I'm a Linux and free software enthusiast. I'm a photographer. Therefore, I tried to get an efficient and professional workflow going under Linux from importing images from my camera, reviewing, organizing and retouching them to publishing. As of now, I don't think this is possible under Linux. The best I could get was digiKam. It's a fairly nice piece of software, but doesn't cover the needs of a (semi) professional photographer. And then there are the issues with running Photoshop CS3 under Linux (the WINE people are working on it though...).

My current solution relies on dual-booting Windows for Bridge and Photoshop (I don't use Lightroom). Here's a description of my current setup:

• aileen - Headless server
  
  • Gentoo Linux
  • Two 500GB external harddrives
• gentop - Laptop
  
  • dual-booting Gentoo Linux and Windows XP
  • running Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3

The two external drives are encrypted using TrueCrypt and mounted at aileen:/mnt/backup/{master,slave}. Whenever I'm done with processing a shooting, I sync the disks via rsync to get a redundant backup. I didn't use any kind of real software RAID.
aileen also runs samba, so I can easily access the master disk from gentop's Windows installation.

So, when I get home with my camera, I boot up Windows on gentop, fire up Bridge and have it import the images (converting them to the DNG format) and save them to Z:\photos\archive\YYYYMMDD\ (Z: is the network drive connected to samba on aileen). Next I set Bridge to Vertical Filmstrip mode and apply my labels and ratings in a "binary rating system" as described by Katrin Eismann in one of the video tutorials that come with Photoshop CS3.
When I'm done, I look at the highest rated images first and start the retouching. I have to admit that most of the times I just skip Camera Raw and take the image straight to Photoshop, because I don't like how the development settings are handled in Bridge/Camera Raw (no easy way of saving multiple sets of settings or to see a complete before and after).
After doing my Photoshop magic, I save the PSD file as YYYYMMDD_title.psd to

• released\ - if it's some artwork I'm going to post here at my web site
• client\doe_john\ - if it's work for some client
• private\ - if it's a private piece that is not going to be published anywhere (yet)

at Z:\photos\.

Now I can finally reboot to Linux again (my Windows environment has nothing but PS and Bridge - no IM or eMail - to keep me focussed). To upload the finished work I mount the external drives on gentop using sshfs.

Done! Thanks for reading, I hope this can help you to further develop your personal workflow to make it more efficient and fun. =)

When I arrived at university this morning, I had no idea what amazing news I was about to hear. Of course this had nothing to do with my lecture on data structures, but with Google (you might have heard of it before)!
Google App Engine allows you to run your web application on their large (and that's a really large large) infrastructure. That's awesome. And they support Python and Django right out of the box. Which is even more awesome. And it's free! Which is just plain ludicrous.
I'm watching the Campfire release event at youtube right now and am totally being assimilated into the collective of Google fanboys. Yup, I admit it. They got me.
After the euphoria had settled down a bit, I had to think about the consequences in the paranoia department, of course. This will allow Google to control even larger parts of the Internet, given that they already own fibre cables and stuff. However, I decided not to panic yet.
I can hardly wait for the folks at Google to mature this cool product (there are still some rough edges, especially when it comes to integrating Django with their database backend and user authentication API) and open it up to the public - the 10,000 beta testing accounts must have been gone within minutes.
*wanders off in blind amazement*

2007's GSoC ideas for Gentoo had this:

"Improve upon Gentoo's Bugzilla (either within bugzilla or externally) to get better metrics per CP(V). Have some sort of AJAX lookup for real CPV's. Store the CPV per bug (how to do bugs w/multiple CPVs?). This lets us harvest bug information better because we can bind CPV's to bugs." (from the userrel/soc page)

As an AMD64 AT, I know that quite often things on Gentoo's Bugzilla don't run as smoothly as they should. However, the above proposal seemed difficult to integrate with the existing Bugzilla. My proposal is to write something new from scratch that merges the functionality of packages.gentoo.org and bugs.gentoo.org into a state-of-the-art web application.

Pros

• Reduced bugspam, traffic and server load
• Significantly reduced development overhead

Cons

• Lots of work
• Difficult transition period

Whenever I had nothing else to do in the last few months, I tought myself django and worked on my latest pet app: coisy.
And here's the good news: coisy already does most of what packages.g.o does and has the foundation for the integrated bugtracker. Here are some screenshots of my current progress (note that the layout and everything is nowhere near final, this is just supposed to communicate that something is actually working here):



So here's a new list, with respect to coisy:

Pros

• Reduced bugspam, traffic and server load
• Significantly reduced development overhead
• django prevents the vast majority of the SQL injection or XSS stuff you'd have to worry about
• coisy can offer detailed statistics to evaluate the state of development
• coisy scales nicely
• coisy allows developers to stay up-to-date using RSS feeds, resulting in a less cluttered inbox (email notifications will still be available, of course)
• coisy can track any number of trees (read: overlays) and manage them independently (e.g. a bugtracker for sunrise or whatever)

Cons

• Lots of work half of it is done, I'll do the rest
• Difficult transition period

Transition from Bugzilla to coisy

First of all, I don't see this happening within the next 12 months at all (probably longer). I am aware of that most developers will be very reluctant about this change, so I came up with some ideas to handle the transition. Gentoo's Bugzilla contains more than 210,000 bugs, containing a wealth of important information. Therefore, it should remain readable as long as possible. When deploying coisy, I suggest leaving bugs.gentoo.org in readonly-mode. Coisy will have the possibility of tying a coisy ticket to a Bugzilla bug and to automatically import comments and attachments from a given old bug.

My goals for this Summer of Code

At the end of SoC, coisy won't be ready for production. My goal is to complete packages.g.o functionality and get some rudimentary bugtracking going.

Beyond Summer of Code

For the time when SoC is over, I still have many ideas for coisy. How about just replying to bugmail in order to post a comment?

Why I want to do this as a SoC project

So far, I've been hacking on coisy whenever I had nothing else to do, with sometimes several weeks without a commit. And I will continue to do so even if my proposal gets rejected. However, as a SoC project, coisy would go on top of my TODO list and I'd have much more motivation. Also, I expect coisy to gain some exposure through SoC, which hopefully means some community and developer input for me.

Why I think Gentoo should accept my proposal

Simple: There's no risk for Gentoo. Even if coisy isn't transformed into a GLEP and never goes live, Gentoo hasn't really invested any resources into its development. However, if it goes well, Gentoo would have the funkiest development platform on the block... or whatever.

I just stumbled upon some good modeling advice, so if you're thinking about modeling or shooting with models, take a look at Miss Stasya's site. Also be sure to check out her portfolio for some great art.

Once again, all has changed. I'm officially engaged, had my first exams at university and hacked together this new site. The code is Open Source (as in GPLv3) and can be found at Google Code. As of now, it's probably useless to anyone else, but feel free to test it.

I recently watched some Photoshop training by Chris Orwig and Deke McClelland - quite insightful, you can sign up for a 7-day trial membership at Lynda.com to see some of their stuff.