My first Piwigo plugin

I switched from Gallery to Piwigo back in 2015 for my photos website software. Since then, one thing that has always bugged me is how Piwigo handles “physical” albums. The “normal” Piwigo user just uploads photos through the web interface, which puts all of the photos into a “/upload/year/month/day/randomfilename.jpg” folder structure. You can then link the photos into one or many “virtual” albums. While this is a pretty flexible approach, I prefer to use a physical album structure: where the albums in my Piwigo site match the physical folder layout on disk.

The problem with using physical albums, however, is that I tend to occasionally re-organize and move a photo or video to a different folder. For example, maybe I had a single photo of the Statue of Liberty which I dumped into my “New York” album, but then I had a few more photos so I decided to create a “Statue of Liberty” sub-album under “New York” and move the exiting photo there. With Piwigo’s synchronization process the file’s original location is deleted from the database and re-added in the new folder location which means all of the metadata associated with the item (tags, description, etc.) are lost and need to be re-entered.

For the past two years I’ve been dealing with this manually: make a note of the description and tags of the photo, physically move the file, run Piwigo’s sync process, and then edit the file and add back the description and tags. Finally, I decided to write a plugin to do this automatically. PPM (Physical Photo Move) is an attempt to alleviate this inconvenience by allowing an existing item in a physical folder to be moved to another folder and keep all the existing metadata.

I just published the first release to Piwigo’s plugins repository tonight and my source code is here on Github. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Defend the Land!

For the third time in a row, my Cleveland Cavaliers are the Eastern Conference Champions!  They’ll face the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, also for the third time in a row:

Cavs-Warriors 2017 Finals

Game 5 against the Celtics was amazing (almost as amazing as Game 2 where they crushed Boston by 44!) and saw the Cavs set franchise records for playoff points scored in a quarter, half, and game. Lebron James also passed Michael Jordan as the all-time playoffs scoring leader (5,995 points).

I know there are probably people that are sick of this match-up, but now they know how I felt when for years it seemed like it was always the Lakers, Bulls, Spurs, or Heat. Now it’s my team and I’m enjoying every minute of it while I can.

Go Cavs! Defend the ‘Land!

Moving from Google Photos to Amazon Prime Photos

I’ve been using Google Photos since it was announced back in 2015 as a belt-and-suspenders second cloud backup of my photo library (my primary backups are still in SpiderOak). I was using the “High Quality” setting since most of my photos are less than 16MP and didn’t want to pay for the extra storage required for “Original Quality.” For no real reason (other than wanting to get more out of my $99/year Amazon Prime subscription), I decided to switch to Amazon Prime Photos on my Amazon Drive.

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Zoning in on the Zesty Zapus

It’s mid-April, which means it’s time for my annual post about spring sports and Linux upgrades! 😉 First, sports …

For the first time in four years my Tampa Bay Lightning are not in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. They were in last place back in February and just missed squeaking into the last wild card spot but fell short. The Cleveland Cavaliers are back in the NBA playoffs, though, and start the first round against the Pacers tomorrow looking to defend their 2016 Championship title. The Tampa Bay Rays and defending 2016 American League Champions Cleveland Indians are off to slow starts, but it’s only April and there’s a long road ahead. On the NFL front, everyone is wondering what the Cleveland Browns will do with their #1 draft pick in two weeks and will actually play the Bucs here for a preseason match-up.

Now on to the new Ubuntu release, 17.04 Zesty Zapus.

Despite being released, I had to use do-release-upgrade -d to kick off the upgrade to Zesty (without the “development” flag it thought there was no new release available yet). Unlike last time, I had no issues with screen and the whole process (downloading the new packages and applying them) went smoothly. I re-applied my customizations to the affecting configuration files, rebooted the server, and was back in business.

$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 17.04
Release: 17.10
Codename: zesty

$ uname -r
4.10.0-19-generic

As expected, I had a few post-upgrade issues that needed to be addressed (nothing major):

  • calibre wouldn’t start in my vnc session: I had to resize the library.png splash screen image from 1024×1024 to 256×256
  • home-assistant wouldn’t start: I had to re-create the python virtualenv setup (I haven’t posted about using home-assistant yet, I’ll try and get to that)
  • the upgrade to vim 8.0 caused a few annoying problems: I had to tweak some settings in /etc/vim/vimrc
  • rather than using my old static /etc/motd, I customized and started using the /etc/update-motd.d scripts for a dynamic login banner

Canonical has now reached the end of the alphabet for their release code names. What name will 17.10 bring us in October? Check back with me then (when hopefully my Cleveland Indians are back in the World Series)!

Southwest Road Trip: Day 4

Since we rode the Tramway yesterday we slept in a bit this morning and then went over to the Anderson Abruzzo International Balloon Museum. Then we drove down to Old Town where we had lunch at Hacienda del Rio on the square (which inadvertently happened to be the same place we ate back in 2000) and then did some shopping.

Later in the afternoon, we drove past UNM and Kirtland Air Force Base before turning in the rental car (1,086 miles driven total!) and taking the shuttle to the airport, er, I mean, Sunport.

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Spring Training 2017: Day 4

Normally my Spring Training vacation doesn’t have a “Day 4” but this time I’m staying in Phoenix to kick off a four-day southwest road trip with my family. My brother had a later flight, as did my sister. So after checking out of the hotel we had time to actually go out for breakfast together at the Black Bear Diner.

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