Sadly, the thread states that it is "solved and closed". Far from it. So, we shall have to wait until the QCMS engine matures to something that was working quite well for the past few years.