Cameraid User's Guide

Version 1.1.4

1999-12-26

Copyright ©1998-1999 Juri Munkki
All rights reserved

Contents


System Requirements

Cameraid officially requires:

  • A Macintosh with a 68020 or newer processor (the program also runs native on PowerPC processors)
  • QuickTime (any version)
  • System 7 or newer
  • At least 2MB of available RAM

The following are recommended

  • PowerPC 604 or better for enhancing large images
  • At least 8-12MB of free RAM, preferably more, for enhancing images
  • System 8.0 or later (System 7 Finder drag and drop may not function perfectly.)

You can:

  • run on old PowerBooks, such as the PowerBook 140 (the PowerBook 100 is not and will not be supported).
  • run Cameraid with just 1MB of free RAM, but images may not display properly and most batch processing commands are likely to fail.
  • use Cameraid to download photos even if you don't have quicktime - just disable everything related to viewing images.

 


Shareware Notice

Cameraid will always be fully functional even if you never register it. As an incentive for users to register, there are certain delays and reminders built into Cameraid. These delays become longer and more frequent as you use Cameraid. To completely eliminate the delays and reminders, you need to pay the shareware registration fee and enter a special unlock code into the registration window in Cameraid. (The registration window is opened from the File menu.)

Each and every shareware payment is important to me. $15 is a very small amount for a program like this, but with enough registrations, registrations will allow me to take more time off my main job to enhance Cameraid. If you like Cameraid, register it. Today.

Single user licenses cost $15 per user

A Site License costs $250 and covers all locations for your organization within a 160 kilometer radius of your site (100 miles). One big advantage of a Site License is that you do not need to keep track of how many people at your site are using the software.

A World-Wide License costs $1500 and it covers all locations for your organization on the planet earth.

For Site & World-Wide licenses, registration is based on your company name, so please include it with the order.

Paying for Cameraid is fairly simple. Open the Register program that accompanies Cameraid. Enter your name, your email address, and the number of single user licenses you desire for each program you wish to purchase (or Site or Word-Wide licenses).

Save or Copy or Print the data from the Register program and send the data and payment to Kagi. More specifics on the Register program to follow. Kagi handles my payment processing.

If paying with Credit Card or First Virtual, you can email or fax the data to Kagi. Their email address is sales@Kagi.com and their fax number is +1 510 652-6589. You can either Copy the data from Register and paste into the body of an email message or you can Save the data to a file and you can attach that file to an email message. There is no need to compress the data file, it's already pretty small. If you have a fax modem, just Print the data to the Kagi fax number.

Payments sent via email are processed within 3 to 4 days. You will receive an email acknowledgement when it is processed. Payments sent via fax take up to 10 days and if you provide a correct internet email address you will receive an email acknowledgement.

Secure online registrations can be made at: http://order.Kagi.com/?6R5

If you are paying with Cash or USD Check you should print the data using the Register application and send it to the address shown on the form, which is:

Kagi
1442-A Walnut Street #392-6R5C
Berkeley, California 94709-1405
USA

You can pay with a wide variety of cash from different countries but at present if you pay via check, it must be a check drawn in US Dollars. Kagi cannot accept checks in other currencies, the conversion rate for non-USD checks is around USD 15 per check and that is just not practical.

If you have a purchasing department, you can enter all the data into the Register program and then select Invoice as your payment method. Print three copies of the form and send it to your accounts payable people. You might want to highlight the line that mentions that they must include a copy of the form with their payment.

Kagi can not invoice your company, you need to act on my behalf and generate the invoice and handle all the paperwork on your end.

Please do not fax or email payment forms that indicate Cash, Check or Invoice as the payment method. As far as we know, there is still no technology to transfer physical objects via fax or email and without the payment, the form cannot be processed.

Payments send via postal mail take time to reach Kagi and then up to 10 days for processing. Again, if you include a correct email address, you will hear from Kagi when the form is processed.

Unlock Codes

Cameraid has a registration code scheme and when you pay, we tell you how to indicate to Cameraid that you have paid the registration fee. When you make an online payment, the code will be included in the registration E-mail you receive from Kagi. (It's near the end of the message)

For single user licenses, the code is based on your name. Please make it very clear what the licensee name(s) for the program should be.

For site and world-wide licenses, the code is based on your company name.

Important note: The registration system requires that the name entered have at least five (5) Roman alphabet letters (a-z). If your name is shorter than this, add a Mr. or Mrs. or whatever is appropriate for your country to make the name long enough.

If you do not have an email address, please enter your complete postal address and please remember, we do not know what country you live in so please enter that into the postal address also.

If you do not have an email address you should consider selecting the Postcard Receipt so that Kagi can inform you of your registration code. Kagi transmits the registration codes via email and paid postcard receipt only.


Support

The Cameraid home page is at:

http://www.cameraid.com/

You can always download the latest publicly available version of Cameraid from that page. Technical support for Cameraid is available by E-mail from cameraid@Kagi.com. Please read the Cameraid FAQ web page before you send in questions. Remember though that you are not dealing with a company, but an individual person. I will often provide better and faster support than companies do, but the time to do so comes out of my personal free time.

Comments and requests are always welcome, but please don't try to "blackmail" me by saying that you will not registered unless I implement this and that. With $15, the most you can expect to do is cast your vote.

If your company makes a digital camera product and you are looking for Macintosh software to bundle with the camera, please contact me. I'm sure we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement.


Key Ideas

I realize that some people hate reading manuals. Ideally you don't need a manual to operate a program and make the most out of it. Unfortunately Cameraid is not ideal and from correspondence with users and beta testers, I can see that most users only tap a small portion of the program's power and features.

Here's a list of important things to remember even if you decide not to read the whole manual:

  • Downloads from digital cameras are easy. Read the manual if you have a problem or you want to learn some tricks, but otherwise you can just skip the manual and plunge right ahead and try it. Just remember that there's a lot more to Cameraid than just downloading photos from a camera.
  • The viewer window is the central part of Cameraid. Think of it as a slide projection screen that only shows one photo at a time. You can usually have hundreds of images open before you run out of memory. Therein lies the power and speed of the Cameraid viewer.
  • Keyboard shortcuts are an important part of operating the viewer. There's a quick reference sheet in the help menu. The left and right arrow keys are the most important keys.
  • The shortcuts menu is way cool and easy to use, but you really should read the manual to see how it works. To quote a beta tester: "Every application should have this feature."
  • Use drag and drop to open all the images in a folder or a disk. You can drag onto Cameraid's program icon (assuming your desktop file is up to date) and directly onto the viewer window.
  • It's possible to drag more than one file at a time from the viewer window to other applications (like the Finder). Shift and control keys are used to modify many operations to operate on multiple files. Read the manual to find out exactly how it's done - it's not obvious.
  • At this writing, Cameraid is the only Macintosh program to offer lossless JPEG transforms. It's the best way to rotate digital photographs to their correct orientation.
  • The batch processor is extremely powerful, but you have to understand the viewer to make full use of it. There are dozens of options and parameters, but you only need to manipulate a few at a time. Use balloon help to figure out what they do.

When all else fails, read the manual, then read the FAQ. If that fails, E-mail cameraid@Kagi.com for help.


