Mark's Blog about Tech and Cool Stuff

I have a lot of travel photos taken on my DSLR that are missing the GPS location.  Having the location is handy for friends and family to see exactly where the photos were taken from.  Over time your own memory fades too. Most of my photos are in raw format (Canon CR2), and I can use Picasa to set the GPS location, but only after the photos have been processed and saved as JPG (or TIFF etc).  If I add the location to the raw image, then it saves the location to metadata that only Picasa recognises. If I go back and reprocess the raw photo, then the new JPG will have lost the location information.  What I needed was software that could add the location to the raw photo. I looked around for alternate software, and did try a few things.  Usually they didn't work on raw files, or were just clunky to use.  Many applications are also designed for taking coordinates from GPS loggers - which I don't have. Furthermore, I don't want to have to type in GPS c...

Picasa  is a quick and handy picture viewer and organiser for all the photos on your PC. Picasa was discontinued by Google in 2016 when they chose to focus exclusively on the cloud. Even though it was discontinued, Picasa is still my preferred software for viewing, searching and managing photos. This post will explain how you can still use Picasa, and specifically integrate with the new Google Photos cloud storage. In short Picasa is still useful.  Furthermore by integrating with Google Photos, you get great cloud hosting for backup and sharing.

TVersity is a digital media server that can share media over your home network using UPnP/DNLA. This is kind-of like Windows file sharing/SMB, except that a digital media server can be a lot smarter.  You get access to traditional media such as picture, audio or movie files, like you would through network file sharing.  TVersity though can take things further, supporting: On-the-fly transcoding of media into a format suitable for your media player, Downloading content from the Internet, Streaming media as it is being downloaded or transcoded, Tagging of media to present a smarter content view instead of just a traditional directory structure, Improved network performance compared with normal network file sharing.  I'm able to stream 1080p video rather than having to copy it to the internal HDD My media player is a Astone AP-300 and is similar to many others in that it has network connectivity, HD video support, and of-course acts as a UPnP Media Player/Render...

I wrote an interface to Picasa Web Albums for the BeyonWiz PVR range (DP-P1, DP-S1, DP-H1 and DP-P2). This allows you to view Picasa Web Albums on your TV without needing you to switch your computer on. Instead it directly accesses Picasa Web Albums through your Internet connection so you are always getting the latest photos your family and friends have uploaded. Here's some images of the user interface. Note these are photos of the TV screen, so are not representative of the actual picture quality. This software is open source under a New BSD license . You can view, download or contribute to the code on the Google Code project WizTV-modules . Please ask questions or provide feedback on the BeyonWiz Forum . The company must be happy with it. They are now promoting their hardware based on the Picasa viewer capability: Kemp believes the latest Beyonwiz range is the most feature packed PVR on the market. In addition to having dual tuners and access to Freeview’s EPG,...