Tag: recommendation

Some starting with Mylio Tips

On By Mark DoddIn Guidance, TipsLeave a comment

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Now that I’ve had Mylio for a week and have worked on importing my images into Mylio I thought I would give some tips based on my experiences. But as always, refer to the Mylio Manual or contact their tech support (Which has been great by the way) if you have any issues.

Importing

If you created a new folder for your Mylio Library

This is not my case so what I say here is just from my trial and error when I was testing it out.

Basically, do one import at a time. Such as one memory card at a time, or one folder of images at a time. There is a lot that Mylio is doing in the background, it is not just making a listing in your catalog, but Mylio also does some other work on your files so it is ready for the Face Recognition, De Duplicating, creating previews, creating thumbnails and putting your images on the Map to name a few that I know of

You should be ok having multiple vaults and multiple devices to start

If you choose an existing folder as your Mylio Library Folder

This is the scenario that I fall into and can give you some advise base upon my experience

After you set up Mylio you should have 2 devices, 1 being your computer and the other being your Vault where your Mylio Library is located. Be that your internal drive or external drive (PS recommend external)

You might be tempted to add your other devices right away such as your phone or another computer. HOLD OFF on doing this.

Depending upon how large your existing library of files is, the initial import into Mylio will take some time. Be prepared for that. As mentioned above, it is not just a matter of putting a listing for an image in your Mylio catalog, but many other things are done as your images are imported.

The larger your library the longer it will take. Mine for example was ~ 182000 images that take around 3 TB of space on my external drive and it took a weekend on my 2019 iMac to finish the initial import properly.

By not adding other devices to your Mylio setup until this is finished, it will speed up the process as Mylio doesn’t have to deal with the other devices during this initial import. That was part of my problem, I couldn’t help myself and I added a second vault right away along with some other devices. And as a result, my initial import took much longer as it copied information to the second vault and to my other devices along with my primary computer and vault when it was adding images to my Mylio Library catalog.

So to the point, after the setup of your computer and 1st vault, let things go until your Mylio Library is all in synced and happy, then add another device, let that sync up, then add another vault if you wish, and let that sync up, etc. Each time you add something, let that sync up completely before adding another. Non Vault devices should be pretty quick, but adding another Vault does take some time.

Once you have slowly added all your devices that you want in your Mylio environment and things sync up across all of them for this initial setup, anytime you add more images it will be much faster to sync to your vault(s) and your other devices as they are connected.

For those Mac OS folks who had been using Apple iPhotos

I have been a long-time Mac OS user and as such have some old iPhoto libraries that still have images that I wanted to import.

I discovered that Mylio didn’t recognize them when I when to add them via the option to add Mac OS, iPhoto, and Aperture option. I believe this to be the fact that these are very old libraries and in a format that Mylio does not recognize. (I have not yet confirmed this with Mylio). But I did find a workaround to make these libraries show up. It will require double the space that your iPhoto Library takes as it will make a copy.

I would open the old library, it would open the current version of Photos and start converting. When it was done and I quit photos I would see two libraries with the same name. One was the new Photos format library and an iPhoto merged library. I would go back to Mylio and choose to add the iPhoto library and low and behold, the iPhoto Merged library would show as being available. I believe that this is due to the format of the iPhoto Library being migrated to the latest iPhoto format before it was converted to a Photos library.

Doesn’t really matter to me what is happening behind the scenes, I just know with this method I can now import this very old iPhoto library into my Mylio Library

If you are a long time Mac User and have images prior to Mac OS X

I am a long time Mac User and I discovered one issue for my images that I had taken before Mac OS X (yes back in the Mac OS 9 days). Those images did not have an extension as part of the file name.

Although Mac OS X does recognize them as images, Mylio was not as it seems Mylio relies on the file extension. So I had the situation where I had images in a vault directory, but they were not showing in my Mylio catalog. This applies to any Linked folder as well.

So the work around it to give your files an extension for the type of image they are. You can do that using the Mac OS Terminal.

  • Locate your images that do not have extensions. If you have a folder that has some with an extension and some without, create a new folder in that same folder and move all the images that do not into that folder.
  • Open the Terminal Application. Found in applications -> utilities
  • type cd and add a space.
  • Drag the folder icon onto the terminal window. This will add the folder file path in the terminal window. Press return. You can also type it as well, but this is a much easier method especially for long file paths.
  • You should now be in the folder that has the images to have an extension added. Yow can confirm this by typing pwd to show the folder path. And doing an ls -l command to show the files
  • Next, you will use the following command to add a JPEG extension to your file names. Just copy and paste the below command. Pressing return after pasting to execute.
    • for i in *; do mv “$i” “$i.jpeg”; done
  • If you have tiff images, the command is similar, just a different extension in the command as shown below. Remember to press return after pasting in the terminal window to execute the command.
    • for i in *; do mv “$i” “$i.tiff”; done

If you make a mistake and accidentally add the tiff extension to Jpeg file types or vice versa, it is easily fixed.