Downloading Photos from Digital Cameras

First, check to see if your camera is supported by Cameraid. The list is long, but it doesn't cover all manufacturers and models:

  • Agfa ePhoto cameras (not compatible with the latest low end cameras that come with Windows-only software)
  • Apple Quicktake 200
  • Epson digital cameras
  • Fujifilm digital cameras
  • Leica Digilux
  • Nikon Coolpix (at least models 700, 800, 880, 900, 950 and 990, maybe others)
  • Olympus digital cameras
  • Polaroid digital cameras (at least model 640)
  • Sanyo digital cameras
  • Toshiba digital cameras

If your camera is not supported, but you suspect that it might be compatible with one of the above cameras, you can try the Fujifilm and Olympus settings, but if you do so, please remember that you are doing it at your own risk.

If your camera is on the list above, but doesn't work with Cameraid, check out the troubleshooting list later in this section. I have received some scattered reports from users who have problems with cameras that are known to be compatible with Cameraid. These are isolated cases and it's hard to predict if your camera is one of them (try Cameraid before you buy). The most common type is the Apple QuickTake 200 (I think I have less than half a dozen reports of QT200s not working with Cameraid). Most problems are related to the computer hardware and system software.

To download photos from the camera, select the "Camera Control" item from the Digicam menu. This will open the "Digital Camera Control" window.

Connection and Protocol Settings

Use the pop up menus to select the camera type, serial port and connection speed. Some of the ports may be in use by other software, such as LocalTalk, printer drivers, modems etc. You should make sure that the port you select has the camera connected and is not in use by other programs. Cameraid will give you an error message when you try to start to download when the port is already in use by another program.

If you are running out of serial ports and your Macintosh has PCI card slots available, you can add more serial ports by adding a card. Keyspan (http:www.keyspan.com) makes such cards and Cameraid has been carefully designed and tested so that it works with their cards and software.

The serial port speed can be up to 230 400 bits per second.

Note:only Macs with so-called DMA serial ports will allow speeds higher than 57600 bits per second. Cameraid will detect if the port supports the speed and lower the speed if necessary, so in practice the only thing you have to worry about is what speeds your camera will support. On many of these older Macs with two serial ports, the modem port works far more reliably at higher speeds.

As of this writing, most Fujifilm, Toshiba and Leica cameras and the Apple Quicktake 200 only support speeds up to 57600 bits per second. Cameraid will ask the camera what speeds it can support and drop to a lower speed automatically in some cases, but for at least some cameras, the camera itself will return incorrect information, so you may have to manually change the speed to 57600.

Of the other brands, many cameras that were introduced before 1998 will operate at only 115200 bits per second. You will have to adjust the speed manually.

Note: The Nikon Coolpix 900 is capable of operating at 921600 bits per second, but Cameraid doesn't yet support this speed. Use 230400 bits per second with Cameraid instead or the Nikon software, if it works faster for you. The Nikon software will revert to 57600 bits per second on many machines, so Cameraid is in many cases much faster.

USB serial adapters from Keyspan (http:www.keyspan.com) and Entrega (http://www.entrega.com) are limited to 115200 bits per second. There's also a product called uConnect that supports speeds up to 230 kbps and it's only slightly more expensive than the two others. If you have USB and your camera uses removable memory cards, a memory card reader might be a good investment.

Speeds lower than 57600 shouldn't normally be needed. If your cable is extremely long or of bad quality, a lower speed may work more reliably.

TIFF Files

Starting from version Cameraid 1.1.3 supports downloading TIFF files. Note that Cameraid needs to store a complete copy of the file in RAM before it is written to disk (my apologies for that, but there are good technical reasons for this), so make sure there's enough RAM either within Cameraid or in the free system memory (Largest Unused Block in Finder) to download a complete TIFF file. If Cameraid runs out of memory in the middle of a download, it will abort the download.

Download Options

The "Send Files to Viewer" option means that as each image file is received, it is also opened in the Cameraid viewer window. New files are appended to the end of the list of open images.

If you have the "Send Files to Viewer" option selected, you can also select the "Automatic Slide Show" option. This will show each new image file in the viewer window as it is received, thus giving you an automatic slide show of the images as soon as they have been received.

Most cameras time-stamp their photos. The "Set File Dates" option will use this time stamp (if it exists and you had the internal camera clock set) to set the creation and modification dates of the files to the actual time when the photo was taken.

You have to decide on a file naming scheme before you start the download. At its simplest, you just enter the start of the file name to Cameraid and Cameraid automatically adds numbers to that name to distinguish the files. The name can also be an advanced pattern, which allows you to use the photo time stamp as part of the file name. See the section on batch file renaming to see how patterns are used.

Downloading & Troubleshooting

Click on the "Start Download" button to download all the photos from the camera. The button will change to "Abort Download". Note that you can continue working on your computer while the download is progressing. Just leave Cameraid running and your photos will download in the background.

The status area will show you how the download is progressing. If it stops at "waking up camera", you should check the cables and connections and make sure the settings are correct. Most cameras also have to be turned on to be able to respond to the computer.

Once the download starts, you will be prompted for a location for the photos. All the images will be stored in the same folder. Cameraid will never overwrite an old file, so if you want, you can use the same folder over and over again and just add photos there. (Note that the Finder may become slower if you store a lot of files into a single folder.)

Note: your computer may need the SerialDMA update from Apple Computer to be able to connect to the digital camera. A quote from the read me file for serial DMA 2.1: "SerialDMA 2.1 extension works with U.S. English Mac OS 7.6.1, 8.0, or 8.1, and any of the following Mac OS computers: Power Macintosh 4400,Power Macintosh 5500, Power Macintosh 6500, Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, Power Macintosh 7220, Power Macintosh G3, PowerBook 2400,PowerBook 3400, PowerBook G3, or PowerBook G3 Series."

If you are not experiencing any problems even though you have one of the above machines (like me), you do not necessarily need to install the update. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Troubleshooting Checklist:

  1. Make sure the camera is turned on and has power (good batteries).
  2. Verify that the cable is firmly connected at both ends.
  3. Verify that the serial port you selected in Cameraid matches the physical connection.
  4. If communications doesn't work at 230 400 bps, try 57 600 bps.
  5. With Keyspan cards, use the default buffer settings for the serial port - they work best.
  6. Your machine may need the SerialDMA update (applies only to built-in Apple serial ports on certain PowerPC machines).
  7. If you have problems using the printer port, try the modem port intead - it's often more reliable at high speeds.
  8. If you are using USB, try connecting the serial port adapter directly to the computer instead of going through a hub (such as the keyboard on an iMac).
  9. If all else fails, consider getting a memory card reader (see below). Actually, considering the advantages that card readers offer, consider getting one even if the serial port downloads work fine.
  10. Some cameras use folders on the memory card for photos. Cameraid 1.1.4 (this will change in version 1.2) can only see one folder at a time. To download all the photos from the camera, use the camera user interface to delete each folder after the download. If a folder is empty, Cameraid will see an empty camera unless that folder is completely removed. It's probably best not to use camera folders if Cameraid is used for downloads.
  11. Sometimes Nikon Coolpix 950 cameras may appear to lock up after a download. I think this might be related to leaving the camera on after a download. I can't reproduce this problem all the time, but it's pretty easy to reset the camera by opening the battery compartment and then closing it again.


