I have been playing with general pi-hole, which lead me to nebula-sync.
In the YouTube video, Pi-hole Syncing… But Smarter…, the creator, Tim, is editing his “.env” file for nebula-sync, and the is a conversation about the CRON syntax, which got me interested, and finally, I was able to quickly summary it here:
CRON=*/* * * * * * * * * * command to execute ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?????? day of week (0 - 7) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday, or use names; 7 is Sunday, the same as 0) ? ? ? ??????????? month (1 - 12) ? ? ???????????????? day of month (1 - 31) ? ????????????????????? hour (0 - 23) ?????????????????????????? min (0 - 59)
In the context of cron jobs, which are used to schedule tasks in Unix-like operating systems, * * * * * represents a schedule that executes a command every minute.
Each asterisk corresponds to a specific time unit in the cron schedule:
First asterisk (*): Represents the minute (0-59). An asterisk here means “every minute.”
Second asterisk (*): Represents the hour (0-23). An asterisk here means “every hour.”
Third asterisk (*): Represents the day of the month (1-31). An asterisk here means “every day of the month.”
Fourth asterisk (*): Represents the month (1-12 or JAN-DEC). An asterisk here means “every month.”
Fifth asterisk (*): Represents the day of the week (0-7, where 0 and 7 are Sunday). An asterisk here means “every day of the week.”
Therefore, * * * * * translates to “run the associated command every minute of every hour of every day of every month and every day of the week.”
I lost my EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM last spring, when it decided to go for a swim, and picked up the 75-300mm as a quick replacement.
I must say there is a noticeable difference between those two lenses.
Anyhow…
In my effort to figure out what Lens I wanted to purchase next, I needed to assess my style of photography, again.
In my film camera days, I carried 5-6 fixed length lenses, but in the digital age, I’ve gone down to three.
Mentally I had an idea, but I had no data to back up my real work environment.
Or so I thought…
While in Adobe Lightroom, I realized I could use the EXIF data contained in the metadata of each file – Lens and Focal Lengths!
This is a very fascinating look, at all of one’s images, over 31,000 in this one catalog!
Using Lightroom and the embedded EXIF metadata information, I could clearly see:
Most Used Lens
18mm-55mm – 8168 images (25.79%)
28-135mm – 16332 images (51.56%)
70-300mm – 3798 images (11.99%)
75-300mm – 1996 images (6.30%)
Most Used Focal Lengths
18mm – 4258 images (13.44%)
28mm – 4363 images (13.78%)
70mm – 1339 images (4.23%)
135mm – 2626 images (8.29%)
300mm – 1888 images (5.96%)
Needless to say, sorting by every focal length alone is a large grouping, but in my case, I looked for any Focal Length over 1000 images or spikes.
Oddly, there is no spike around 55mm (473 images), which suggests that I never really used the 18mm-55mm all the way zoomed in.
Here is an exercise: What if your Lens happens to cross over in their Focal Length?
In this case, simply isolate/select a given Lens and Record the Focal Length numbers, which can reveal which Lens you actually used for a similar situation, and Thumbnails, just below. It’s a great way to remind you of what you did!
I wish there was a way to export the data and bring it into a spread sheet for my geeky fun! (Note to Self…)
That did not surprise me in the least, but which side of the Lens should I consider for my next Lens?
Clearly, my next largest ranges are 18mm (13.44%) and 28mm (13.78%) — about 27.22% of the images.
At the same time do I look at the 70-300mm range, which is 18.29%, because I a shot 70mm+ 18.46% of the time?
If this confuses you, don’t worry, because the more you dig into the data, the worse it becomes!
Try some of these!
Sort by Year – See how your Capture needs have changed
Sort by Body – Most used combinations to compare results
The list goes on.
I just wanted to highlight another aspect of Adobe Lightroom that might help you in your decision-making.
Now if you have any ideas on what I should do about my Lens dilemma, please let me know via email.
Update(s) –
07/17/2015 – In my morning reading, I ran into this site lightroomdashboard.com, in which you upload your Lightroom catalog file (.lrcat), and it will visualize your shooting habits. With a backup of my live catalog (1.27 GBs), I tried the “Drag-n-Drop” interface, and Chrome crashes. There is a Note that says they are aware of issues with 2+ GBs LR Catalogs. I would not be surprised their server(s) are being hit hard today. Need to check later.
>>> “Commenting Off” because of Spammers – send email! <<<
This morning, I started to “stitch” together a panoramic photo that I had taken the other day in Dowlin Forge Park, right here in Downingtown.
