Camera, code, coffee

Up until now, Otto could either geotag photos by city or geocorrelate them using GPX files. The latest version introduces a new -l option that allows you to geotag photos using the provided geographical coordinates and altitude. It looks something like this:

otto -d "/path/to/source/dir" -l "48.355,11.773,494"

Another new -r option can be used to transfer only RAW files as follows:

otto -d "/path/to/source/dir" -r NEF

Speaking of RAW files, Otto now uses the exiv2 tool to write EXIF metadata (copyright, author, description, etc.) to RAW files — something that wasn't possible before.

Instead of rsync, Otto now uses wget to fetch notes. This means that you no longer need to have rsync installed on the machine hosting notes, and you don't have to deal with login credentials.

And that's about it. As always, you'll find the latest version of Otto on GitHub.

Need to get the geographical coordinates of your current position? On a Debian and Linux Mint, install the geoclue-2-demo package using the sudo apt install geoclue-2-demo command, then run the following one-liner:

/usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i | grep -e 'Latitude' -e 'Longitude' | tail -n 2

If you need the latitude and longitude values only, use this one-liner instead:

/usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i | \
grep -e 'Latitude' -e 'Longitude' | tr -d ' ' | \
cut -d':' -f2 | tr -d ° | tail -n 2

Ideally when you travel, you'd want to use a fresh card with your camera each day. This way, if you lose the card, or the data on it becomes corrupted, the damage would be limited to a single day. This strategy might not be feasible for longer travels (if you travel for a month and you use two cameras, you'd need 60 storage cards), but it can be practical for shorter trips.

Otto can now handle this particular scenario. Specify the -i parameter, and the script creates a directory with the current date as its name (for example, 2023-05-01) and backs up the content there. The script is clever enough to distinguish between cards coming from different cameras, thus keeping things tidy while avoiding inadvertently overwriting data coming from multiple sources. Here is how it works. Say, you use a Nikon D800, and you use the following command to back up data:

otto -i -d "/media/$USER/NIKON D800/DCIM/101ND800"

This command creates the 101ND800 directory first, followed by a subdirectory with the current name as its name. The data from the specified source is then backed up to the 101ND800/2023-05-01 subdirectory.

In addition to transferring and organizing JPEG and RAW files, Otto can now generate statistics by analyzing the EXIF metadata of files in a given directory. Say, you want to know what lenses you use most. Run the command below, and Otto generates a CSV-formatted text file containing all lenses used to take photos in the given directory along with the count for each lens.

otto -d "/path/to/dir/with/photos/" -s LensID

Want to know what focal length you use (most)? Here's the command to use:

otto -d "/path/to/dir/with/photos/" -s FocalLength

How about camera models? There's a command for that, too:

otto -d "/path/to/dir/with/photos/" -s Model

Each of these commands generates a .csv file that uses the EXIF tag as its name (LensID.csv, FocalLength.csv, Model.csv, etc) in your home directory. You can then import the file into a spreadsheet application like LibreOffice Calc and generate a graph. Or you can use web tools like cvs-graph to create a pie chart using the generated CSV file.

You'll find Otto in its own GitHub repository.

If only an iPad or an iPhone could run Linux tools like Rsync, ExifTool, ImageMagick, etc., you wouldn't have to schlep around a Linux notebook when traveling, especially if your photographic needs are limited to keeping your photos and RAW files safe.

Enter iSH, an app that bestows Linux powers on Apple devices. Once installed, iSH offers a Linux environment that gives you access to a plethora of Linux tools. More importantly, iSH can access the iPadOS and iOS file systems and external storage devices connected to the iPad or the iPhone. This means that you can run commands and scripts in iSH to back up data from a storage card connected to the Apple device. Better still, if you use a USB-C hub that features both a card reader and USB connectors, you can back up data directly from a card to an external USB storage device, bypassing the iPad's or iPhone's internal storage.

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The best way to learn new words and phrases is to use them actively. The next-best way to learn new words is to be exposed to them as much as possible. And since the wallpaper that adorns my graphical desktop environment is what I stare at most of my waking hours, I thought that it'd only make sense to add words and phrases I want to memorize there.

Half an hour after the eureka moment, I had a working hack consisting of a plain text file with words and phrases along with their translations, a wallpaper template PNG file, and a simple Bash shell script. The latter pulls a random line from the text file, and uses the template to generate a new wallpaper with the picked line. Below are all the gory details worth knowing if you want to roll out something similar.

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