Memory Card Readers

The ultimate peripheral for digital camera users is a memory card reader.

Memory cards are getting larger, but serial ports aren't getting any faster, so download times are growing longer and longer. Fortunately Cameraid serial downloads operate in the background, so they will at least not tie up your computer.

Memory cards readers are possibly up to 100 times faster than the serial port alone (YMMV). Instead of minutes, the time to copy images from the card is reduced to mere seconds (in most cases under a minute).

Cameraid supports most memory card readers through a set of items in the Shortcuts menu. To be compatible with Cameraid, the memory card reader has to be able to mount the card as a "disk drive" on the desktop.

Memory card readers are an evolving technology. It's hard to keep up with the market in a manual like this, so remember that the information presented here might be out of date or incorrect when you read it. This part of the manual was written in early August 1999.

At this writing, the only Mac-compatible reader that is incompatible with Cameraid is the FlashPath (floppy disk adapter) - you can use it, but you have to use the software that came with the adapter.

Note: If your camera doesn't have removable memory cards, you can't use a memory card reader to read the photos.

USB

For machines without serial ports, USB card readers are an excellent choice.

If your camera uses CompactFlash memory cards, the SanDisk ImageMate USB is available for around $50. Check services such as www.shopper.com for latest prices.

For SmartMedia, the prices seem a bit higher. Possibilities include the Newer Tech uFlash SM and the Hagiwara Flashgate from www.epc-online.com.

There is a PC-card reader from Ariston, but it's relatively expensive (about $145 from www.outpost.com).

The PC-card reader is also probably your only choice if you have a camera that uses the Sony Memory Stick. You'll need an adapter to fit the memory sticks into a PC-card slot.

Microtech's USB Cameramate unfortunately remains vaporware as of this writing, but it promises support for SmartMedia and CompactFlash (including the new CF II standard!), which would make it a good choice. As of this writing, no one seems to have it in stock.

SCSI

For machines with SCSI ports, the Minolta CD-10 is a good choice. I think the product itself has been discontinued, but it's still sold (MacZone and www.sparco.com to mention just two online stores that have it - click here for others) and a good bargain, if you don't have USB. Note that it's a PC-card reader, so you'll need adapters for smaller memory cards. This is in addition to the cost fo the reader itself (add at least about $10 for CompactFlash and about $50 for SmartMedia). It comes with a cable, but depending on your configuration, you may need an additional cable.

PowerBooks

Most recent PowerBooks already have PC-card (or PCMCIA) slots, so all you need is an adapter for the type of media that you use. CompactFlash adapters are very simple and cost onl y around $10 while SmartMedia adapters are more complicated and usually cost around $50. No driver software is needed - just insert the card and it should work OK. For this reason, most new PowerBooks are excellent companions to Digital Cameras.

The iBook

The iBook doesn't have PC-card slots, so refer to the USB section above.

Operation

When you insert the card into the reader, you can manipulate the photos just as if they were on hard disk. You could use the Finder to copy the files, but to make the card useable again, you need to delete the files. Dragging them to the trash isn't enough - you have to empty the trash as well or they will still take space on the card!

With Cameraid, you can use the three supplied shortcuts to make it easier to work with memory cards.

  1. Start cameraid and insert the memory card (in whatever order you like).
  2. If you have the viewer window open, close it now so that no images are open.
  3. Select the "Open Images on Untitled" shortcut (or hit Command-U).
  4. The last image should now appear in the viewer (and the others are there too, if you want to browse them)
  5. Select "Copy and Delete Images" from the menu and specify a target folder for the copies. Cameraid will copy the images one by one and delete images it has successfully copied from the memory card.
  6. Use either the Finder or the shortcut "Put Away Untitled" to eject the memory card (keyboard shortcut Command-Y).

If you need to copy several memory cards worth of images, go back to step 1. Remember to close the viewer window before you open the images from the card: if you don't, you'll end up copying the same images over and over (no harm done, except it takes a bit of time to do the copy).

If you want to rotate the images using the lossless JPEG tranforms, you should be able to do so at any stage. I recommed doing it after step 5 so that the rotated images are never stored on the memory card.

Cameraid will automatically rename the images when it copies them. If you want to add icons or previews, use another batch processor shortcut to do so after you have copied the images.

The memory card should be empty and ready for use after you eject it. It's still a good idea to reformat the card in the camera every now and then. (If you have any Digita scripts on the card, remember that formatting the card will delete them - Cameraid will not touch them.) It is my experience that cameras may not like the cards after they have been formatted on a Mac (even if you used the MS/PC-DOS format).

Read the sections on batch processors and shortcuts to learn how to learn how to make changes to these shortcuts.


Viewing Images

Have you ever been in a situation where you have a hundred images and you need to select a few good ones for a project? Or have you ever run out of disk space and decided that you should probably delete some of the less brilliant photos in your collection? That's exactly what the viewer in Cameraid was written for.

Think of a slide projector: it takes a cassette loaded with cartridges and shows them on a screen one by one. That's how Cameraid works, except that the "cassette" can hold as many viewers as memory allows.

Opening Images

When you open an image file or drop one onto the Cameraid icon or viewer window, that file is added to the list of images. If you drop a whole folder or disk full of images into Cameraid, all the enclosed images will be added to the list.

Note: if you drag files from "Find File", you can't drag them directly to the Cameraid viewer window, but have to drag them to the Cameraid program icon instead. I consider this to be a bug in "Find File", even though I could probably program around it in Cameraid. I'm waiting for Apple to eventually fix Find File...it's long overdue.

Selecting Images

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Here's the part of Cameraid that is probably the toughest to grasp, if you haven't read the manual.

Below is a screen snapshot of the Cameraid viewer window. The main area usually displays the image or a thumbnail view of it (in this case, my dog, Otto).

The top margin shows the size (in kilobytes), type (usually either JPEG or PICT) and name of the file (in this case 1006-13.37. The number on the right is the file size.

The number in the middle (zero) indicates the grade that you have given this image. I call this number the grade, because it's a little bit like a school grade. Anything less than zero belongs to one group (negative grades) and anything greater than or equal to zero belongs in the other (positive grades). You usually change the grade by using the + and - keys. Try it to get a feel of how it works.

The idea is that you can go through your images and give them grades and then use the grades to decide what to do with the images.

The two numbers at the right margin show the number of the current image and the total number of files that are open in the viewer.

Useful tip: if you click on the top margin with the mouse, Cameraid will ask the Finder to reveal the file. If you are wondering where a certain file is located, clicking on the top margin is usually the fastest way to find out.

Let's say you have 100 images to start with and you can only print up to 20 of them. With Cameraid, you can go through the images and each time you see one that you don't like, you can hit the minus (or arrow down) key to give it a negative grade. Once you have gone through all your images, you can remove the negative scores and see how many are left.