  • Changing the extension from .tiff to .jpeg us the following command in the terminal while in the folder
    • for file in *.tiff; do mv “$file” “${file%tiff}jpeg”; done
  • Changing the extension from .jpeg to .tiff us the following command in the terminal while in the folder
    • for file in *.jpeg; do mv “$file” “${file%jpeg}tiff”; done

Of course, if you have a different extension, the above command work, you just need to change the .tiff or .jpeg to the extensions you need.

Once the extension has been added, Mylio will automatically add the images from these linked folders to your Mylio Catalog.

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So You are Thinking About Night Photography

On By Mark DoddIn General Blog Post, TipsLeave a comment

So you are thinking about night photography and not sure if your camera can do it or what the settings you might use.

 

Most modern DSLR’s and Mirrorless cameras can take great pictures at night and of the stars, but I would recommend doing some testing before you go out on your first night of night photography shooting. The intent is to

  1. Let you know if your camera is suitable for night photography and
  2. To give you a starting point on the settings to use to get the best shot of the night sky or other night shot.

The steps used do not only apply to taking pictures of the sky but any night photography situation you are thinking about such as taking pictures of the city at night.

 

Night sky photography (AKA Astrophotography) is something that I’ve always wanted to and I needed to find out if my current camera was up to the job. On a recent night where there were no clouds in the sky I decided it was time to test my old trusty Nikon D80 to see if it was up to the job. So I headed outside with my tripod (A must if you are doing any low light photography), my Nikon D80 with the Nikkor 18-135 lens, and my wireless remote. The remote is not required, but it does make things a little faster to do. If you don’t have a remote trigger device be it wired or wireless, you can still get your night shots, but you will have to use the camera’s built-in timer function or you will get camera shake when you press down the shutter release button.

 

For my testing, I put my camera in manual mode, set the aperture (f-stop) as wide as my lens would let me at f3.5 with the lens at its widest setting of 18mm and set the exposure time to 30 secs, which is the longest my camera will go before switching to bulb mode. For the testing, you want the exposure time and f-stop fixed as you will be only adjusting the ISO setting for each shot. You will need to focus your camera to near infinity in order for the stars/night sky to be in focus. Do this manually by turning your focus ring all the way until it stops at infinity and turning it back just a little, or find a distant light and let your autofocus focus on that. After you have set your focus, you must turn off the autofocus feature of your lens or as soon as you go to click your shutter release your camera will just get stuck trying to focus and most likely never focus. On my Nikkor lens, I can turn off the autofocus on the lens. Your camera/lens will vary on how you turn auto focus off. It is your option whether or not to use the long exposure noise reduction option that your camera has. For my testing, I did use my camera’s long exposure noise reduction option. If you are not sure, take a series of pictures with it off, then another series with it on and compare.

 

Start out at the lowest ISO your camera has, in my case that was 100 and with each picture you take,  increase the ISO by one setting stop until you get to the highest your camera can do.  For my old trusty Nikon D80 that meant ISO’s of: 100, 125, 160, 200 250 320, 400, 500, 640, 800, 1000, 1250, 1600, HI 0.3, HI 0.7, HI 1.0. When it is all said and done, you should have a range of shots that vary just by the ISO. So I ended up with 16 shots.

 

This 5 of the images spread across the full 16 image range of images that I got during this test.

 

Click on each image to see the full version

At ISO 100
At ISO 100

At ISO 250
At ISO 250

At ISO 640
At ISO 640

At ISO 1600
At ISO 1600

At ISO Hi 1.0 Equivalent to 3200
At ISO Hi 1.0 Equivalent to 3200

 

After looking at my test shots it tells me a few things

  1. Due to light pollution and the low sensitivity of my sensor I”m not able to get the Milky Way with this camera. By today’s camera standards, my Nikon D80 has a very low sensitivity as its highest native setting was 1600. Most camera’s today got to at least 25,600.
  2. To get a decent amount of stars I need to use the higher ISO’s of my camera. At least 1600 if not the digitally enhanced HI settings.
  3. Even at the higher ISO’s my camera still cannot capture enough light for the faint stars. And even with noise reduction turned on, the pictures are still too noisy.

 

Just because I cannot capture the stars with my camera I did not give up on night photography as you may have seen in my previous posts from Light City Baltimore.

 

I’ve been able to get some great night shots in the city with my Nikon D80.  This is because the light it much brighter than the faint stars and my camera’s sensor is sensitive enough to get the light at this level.

Just keep in mind that you are doing this testing just as a starting point and to determine what is possible at the max aperture and timed exposure. Once you know this base, if it worked out for you, you can make adjustments when you change the exposure time and aperture. I won’t go into the formula here, but I’m sure you can find it on the internet.

 

For now, get out there and try some night photography shooting, I’m sure you will get some great pictures.

 

#nightphotography #Camera #Settings #testing #tips #night #recommendation