4:3 or 16:9? Or both?
Unfortunately when analyzing the device features before making the purchase I overlooked one aspect - the display is 16:9 while most (essentially all) of my photos are 4:3. And there is no sensible way to automatically adjust the display to handle the format change properly. It either stretches the proportions or adds vertical bands (that may be configured to be white, gray, or black). Neither looks good.
So I went off to Adobe Lightroom to see what can be done about the format change. And I have to say I like what I've found.
Lightroom is a powerful photo library tool. The fundamental concept it has is storing the base images, as imported from a camera, and then the whole sequence of operations done on the image. SO at any time you can roll back and forth with the adjustments. Once happy, you export the photos, usually to JPG format. Lightroom has a concept of a virtual copy of a photo. A virtual copy is really a fork of a series of adjustments. Once a virtual copy is created, it simply starts a new sequence of photo tuning operations. In my case, using that feature, I can have the main photo in a 4:3 format and the virtual copy in a 16:9 format. Without duplicating the physical RAW files on the hard drive. Lightroom even makes the flow very easy: select the original 4:3 photos (usually Ctrl+A on a selected collection in the library view), create a new collection and while doing that it offers to create virtual copies of the selected photos and add them to the new collection - all in one step. Once there, select all newly created copies and change the Crop Ration in the Quick Develop pane, as illustrated on the attached screen shot.
Now the "only" remaining thing to do is to crawl through all photos, one by one and decide how the crop is done. This is tedious, but unless we get some kind of AI to cope with such tasks, you have to do it anyway. The good thing is, in the end you will have two formats available side by side: the original 4:3 and the cropped 16:9. I think it is worth doing, as increasingly more displays offer 16:9, while image sensors remain mostly 4:3 (at leas for the time being).
Happy cropping!
Meural really is great, I think of second one, for tho other room...
ReplyDeleteas for cropping - there're other options, of course all have some pros/cons, if you have collection already available - you can run imagemagick on all to crop with gravity to the center
And for AI part - as an example you could use google vision to find out faces on the picture and set gravity to keep faces inside cropped area. but that would involve some programming already.
Thanks for the ImageMagick tip. I need to look into it. But having said that, I still prefer manual re-cropping. I tend to be rather pedantic about my photos and like to have precise control over the final looks. Lightroom has been serving me well with its library management. I wish it was better integrated with Google Photos, as the workflow of pulling somebody else's photos from shared GF album is not that straightforward.
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of Meural - they should join forces with Nixplay. We have several Nixplay frames and they have great remote photo management. Again the integration with Google Photos is lagging, but their own UI is pretty good. I think there is only a handful of people on the planet who discovered the Meural and figured out how to use it as a photo frame.
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