The bottom margin is used to display photo info. Most digital cameras store some kind of information about the photo in the JPEG file. The above example is from an Agfa ePhoto 1680, but it's very similar to what you would see displayed from many other digital cameras. In this case, you can see the exposure time (1/90 seconds), aperture (F8.0), zoom setting (x2.0), JPEG quality setting and the date and time when the photo was taken. The window isn't quite wide enough to show my full E-mail address (many cameras allow you to customize this string) or the camera firmware version numbers. The information shown depends a lot on the camera that was used to take the photo.

The scroll bar does not scroll the image. In fact, there's no way in Cameraid to scroll the images: they are always centered in the window. The scroll bar selects the currently displayed image from all the open files.

You can use the scroll bar and menu commands to navigate and use the viewer, but in most cases it's much easier to use the keyboard shortcuts. This may sound like something from pre-Macintosh computers, but in fact there's something to be said about simple, single-key commands when you want to accomplish something quickly. Here's a list of shortcuts (the same window can be opened from the Help menu in Cameraid):

The keys were chosen so that you can use the numeric keypad to browse the images and increase and decrease the grades. The enter key is also conveniently located so that you can switch between thumbnail view and full image view. Alternatively, you can use the arrow keys.

To quickly rename a single file, hit the R key. If you just want to add something to the file name, you can use the right arrow key to get to the end of the old name, then type the new name and enter to make the change.

Drag and Drop

If you click and drag anywhere in the image area (even the white space around the image), you'll notice that a gray circle can be dragged around. This circle represents the image file and you can drag it anywhere just as if you were dragging a file icon in the Finder.

The control and shift keys on the keyboard are used to select more than one file at a time for dragging. The control key corresponds to all images with negative grades and the shift key is used for all the others. This means that if you simply want to move all the files into a single folder, hold down control and shift and drag from the image viewer window to the folder you want.

If you haven't touched the grades (they start out at zero), holding down shift when starting the drag will cause all the files to be dragged (since they all have zero grades).

The shape being dragged gives you information on what is being dragged. A large circle means that all the files are being dragged (control+shift held down). A square with a plus sign in the middle means that files with grades greater or equal to zero are being dragged. Similarly a square with a minus sign in the middle means that files with negative grades are being dragged. If nothing happens when you shift- or control-drag, there probably aren't any files with suitable grades. A small shape indicates that only one file is affected while a larger shape means that more than one file will be dragged.

If some of the files have identical names and you try to drop them into the same folder, the Finder will be unable to complete the operation. You'll get an error message and nothing will be done. The batch processor in Cameraid can be used to move or copy files into the same folder without having to worry about naming conflicts.

The same keys (control and shift) are also used in conjunction with JPEG transforms, shortcuts and (optionally) the batch processor.

Saving Collections

The collection of open files can be saved into a document. A collection document will contain aliases (or links) to the files, so it takes very little space and can often find the files even if they are moved. Opening a collection will add all the files in that saved collection to the viewer. For instance, you can combine two collections by opening them both. Grades are saved with the collection.


Rotating and Transforming JPEG Files Losslessly

JPEG is what is called a "lossy" compression method. This means that when you compress an image with the JPEG method and then open that file again, you'll almost never get the same image back again. If a file is opened and saved enough times, the changes begin to accumulate and can visibly degrade the quality of the file.

It is possible to perform some limited operations on JPEG images without degrading the image quality. Cameraid incorporates special program code from the Independent JPEG group. This code allows you to rotate and mirror JPEG images in a way that preserves image quality.

The operations are also reversible. This means that if you rotate an image clockwise, a counterclockwise rotation will restore the image to what it was.

Note that the file size will usually change a bit. JPEG compression is done in two steps and the second (Huffman compression) step allows for some optimization to be done without degrading image quality. Cameraid will also perform this optimization on transformed images. (Or you can perform the optimization transform, which will not change the image pixels in any way, but will try to make the file a bit smaller.)

As mentioned in the drag and drop section of the manual, the shift and control keys can be used to apply the transforms to more than one image at a time. This is useful if you want to save a few KB of disk space and optimize the compression of many image files in one operation.

Caveat: Cameraid will try to perform JPEG transforms on PICT files as well. If the PICT files is not compressed with JPEG or JPEG was used in strips (PhotoShop tends to do this), the operation will usually fail and Cameraid will leave the file unchanged. Under some conditions, Cameraid may fail to notice that the file contained more than a single JPEG compressed image and save the transformed JPEG and overwrite the original image. For this reason, if you plan on transforming PICT, make sure you have a backup copy to avoid losing data.

Caveat: JPEG compression is done using 8x8 pixel blocks. If the image dimensions are not a multiple of 8, some incomplete blocks are used at the right and bottom edges of the image. Some of the transforms will be unable to operate perfectly on files like that. Fortunately, the imperfections were designed so that most of the image is transformed correctly and if the inverse transform is performed, the original image is restored without loss. All known raw digital camera image JPEG files have dimensions that are multiples of 8 and will transform perfectly. You'll usually only have trouble with cropped or scaled digital photos. You may also notice this when a JFIF preview thumbnail is rotated.

Caveat: JPEG transforms require a lot of temporary memory to store the intermediate stages of the operation. Cameraid can use application memory, system memory and even hard disk space to store the intermediate data, but if the disk is used, you should expect that the operation can take a very long time (go take a coffee break or even have lunch while the computer is crunching). Megapixel class images (about 1280x960) will usually require about 6-8MB of free memory.


Customizing Cameraid

Creating And Using Shortcuts

The shortcuts menu is a bit like the Apple menu, but it's specific to the Cameraid application.

To add items to the Shortcuts menu in Cameraid, make sure there's a folder called "Shortcuts" in the same folder with the Cameraid application and either place an alias to the item or the original item itself in that folder.

The best way to learn how to use shortcuts is to try it out and see how it works. The main thing to remember is that Cameraid only scans the folder when it is starting up, so if you modify the folder while Cameraid is running, you have to quit and relaunch cameraid to see the changes.

The rest of this section gives an accurate description of how shortcuts work. If you don't like overly technical text, you may want to skip the whole thing and just go ahead and use the shortcuts folder and menu.

Here's how various items affect the shortcuts menu:

  • Folders will not appear on the menu, but any items in the folders will be treated as if they were in the shortcuts folder itself and separate with gray lines from other items. In other words, use folders to group files similar items together.
  • Aliases to folders will be added directly to the menu, regardless of the contents of the original folder. When you select a folder alias from the Shortcuts menu, Cameraid will behave as if you had dropped that folder onto the Cameraid program icon: all the PICT and JPEG image files in it will be opened.
  • For all other items, the items are added to the menu and aliases behave just like the original item when that item is selected from the menu:
  • Application items can behave in several different ways, but in general the application will be launched and can open files from the viewer.
  • PICT and JPEG files are opened into the Cameraid viewer when the menu item is selected..
  • Batch processor files will either be opened or executed immediately without showing the settings window first. What happens depends on the "Execute Immediately from Shortcuts Menu" setting on the Advanced panel of the batch processor document.
  • Other files will behave as if they had been double-clicked in the Finder.

