Use Lightroom on a mapped network drive (on Linux with VirtualBox)

If you try to open a catalog stored on a network drive, Adobe Lightroom will complain about “Lightroom can not be opened on network volumes, removable storage or read on read only volumes.” You can easily overcome this by assigning the network drive to a drive letter using the subst command: This is especially useful …

How to copy EXIF tags from XMP to NEF with ExifTool

Adobe Lightroom only writes changes to Metadata such as geolocation into the XMP sidecar files and not directly into the EXIF tags of the image. If you add coordinates via the map module, then you will need to copy that information from the sidecar files back into your raw files (in my case Nikon NEF). …

Nikon D800 questions

Google has a new experimental feature that proposes content for your website based on search queries that might not have good enough results. For this website and the category photography, it suggests to answer the following questions:

How to install SpectraView II on Linux (Mint 20)

NEC (now Sharp) provides a Linux Version of SpectraView II and a corresponding installation guide. Unfortunately, both are pretty outdated. They reference Ubuntu 14 as the latest version 🙁 . Even worse, the application depends on some Qt4 packages which are no longer available in a current Ubuntu/Mint installation. After digging around the internet I …

Using a Wacom pen tablet inside VirtualBox 6

I have the tablet wacom intuos pen & touch small CTH-480, which I wanted to use for photo editing in Adobe Lightroom. Since I work under Linux Mint 20, I have a virtual machine running Windows 10 and Lightroom Classic 10. Unfortunately, I got the pen to work as a mouse only by disabling it …

The search for the Okinawa Rail

The Okinawa Rail is a flightless bird endemic to the Yambaru region in the north of Okinawa. The Japanese call it Yambaru Kuina, and though stylized versions of it are ubiquitous on packaging, advertising or road signs, most people have never actually seen it. Okinawa rail on street signs.

How to install ExifTool with Composer

I’m working on a PHP project, that uses Phil Harveys excellent ExifTool to read Exif and XMP tags from photos. Since ExifTool is written in Perl, there is of course no composer.json to install this dependency directly with Composer. But you can create your own package information in your master composer.json as follows: { … …

Visited by a roe deer

Over the New Year, I’ve spent a couple of days in my vacation home in the canton Vaud. During one night, we got quite a bit of fresh snow and the next evening my wife discovered this roe deer in our orchard. He was probably looking for apples.

What I don’t like about the Nikon D500

So far nothing except one (little) thing: Unlike on the D810, the GPS icon is not displayed on the top LCD only on the rear LCD. The GPS icon (on the rear LCD) blinks as long as no fix is available. Having this information on the top would be useful before taking a picture, especially …

Gimbal and replacement foot for the Nikon 600mm FL

Unfortunately, the Nikon 600mm f/4E FL ED VR does not balance with the D810 and the foot replacement LCF-13 by Really Right Stuff nor with the Nikon stock foot. The LCF-13 worked perfectly with the previous model 600mm f1/4G ED VR. After some research I ordered the foot LF-N604FL by jobu design. It is 4 …