Today I woke early. I set the alarm for 05:30 and again at 05:40 and yet again at 06:00. The reason for so many alarms is that it’s easy to set the first, wake up to turn it off, and then wake too late. It’s also as a backup. Usually the first alarm is enough to wake me.
I can be a morning person, if other people are not noisy at night when I want to go to sleep at a reasonable time.
In the Age of the AI bubble, but long before this, photographers and camera operators have been vanishing from television studios as well as from events. Where you would have hired a camera operator and video editor you now hire a video editor/graphist because video editing has moved from editing video footage to creating graphics filled videos. This is part of why I became disenchanted with video and why I pivoted towards media asset management and self-hosting.
I chose to experiment with Le Chat by Mistral, the French AI alternative to Gemini, Claude and CatIFARTED (ChatGPT). For the experiment I copied my Photoprism photos from the drive I use that is connected a Raspberry pi to a laptop before running scripts to sort and remove duplicates. It worked well, with a nice little bonus which I’ll expand on later.
Goal: Clean Up Duplicate Photos My objective was to Remove duplicate photos from a large collection while keeping the best version of each file.
For several days now I have been playing with Gemini, Google Takeout files and Flick Export files, first to re.marry json data to relevant exif fields, and then to create a folder structure library by year, month and day. In the process I have had to itterate, and itterate, and think lateraly in order to achieve what I wanted to achieve.
Verbose One of the biggest frustrations I have is that when I ask a follow up question for more specific detail of something it re-calculates everything.
Let’s begin by saying that Flickr is not intended for video. It’s meant for photographers to backup and share their photos with like-minded individuals. When you use the Flickr app for iOS and Android it automatically backs up videos, and photos.
After some trial and error I was able to get the exif data attached to photos and then sorted chronologically into folders. In the process I noticed that almost 10,000 files were missing when the transfer was finished.
I downloaded my photographs from Google Photos via Google Takeout before using Exiftool to repopulate the exif metadata. Once this was done, I had to move the files from the mac to the Raspberry Pi running photoprism. For this I used rsync because it can run in the background as you sleep.
The Rsync command The command is rsync -avzP /source/ user@remote_host:/destination/
-a is for the archive mode
v is verbose.
Yesterday was cold and grey when I set off on my daily walk/run and my intention was to go up to Cheserex across to Tranchepied and then back down towards Nyon. I had no intention of running a semi-marathon.
The reason for which I ran so far is that I saw dog walkers and their dogs were not leashed. Years ago I was agressed by three dogs, one of them every time we crosssed paths, so now, if I’m alone, and I see a dog, I cross where the field boundary is, and then I continue my walk, run or bike ride.
Recently I decided that I would backup my Flickr library locally despite having over a year left on my pro account. In so doing, when the decision comes whether to dump, or keep using flickr, I will know that my data is safely backed up locally. Of course I decided to play with the archive but came upon a snag.
E6 Microdegrees That snag is that Flickr uses the E6 Format, also known as Microdegrees.
I know, without a doubt that if I ride with one group, especially if there are only 25 people, that it will be hard. It’s because of how hard I know the ride will be that I am not keen to join that group. despite this I still considered going for a bike ride this morning, until noisy neighbours made it impossible for me to have an early night.
There is a bad habit among alcoholics that they need to make noise at night without considering that others may want to sleep.
Imagine, you decide to backup your photos from a website such as flickr, but you find that it generates over a hundred files. Imagine going through and downloading every file manually. Imagine clicking hyperlinks one hundred and sixty eight times. Imagine having so little pressure on your time.
That’s where a quick ai prompt will get AI to get a shell script to do the work for you. A shell script is a few lines of code that you run via a dot sh file to do a repetitive task, or chore for you.