Here's what happens when you select an application item from the shortcuts menu:

  1. If the application isn't running, it will be launched.
  2. If the viewer window isn't the front window, no files will be opened by the application.
  3. If the shift key is held down when you pull down the menu, files with grades greater or equal to zero will be sent to the application. The application will open them, if it can.
  4. If the control key is held down, files with grades less than zero will be sent to the application. (Note that you can hold down both shift and control to open all the files regardless of their grade).
  5. If neither the shift or control key is held down, the currently visible image file will be sent to the application.

Note that applescripts are also applications, so if you are good at scripting, you can easily enhance Cameraid with your own scripts. An Applescript called "Trash Photos/6" is provided in the "Extras" folder. This AppleScript will move the files given to it into the trash. It's works better than dragging the same files into the trash, because it can deal with multiple files that have the same filename. Move it into the Shortcuts folder and restart Cameraid to use it as a shortcut.

Note: Applications do not unfortunately always come to the front when you first launch them. I haven't been able to get around this behavior. Once launched, applications will come to the front when you select the shortcut menu item for the application or for a document that belongs to that application.

Special Characters in the Shortcuts Folder

The Macintosh menu manager can interpret certain characters in the filenames to add keyboard shortcuts to the menu items and to modify the appearance of the items. If you end the file name with a slash and a single character, that character will become the keyboard shortcut for the menu item. You should avoid keys that already have a meaning (cmd-O, cmd-S, cmd-Q, etc.) and it may not be possible to use characters that require the option or control key to be held down.

If the file name contains an opening parenthesis, it will be displayed in gray and you will not be able to select it from the menu. This is useful if you just want to add some text to the menu (such as a warning before items that could potentially be dangerous items). There are many more (less useful) special characters. To learn more, consult the menu manager chapter of Inside Macintosh (available on www.apple.com).

Examples:

  • An alias of JPEGView named JPEGView/J would add a shortcut for JPEGView. You can view an image full screen in JPEGView if you hit command-J from the Cameraid viewer. You can open all ³0 grade images using command-shift-J. The control key can be used (to select negative grades.
  • Similarly, an item named PhotoShop/P might be used to launch PhotoShop.
  • An alias to your "photos" folder will allow you to open all your photos with a single menu command.
  • You can open Cameraid documentation directly from the Shortcuts menu, because aliases to the documentation files have been placed in the shortcuts folder.

Customizing Cameraid Resources

You can customize Cameraid by placing a "Cameraid Resources" file in the same folder as Cameraid. It will override resources in the Cameraid application. This is useful if you have changed any resources in Cameraid (like the template for custom photo icons) and want to keep those modifications separate from Cameraid itself.

There's a sample "Cameraid Resources" file in the "Extras" folder. Move it into the same folder with Cameraid and restart Cameraid to use it. You have to quit Cameraid if you wish to edit or add resources within this file.


Batch Processing Images

The batch processor window may seem a bit intimidating, but it gives you several very powerful tools for working with your image files and enhancing them.

Once you come up with a set of useful settings, you should probably save it for later use. If the command is used frequently, then the shortcuts folder is probably the best place for storing the batch processor settings file. In fact, Cameraid comes with a number of useful preset files.

Note: The batch processing window has help balloon available. Just turn on the balloon help from the help menu and move the mouse over the item you are interested in.

Note: You should probably experiment with the settings while you are reading this section. The best way to do so is to copy a few files so that you can play with them without having to worry about damaging the originals. You only need a few files (half a dozen is plenty) to learn how the BP works.

Drop the files you want to experiment with onto the Cameraid icon to open them in the viewer window. The BP always operates only on files that are open in the viewer. If there are no files open, executing the processor will open a file dialog, prompting you to open a file for processing.

To start with a clean slate, use the "New Batch Processor" command from the file menu.

Whenever you create a new BP window, the default settings are such that if you hit "Execute", nothing will be done. In order to accomplish something useful, you need to turn on some of the options.

 

The "Select" Panel

The select panel can be used to select a subset of the files that are open in the viewer. The default settings are such that all files will be selected.

You can limit the BP so that it operates on a single file only (the one that is shown in the viewer), or based on the grade that you have given to the photos. The "Based on Keyboard Modifiers" makes the selection based on what keys you are holding down when the Execute button is clicked (or when the Shortcuts menu was pulled down to auto-execute the document). So summarize: no keys means one file, shift means grades ³0, control means grade < 0.

Sometimes you may want to create JPEG versions of PICT files or PICT versions of JPEG files. For this purpose, it's nice to be able to make the BP operate only on certain types of files. By default, both PICT and JPEG files are operated on.

If you are renaming photos, it may sometimes be convenient to operate only on files that contain the time stamp that tell Cameraid when the photo was taken. Check the "Only Files with Photo Info" to restrict BP operations to files with time stamps.

Finally, you can also look for a special string within the filename or at the end of the file name. This is pretty much similar to how Find File works. If you are looking for files that end with the same string, then the "original name" of the file is considered to be without that extension. This allows you to strip or modify file extensions.

 

The "Rename" Panel

This panel will rename the files that are open in the viewer and have been selected with the "Select" panel. Click on the "Smart Rename" box to enable file renaming.

The table below the pattern gives a quick summary of the various components that can be used for smart renaming.

Why is it called smart renaming? You could of course rename the files one by one, but if you asked Cameraid to rename two files in the same folder with the same name, it wouldn't be able to do it, because the Macintosh file system wouldn't then be able to tell the files apart.

Cameraid file name patterns will always generate unique file names, so that old files are not overwritten. Even if you try to rename all your files "Photo", Cameraid will add numbers to the file names where necessary to keep the file names unique in each folder.

In effect, if you like sequentially numbered files that all start with the same text, you can just type whatever you want into the pattern and it will work just fine. Most people find it convenient to name the files based on the date and time when the photo was taken, so that's what the default rename pattern does.

The default rename pattern looks really complicated, so let's have a more detailed look at it first.

The first character is a colon. Since the colon can not be used for Mac file names, it acts as a special "escape" character in Cameraid. The characters after it always have a special meaning. So, the first thing that Cameraid sees in our default pattern is ":M". If you look at the table below, it means that it should be replaced with the month when the photo was taken. The default behavior is to use two digits for all time-related numbers, so for September, the first two characters of the file name would become "09"

The second pattern comes right after the first one and is ":D". This will be replaced by the day of month when the photo was taken.

The minus sign (or dash) right after the date will end up in the file name the way it is.

The ":h" pattern will be replaced with the hour when the photo was taken (using a 24 hour clock). The period after it is once again just what it looks like (a period) and the minutes will come next in the file name.

The last three components of the pattern are ":(", ":i" and ":)". The parentheses are special and mean that anything between them will only be used if the file name isn't already unique without whatever is inside the parentheses. So, if you took three photos on September 15th at 10:15 AM and then two more a minute later, the file names would be:

Note that the files are all in the same folder. If they were in different folders, there wouldn't be any clashes in the naming and you would end up with three files named "0915-10.15" and two named "0915-10.16".

Hit the "Execute" button (or return or Enter on the keyboard) to perform the batch rename. Warning: Renaming is not undoable. The pattern will in most cases overwrite the original names of the files, so if you aren't sure you want to rename your files, make sure you are trying this on an extra copy of your files.