It is a series of (28) Canon RAW files (cr2) that were taken with a Canon T5i/700D, imported into Lightroom 5.3, and merged into a straightforward panorama image in Photoshop CS 6.
The actual merge of the (28) 16-bit files took about 3-4 minutes, which was A LOT better than last time, where I had to break-up the (42) files into groups of 10, merge them into one file, and repeat until all the files were merged.
Once the merged file was in Photoshop, with all 28 layers showing, my new machine was not even breathing too hard. Even with Lightroom and several Chrome instances, I was still only pushing 85% physical RAM and the CPU spiked at 15%!
From there, I tried to “Save As” a Standard Adobe PSD, and got the standard error dialog, showing the 2GB file size limitation.
Nothing new there…
Then I tried a “Save As” as an Adobe TIFF file, and this time the computer took a great deal longer, 5+ minutes, before there was an error, and during that time, Photoshop created a 10.6+ GB file tmp!
10.6 GB Adobe TMP file
To date, this is the single largest file that I have “Saved” in Photoshop!
Finally, I tried saving the file as a Standard Adobe PSB file, which is still a large file at 3.3+ GBs!
Main Adobe PSB file w/o Flatten
Time to Flatten some Layers!
With the Main PSB file open, I Flattened the Layers into 1, and did a “Save As” a PSB and then Re-Opened the Main PSB file, Flattened, and “Save As” again as TIFFs, and was very happy to see both files sizes were nearly identical at 638 MBs!
Comparison when Flattened
Conclusion
I conducted this test mostly out of personal curiosity and to see if files have remained consistent since the last time I did this experiment.
I expected the file size to go up, mainly because I was using 27-28 MB files created with the Canon T5i/700D vs 8-9 MB files with the Canon XTi.
If I were to estimate, the same 46 shoots done in 2011 could easily reach 6 GBs as a PSB file, and maybe create a 20-30 GB temp file at the same time.
Be sure that you have enough scratch disk space before you start.
It should be obvious that if you know a file is going to reach over 4 GBs, save it out as a PSB and go from there in the rest of your workflow.
The current maximum file file for an Adobe PSB is 4 exabytes – 300,000 x 300,000 pixels – 350 x 350 feet, which should keep you.
It is also nice to see that after Flattening, both PSB and TIFF files appear to be the same size.
Personally, I would keep the TIFF files, mostly because TIFF is NOT a proprietary file format, and in the future, if I want to move the file into another program, it will be easier.
Although I wrote my first post on PSB vs TIFF several years ago, I have yet to find out what IS all the Un-Saved data?
Duplicate “colors?” Non-Human readable code?
If you happen to know, please let me know.
I’m just very curious!
And finally, it should be noted, just like last time, the 2 PSB files do NOT show up in Lightroom, so you have to remember that they are there.
The TIFF file that was created, after Flattening all the Layers, DOES show up in Lightroom.
Adobe Bridge CS6 (5.0.2.4 x64) is able to show the Flattened PSB and TIFF, but NOT the larger Un-Flattened 3.3+ GB PSB file.
Hope you enjoyed my little file size observations.
If you have any questions or answers, please let me know!!
It is always a pain to move to a new computer because there are so many files and settings that need to be redone for the user to really get productive again.
With this idea in mind I offer the following tips and advice in regards to moving an Adobe Lightroom User from one machine to another.
This guide is geared towards people who are technically proficient on the Windows operating system, but should be able to serve as a guide to those working in a Macintosh environment.
If you have any other ideas or tips please feel free to send them my way!
Transferring the Data
As any User of Lightroom knows, the Catalog and Image files are the heart of your work and business, and if you are moving to a new machine, you need to consider what to do with them as you move forward.
On the “C:” drive of Old Machine –
There are several of options available to you, if your original catalogs and Images are still on the main “c:\” hard drive of your old machine.
Transfer files across the Network
If both machines are still attached to a network, you can easily transfer the catalogs across, but that is going to take time, and chew up various network resources.
Remember, depending on the number of Images you have, your catalog directory could easily reach several gigabytes worth of data,in my case: Catalog: 12.7 GBs & Images: 261 GBs
Remove the old hard drive –
If you remove the hard drive, you have two basic options, but before you begin, backup your files on the old machine in your normal manner.
Install in new computer –
By simply taking the hard drive out of the old machine, and installing it into your new machine, is most certainly the easiest of the options, and also gives you a second HD spindle when dealing with I/O operations in Lightroom.