If you don't like using letters to distinguish photos that were taken on the same minute, you could add the time in seconds or an index number to make the file names different. If your pattern does not produce unique file names, Cameraid will append numbers to the name until it comes up with a unique file name.

Note: If the file does not contain a time stamp from a digital camera, the modification date of the file will be used as the time for renaming the file.

You can control the number of digits in numeric fields by adding a number between the colon and the letter. For instance, the pattern ":Y" gives you only the last two digits of the year, which would be "00" for year 2000. To be really year 2000 compliant, you might want to use ":4Y" instead.

The original file name can also be used while renaming. If you have named all your files according to the contents only, you could rename them so that they start or end with the date, but still contain the original title as well (remember though that file names have a length limit, so this may fail for very long file names).

For example:

:M:D :o

The pattern above adds the month and date (using four numbers) before the original file name and inserts a space in between the date and original file name. Assuming you had three photos taken on April first and originally called "Apple", Orange" and "Banana", the file names would become "0401 Apple", "0401 Orange", "0401 Banana".

As it says on the rename panel, the ":o" pattern only gives you a part of the original file name. If you were looking for a certain suffix (such as .jpg) using the Select panel, then the suffix will not be included with the pattern. This allows you to strip or change suffixes.

The :W and :K patterns are used to specify the day of the week and name of the month. The names come from your system file, so if they will be in the language you are using. A single digit can be used to limit the length of the string. For instance, :3W would give you the first three letters of the day of the week and similarly :3K would give you the first three letters of the name of the month.

New Patterns in version 1.1.3

Note that these patterns are not mentioned in the help and examples box on the Rename panel.

It's now possible to use the width and height of the image (in pixels) to name it. In cases where a larger file is scaled or an HTML thumbnail is created, the "small" patterns represent the size of the scaled file and the big (capital) versions represent the original file. In the case of HTML captions, the small file is the thumbnail on the web page and the large file is the one the HTML link points to.

Small:

:x

Width

:z

Height

Large:

:X

Width

:Z

Height

The "Thumbnails" Panel

This panel controls the creation of thumbnails. Thumbnails are scaled-down versions of the image. Most digital cameras already create a thumbnail that Cameraid can use and show in the viewer, but these thumbnails are usually not visible in the Finder icons or in the standard file dialog as a file preview.

The items in the "Add to Original Files" box control what is done to the files that you have opened into the viewer. The custom finder icons are probably the most useful. They will be displayed in the Finder and in many application if the application can not find a higher resolution preview thumbnail.

Hint: If you don't like the style of the icon that Cameraid creates and you know how to use ResEdit, you can edit icl8 resource id 256 to change the template for new icons (the red color in the template will be replaced by pixels from the scaled image).

Preview images are somewhat larger and are usually visible in the file dialogs of other applications. Cameraid also prefers Mac style preview images over JPEG previews, so if it can find both, the viewer will show you the Mac style preview. Like the custom icons, Mac style preview are added as resources and will not affect the contents of JPEG files (they will be stripped off, if you upload the file using a raw binary mode instead of MacBinary).

JPEG Preview images are so-called JFIF thumbnails. They are stored within the JPEG data. Cameraid can not replace an existing JFIF thumbnail, but it can add them to files that have either no thumbnails or so-called Exif thumbnails. Cameraid prefers JFIF over Exif, so if both exist, the JFIF thumbnail will be shown.

The "Create JPEG Preview with" box affects copied and scaled files. The only type of preview that can immediately be added to those files is the JFIF preview thumbnail. If you want your new files to have custom Finder icons or Mac style preview images, you need to run the new files through another batch processor.

 

The "Copy" Panel

The "Copy" panel allows you to process or copy images without scaling them in any way. If the "Image Processing" option is turned off, the original data of the file (whatever it is) is used for the copy. This is very convenient when you have opened a number of files (with possibly many identical file names) into the viewer and need to copy them all into a single folder.

The file name pattern works the same way as the rename pattern. Use the rename panel for quick reference on how file name patterns are constructed.

"Target Folder"

If the "Target Folder" check box is not checked, the copies will be made into the same folders with the original items. When it is checked, Cameraid will ask you to select a folder for the copies. If you cancel the dialog and do not select a folder, Cameraid will prompt you for the folder again when it is needed. This allows you to set up a batch processor that will ask what folder to use each time it is run. It also allows you to set up things so that the target folder is always the same folder.

Image Processing

If the "Image Processing" panel is enabled, the image will be drawn into a buffer, optionally enhanced and then usually compressed into a JPEG again.

The "File Quality" setting allows you to control the quality of the file. There are two special cases for the file quality value. A zero value means that you only wanted to see what the processor would do and don't want to create a file (a sort of dry run). A quality setting of 101 will create a PICT file without JPEG compression. The file will be big, but if you want to further process the images in some other application, it's probably the best format to use, since the (lossy) JPEG compression is not used at all.

The image processors in Cameraid are mostly automatic. You select which ones to use and Cameraid will then decide how to use it. The filters have been designed so that they improve photos in most cases and only rarely make it worse than it was (a matter of opinion, of course).

"Luminance"

Low contrast photos are enhanced so that the shadows are darker and the highlights are brighter.

"Gamma"

Photos with an overall dark tone (especially around the center of the photo) will be made brighter, without significantly changing the lightness or darkness of shadows and highlights. Similarly, very bright photos can be darkened a bit. In most cases the changes will enhance the photo by showing details that were previously not visible. In many cases, enhanced shadow areas will also show compression artifacts.

The automatic gamma curve control is probably the most controversial enhancer in Cameraid. If you don't generally like what it does or find it unpredictable, simply turn it off.

"Color Balance"

In some cases the white balance of the image will be off. This means that the darkest shadows will not be totally black and the brightest highlights will not be white. This setting will adjust the color balance of the image so that shadows are closer to black and highlights are closer to a true white. Highly recommended for cameras such as the Olympus D-300L (which tends to produce bluish images). For some types of color problems, the color balance will not have an effect. If your camera already produces images with satisfying colors, you may want to turn this option off - in some cases Cameraid will make the colors less realistic.

"Sharpen"

If sharpening is turned on, you can select from three different levels of sharpening. If you are not scaling the image to a smaller size, the first setting is probably best, as it produces the most subtle sharpening effect.

Cameraid's sharpening filter has been specially designed so that it doesn't enhance JPEG compression block boundaries (those are usually the first things to show up when you really sharpen a JPEG image) and so that the color contents of the image is not sharpened. Human color vision has much lower resolution and so it doesn't make sense to sharpen the color information (you would otherwise often end up with brightly colored dots as a result of the sharpening operation).

"Clean up Colors"

This will slightly reduce colored fringes and spots that often occur in digital photos. For instance, many cameras will create a slight bluish fringe around the branches of a tree, if the tree is black and the sky is mostly gray or white.

This filter smooths (or blurs) the color information of the photo without touching the luminosity. The amount of blurring is such that the human eye usually can not notice it, except that for the occasional brightly colored spots or lines that are "toned down".

"Artifact Reduction"

This is a special filter that looks for certain kinds of problems that are caused by CCD (and probably CMOS) image sensors in digital cameras. It looks for either horizontal or vertical lines or blocks close to high contrast borders in images. The "Advanced" settings panel is used to control which way type of artifacts Cameraid will try to eliminate. The default setting is good for the Agfa ePhoto 1280, video camera CCDs (such as the ones in the Sony Mavica FD5 and FD7) and live video or television frame grabs. The other orientation works for higher end megapixel CCDs (such as the one in the Nikon Coolpix™ 900, Agfa ePhoto™ 1680 and Olympus D-600L).

Agfa ePhoto 1280 users are highly encouraged to use this filter, if the Agfa PhotoGenie™ filter has not already been applied. The effect of the artifact reduction filter is roughly similar to what the PhotoGenie™ process does,but it doesn't sharpen or simplify the image as much (giving you more options as to what to do with the photo later on).

"50% Reduced Filter & Adjustment Effect"

If you feel that Cameraid is making extreme adjustments to your photos, you can turn on the "50% Reduced Filter & Adjustment Effect" option. This option affects everything except the "Artifact Reduction" filter. Instead of making the full adjustment to the photo Cameraid will only do half the adjustment.

If your photos already look great and you just want to give them a little extra zing, this option may be useful to you. Some photos of bright red flowers and other brightly colored images may oversaturate slightly as a result of the gamma, luminance and color balance settings. For photos like this, the 50% effect may produce the ideal image.

 

The "Scale" Panel

The "Scale" panel is similar to the "Copy" panel except for a few added parameters. Another difference is that when you use this panel, the image is always uncompressed and compressed again.

There are several other (minor) differences in how the "Copy" and "Scale" panels work. For instance, the default setting is that JFIF (JPEG) thumbnails are not created for scaled images. Other aspects are controlled through the "Advanced" panel.

"Scale"

The first field specifies the scale factor for the new image. The default is 25%, but you can use size from 1% up. 100% is the same as the original size, 200% would be double size, etc.

Note: If you enlarge an image, Cameraid will require a lot more memory than when you are reducing the size of the image, because it needs temporarily create a full size original of the image and a scaled up version. Make sure there's plenty of memory available for Cameraid (both application and system memory can be used).

"Maximum Width" & "Maximum Height"

No matter what scale factor you specify, the maximum width and height are always enforced. The image is always scaled so that its aspect ratio is unchanged. If the image would be 1280 by 960 pixels, but the maximum width and height are both set to 640 pixels, then the scaled image will be 640 by 480 pixels.

If you need to create thumbnails with certain dimensions, you can set the scale factor to anything large enough (say 400%) and limit the size by using the pixel dimensions only. For web pages, anything between 100 and 200 pixels is usually good for thumbnails.

 

The "HTML" Panel

The HTML panel allows you to create a web page with a table of thumbnails and links from the thumbnails to the original image files.

The HTML generator isn't very smart, so the files have to be correctly located for the web page to work. The window below shows you how the files should be located for the default settings to work correctly.

The basic idea is that the "Photos URL" and "Thumbnails URL" are relative to the location of the index.html file. Cameraid doesn't check if this is actually true, so if you accidentally put the thumbnails in the wrong folder, you can move them to the thumbs folder and the HTML file should work correctly.

Once you have the HTML file, you can either edit with a plain text editor (if you know HTML) or open it into a dedicated HTML editor. Cameraid creates Claris Home Page files, but the files can be opened in any HTML-capable editor.

The caption you enter is treated like a rename pattern, but it's not used as a filename. Instead, it's presented under the thumbnail and it is part of the hyperlink to the photo. You can use HTML tags such as <BR> (for a line break). If you do not want the caption to be a part of the link, start the caption with </A> (there will be an extra </A> after the caption, but browsers will ignore it). The ":o" and ":i" patterns are particularly useful: if you want your photos numbered and titled with the filenames, use a pattern like this: "(:i) :o". Remember, you can easily rename files from the Cameraid Viewer by pressing R. If you don't want to rename your original files, make a copy of the files and rename the copies before you create the web page.

Captions can also be used to generate a table where the thumbnail points to one image size and the caption below can contain several links to other sizes of images. See the "Extras" folder for an example of a batch processor that does this.

The thumbnails are arranged into a table. You can control the number of columns in the table freely, but it should probably usually be such that the thumbnails can comfortably fit in a typical window. If the thumbnails are 128 pixels wide and the window is about 640 pixels wide, then four columns will comfortably fit into the window (including some margins).

The thumbnails have a colored link border around them. If you set the thickness to zero, the border disappears, but the user will no longer be able to see which links he/she has already followed, so in most cases the border should probably be at least one or two pixels wide.

For the photo links, the name of the copied file is preferred, but if no copy was made, the original file is assumed to be the photo to link to.

Note: As can be seen from the sample web page folders, the convention is to use file name extensions to specify the file type. JPEG images should end with the .jpg extension and the web page usually has a .html or .htm extension.

Note: PICT files can generally not be viewed by web browsers, so you should not use the PICT file quality setting for images that you plan to put on the web.

Quick Thumbnails

The Quick Thumbnails option is similar to the "Scale" panel, but allows only limited control over what is done to the image. You can specify the maximum size (in pixels, applied to width and height), rename pattern and destination folder for the thumbnail file. If you need more control, use the "scale" panel.

The HTML file will always consist of a table of thumbnails that act as links to larger size images.

If the "Quick Thumbnails" option is turned on, the table will use these files and their names for the thumbnails on the web page. The links will lead to either scaled images, full size images or the original images. (If scaled images were not made, full size images are used etc.)

If "Quick Thumbnails" were not made, then scaled images are assumed to be the thumbnails. If no scaled images were made, the filenames for the full size or original files are used.

 

The "Advanced" Panel

Advanced image-enhancement controls are found in this panel. The same settings apply to both full size (copies with enhancement enabled) and scaled images.

"Artifact Reduction"

These settings affect the "Artifact Reduction" filter of the copy and scale panels. The type of artifacts that your images have depend on the type of image sensor that your camera has and can not be determined by Cameraid, so if you want to use the artifact reduction filter, you'll have to select the artifact type.

Before:

Horizontal Bars

Vertical Bars

Agfa ePhoto 1280
and some other 1024x768 cameras

Live video
Sony Mavica FD5, FD7

Agfa ePhoto 1680
Nikon CP 900
and other megapixel cameras

After:

The artifacts on most digital still cameras occur because a single CCD image sensor with a color mask is used to capture color images. Most CCDs do not have a sufficient density of red and blue sensor elements to capture all types of images accurately.

If you rotate an image by 90 degrees, the orientation of the artifacts also changes. By default, Cameraid looks at the image dimensions to detect rotated images. Remember that if you have cropped an image from landscape to portrait orientation, Cameraid will (incorrectly) assume that the image has been rotated.

"Color Cast Correction"

Under some conditions the white point of a photo may be correctly set, but the mid tones can still have a color cast. For instance, the Agfa ePhoto 1280 has a tendency to produce indoor photographs with a yellow-green color cast. To compensate for the color cast, select the amount of compensation (usually "some" or "little") and a direction. For the yellow-green cast, correcting towards blue or cyan will usually work best.

Tip: Use the 0 (zero) quality setting to preview the effects of filters on your images. Once you find the right settings, change the quality setting to create the enhanced files.