But before you remove the hard drive, be sure to check the compatibility of data interfaces on your new machine – Can the new machine deal with the older IDE interface?
An example I can give, is my new machines, that is based on the Asus Z87-Pro motherboard, which does not have any IDE connections.
Also keep in mind, that if you connect the old “C:” drive, and it wants to reinitialize for whatever reason, and you have not backed up your data…
External case –
This is another good alternative, and does give you the flexibility to move to different environments with little issue, and also gives you the additional spindle speed during I/O, but is subject to the port speed when you plug-in, assuming that the chipset on the external drive is the faster of the two.
Backups
There are three critical areas that need to be transferred to your new machine for it to work in a fashion that you are used to: Images, Catalogs and Preferences.
Images –
Do I really need to say more?
Catalogs –
As mentioned earlier, catalogs can easily reach several gigabytes worth of data, but does all that data need to be transferred to the new computer?
Again Users of Lightroom know, and unless they have change the default settings, the program will prompt you to do backups, which are located in a sub-directory of the main catalog directory.
c:\My.Adobe.Lightroom.Catalog\Backups\
By simply looking into the backup directory, one could easily save time and the amount of data that needs to be transferred, by simply cleaning out old unnecessary files, but this is completely user based.
Just check to see which “Date – Time” named directories really need to be moved.
Preferences –
Since this is most likely a new software install, none of your preferences will be in place, so where are those files located?
Like all other User preferences, they are stored in the operating system’s Users profile directory, that is hidden through the normal interface, that can be easily accessed with a little forethought.
Once installed in the new directories, Lightroom should have no issue accessing the “.lrtemplate” files. (BTW – If you really want to be geeky, you can open up these files in a text editor and play with them to your heart’s content)
Conclusion
When I moved to my new machine, I used a combination of techniques described above.
On my old machine, the Lightroom catalogs and images were already located on an internal secondary SATA hard drive, so I just removed the old hard drive, and installed it into the new machine.
From there, I copied the images and catalogs (approx 275 GBs) to the root directory of my new machine, creating a new backup of the files.
Even across the SATA III bus, this still took several hours, and I could smell hard drive smoke. (just kidding!)
When I got to my preferences, I connected to my old machine across the network and simply copied the files into the associated directories.
From there, I reconnected the Lightroom catalogs to the local main image directory, now located on the root of my main “c:\” drive.
Finally, I rewrote my old robocopy script to include the additional external hard drive, that I added for redundancy in my backup solution.
Some may argue, that having all my data on the “c:\” will produce bottlenecks, while I would agree in theory, I also have to wonder with my usage of Intel’s RST technology, reduces this as an issue.
Here is a quick Overview, which I was Posting on Facebook and Twitter –
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 12:00ish]
– USPS Delivers New Motherboard (Asus P87-Pro)
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 13:30ish]
– Motherboard boots outside of case
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 14:30ish]
– I’m in the BIOs!
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 15:49ish]
– COOL! – NO MORE FLOPPY! [EL – Oh I’m glad your cialis arrived!]
[AM – Is that no more 5.25 or no more 3.5″? ;-)]
[Me – Only Firewire & USB over that SATA 3…
Now we are calling gigabytes!]
[JQ – It is all about the thumb drive]
[Me – I got plenty of Front and Rear ports!]
[JQ – OH YEAaaaaaaaaaa]
[Me – and I have a TON of cache!]
[DP – That’s what she said.]
[VR – Floopy!? LOL]
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 16:02ish]
– Installed OS in under 10 minutes!
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 16:14ish]
– Too funny! – Out of the box… The OS rates this as 1.0 in User Experience… Let’s see if I can do something about that…
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 16:23ish]
My current System Rates at 5.0… OOTB… New machine (Loong “Chinese Dragon name”) rates at 1.0… I have NOT even put in the OEM drivers yet, and it is still faster!
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 17:06ish]
First FB post from Loong!
[2013-Aug-09 Fri 20:17ish]
One has to LOVE a family that understands the deep and dark ritual of installing a new personal computer… The various incantations to be passed down from Father to Son… Well… It sounded good… Didn’t it?
[LS – No sons, but the ritual here is gun cleaning and fishing lol]
[Me – Damn GF! You know me too well!]
[MR – Starting from a baseline of Gregorian chant punctuated by outbursts of Tourette syndrome, right? Toned down to Donald Duck when the kids and/or wife are around…]
[Me – Scary, but TRUE, I have SEVERAL CDs of Gregorian chants! and that is an AWESOME idea!]