"Gamma Curve Preference"

The automatic "Gamma" adjustment found in the "Copy" and "Scale" panels works by looking at the image content. If the midtones of the image look a bit dark, the gamma curve will be adjusted so that they become lighter. You can use this popup menu to set your preference. Remember that selecting "light" does not mean that all images will be made lighter: images that are already mostly very light may actually be made darker.

 

The "Files" Panel

"Execute Immediately from Shortcuts Menu"

When batch processor documents are placed into the shortcuts menu, the default behavior is to simply open the document when it is selected from the menu. If all the settings are in place, it may make more sense to simply execute the batch processor immediately without opening the window first.

To open and modify a BP that has this option enabled, simply open it using the Finder or the Open command in the File menu.

Tip: This option can make working with pre-saved shortcuts a lot smoother.

"Add New Files to Viewer"

If you don't want newly created files to appear in the viewer window, turn this option off. By default, all new images will be added right after the originals. If the original is deleted, it will of course also disappear from the viewer.

"Show Images During Processing"

The default is to show enhanced and scaled images in the viewer window. For copied images that a enhanced at full size using the "Copy" panel, the original file is shown first. This allows you to see what changes the enhancer made. The enhanced images are shown before they have been compressed, so what you see may not be exactly what you get.

It takes time to display the images during processing, so for maximum performance, this option should be turned off.

"Copy Photo Info to Scaled Images"

Photo information tags from digital cameras are always included with full size copies. Scaled images are assumed to be used as thumbnails, so to keep the file size down to minimum, the default behavior is not to copy the information to scaled files. Turn this option on to include the exposure time, time stamp etc. even with scaled files.

Note: Only JPEG-compressed images can contain the necessary information tags.

"Create Progressive Scan JPEGs"

To make JPEGs load on the web so that the browser displays the image with increasing resolution instead of scanning from top to bottom, turn this option on. Progressive scan JPEGs may also take slightly less space than the equivalent top to bottom scanned JPEGs, but some programs may have difficulty using these files.

"Try to Convert Copied Files to JPEG"

The "Copy" panel will only do an exact copy of the original file if no image processing is performed and this option is turned off. If this option is on, Cameraid will try to extract JPEG data out of the original file and create a JPEG file. Although the image data will still be copied exactly, the file type and creator may be changed and Finder icons and Mac style preview thumbnails may be deleted.

"Delete Original Files"

In most cases you will want to keep the original files for future use. However, if you want to move files instead of copying them, then you can essentially achieve this by making a copy and then deleting the original.

Tip: To move files from a flash memory card that has been mounted to the desktop, drop the flash memory card icon on the Cameraid icon and execute a batch processor that will copy the files to a folder on your hard disk drive and then delete the original files. The memory card will be clean and ready for use as soon as the files have been copied.

Warning: Once deleted, it may be hard (or even impossible) to recover the deleted file. Flash memory cards usually contain a DOS file system. You can recover deleted images if you have a DOS undelete program. Unfortunately I am no t aware of any that work natively on a Mac, so the recovery will usually have to be done on a PC.

"File Creator"

This item sets the creator of the image files that the batch processor creates. The default is to make Cameraid files, so that double-clicking on the file in the Finder will open it into the Cameraid viewer. Only the first four characters of the creator string are used - the rest are there for your reference. The pop up menu contains some common creator strings.

 

The "Memo" Panel

The memo panel can be used to store notes about the behavior of a particular batch processor document. If you create a batch processor that will be used by others besides yourself, you should probably write some instructions into the memo area and leave the memo panel open when you save the batch processor document.


Menu Command Reference

 

The "New" command will always create a new batch processor with default settings. To open a viewer window, you have to open an image file.

You can have as many batch processor windows open as memory permits, but only one digital camera control window and only one viewer window at a time.

The rename command applies to the viewer window only. Both command-R and R work as shortcuts for this command.

 

Originally Cameraid was designed so that selected files could be renamed so that the would end or start with bullet marks. The default behavior is to append bullet marks to file names.

Unmark all will look for files that end or start with the bullet mark and rename the files to remove the marks.

Mark <0 grades will rename the the files with negative grades.

You can ask Cameraid to sort the images by grade, date, file name or file size.

If the "Reverse Sorting Order" item is checked, the sort orders are reversed (highest to lowest grade, latest to oldest date, reverse alphabetical order and from largest to smallest file).

Note: The sort order is not continuously maintained. If you add more files, change the grades or rename the files, you have to perform the sort again to keep the files in order.

The grading system is discussed in more detail with the viewer window.

 

Most of the items in the zoom menu are self-explanatory. Images and thumbnails can have separate (different) zoom factors. The zoom settings are stored in the preferences.

Experiment to find out what the various menu items do.

Remember that you can use keyboard shortcuts to switch between full image and thumbnail view. (Space and enter will toggle between modes.)

Triple size thumbnails are usually much more convenient than the regular size thumbnails.

The "Adjust File Dates Now" will go through all the images in the viewer window and change their creation and modification dates to when the photo was taken, if the file contains the necessary time stamp information. This command is only available when the viewer window is active.

Automatic photo info will make Cameraid look for photo info in the viewer. If your photos never contain this information or you are not interested in it, you can turn this option off and make Cameraid work a little faster. This command is only available when the viewer window is active.

Automatic Date Adjustment will look for photo information tags and adjust the file dates whenever they are not set to the time when the photo was taken. This can make Cameraid work significantly slower. This command is only available when the viewer window is active.

The "Camera Control" command opens the digital camera control window.

The "Erase All Pictures in Camera" command is only available when the digital camera control window is active. Selecting this command will first start a six second countdown, during which you can still safely cancel the effect of this command by hitting the abort button. It will then erase all the pictures in the camera.


Acknowledgments

Very few programs can be created without help from others. This section of the manual tries to give credit where credit is due, but please forgive me if your name has been omitted.

Lossless JPEG Transforms and JPEG Compression Libraries

This software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. For more information:

ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/

Special thanks to Guido Vollbeding for implementing the Independent JPEG Group lossless JPEG transform code.

Installer

The installer for this product was created using Installer VISE from MindVision Software. For more information on Installer VISE, contact:

MindVision Software
7201 North 7th Street
Lincoln, NE 68521-8913
 
Voice: (402) 477-3269
Fax: (402) 477-1395
E-mail: mindvision@mindvision.com
http://www.mindvision.com

Digital Camera Protocols

The digital camera communications protocols were reverse-engineered by several people. My thanks to them for providing this information on the world wide web. The actual program code was written entirely from scratch by me and bears no similarity with any of the programs listed below.

Eugene Crosser <crosser@average.org>

http://www.average.org/digicam/

Jun-ichiro "itojun" Itoh

ftp://ftp.itojun.org/pub/digi-cam/

"Project O"

http://www.best.com/~rudnicki/olycmd.html

Thierry Bousch < bousch@topo.math.u-psud.fr>

http://topo.math.u-psud.fr/~bousch/fujiplay.html

Mamoru Ohno <mamo@yk.rim.or.jp>

http://www.yk.rim.or.jp/~mamo/Computer/DS-7/detail-e.html