Messages

1

General Software Discussion / File renamer that can work with EXIF data and can be automated?

« on: February 10, 2019, 11:50 AM »

I'm sure that something like this exists, need some help. I have a lot of old photos I'm trying to organize. The look like this right now -

photos
-- party
----- img01.jpg, img02.jpg etc
-- marriage
----- m1
-------- dsc100.jpg, dsc101.jpg etc
----- m2
-------- dsc100.jpg, dsc101.jpg etc (same name but different pics)

What I'd like to end up with is photos renamed with folder name, and date+tags from EXIF data, in those respective folders.

e.g.
party
---- party_2015_1205_0930pm.jpg

I've tried a few renaming tools but none could do this and I didn't find any way to do this in batch mode or from cmd line, as I have a huge number of photos to process.

Any suggestions?

2

Living Room / Re: 10th Anniversary - long time member check-in thread

« on: March 07, 2015, 04:36 AM »

Hello everyone!

I still love this site and apologize for not having been very active, I have mostly been a lurker here reading all the great posts and learning from them, discovering new software etc. I'm just glad to be reminded of this by mouser, and will try to contribute more.

3

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« on: September 23, 2013, 04:03 PM »

I will not use a non-index based search program. All the arguments about indexes taking more resources are false. Think about it.

non-index search : has to examine all files on filesystem. If it's smart it uses NTFS MFT table (like in Everything). If you need to search contents, it has no option but to open every file and search through it, over and over again for each search.

index-based search: does the same process, but only once. After that it gets updated whenever the file changes, through a file change notification, which is very efficient. The cost is just keeping the index on disk which is trivial. The advantage - much less disk access and much higher speed.

The indexing service doesn't even do much compared to other similar services on the pc that also look at the file. e.g. every time a file is touched, many things like your AV/malware program will hook into it, read the file contents, compute its signature etc.

4

General Software Discussion / Re: 2013 Version: Browser Wars

« on: January 30, 2013, 04:29 PM »

Chrome also insists in going out of its way to prevent me from doing certain things -

- change the location of the profile folder. I don't want it on the c: drive
- not run googleupdate.exe on startup
- no multi row tabs

I've turned off web history for my google account, but I somehow don't feel comfortable in Chrome, as if it might still be tracking me (tin foil hat on). I do like Chrome's sync feature though.

5

General Software Discussion / Re: 2013 Version: Browser Wars

« on: January 29, 2013, 04:27 PM »

The answer is simple - Firefox can do anything the other browsers can, and much much more, thanks to its addons. You *might* see speed differences but these are highly dependent on hardware, plugins, no. of open tabs etc, and thus not really a reliable metric.

Chrome's only virtue is that it increased competition, but it also bought about horrid UI paradigms (tabs in title bar), insane numbering schemes etc.

6

General Software Discussion / Re: Software that sounded useful, so you bought it, but then...

« on: January 07, 2013, 02:36 PM »

I'm a paid user of Xplorer2 for years now. The other day I paid again for v2.0, and it turns out there really isn't that much new or different at all. I don't mind this, since it supports the developer and its an essential program, but I was really hoping for new features.

7

General Software Discussion / Re: Suggestions for a RSS reader

« on: December 23, 2012, 09:07 PM »

1. offline support. Download all the feed content, including comments, images etc, so it can be viewed anytime. I want the app to act as a cache of the blog, essentially.

People go offline?


I just use Opera Feed...I think this has most of the above options.

-Stephen66515 (December 23, 2012, 08:22 PM)

I don't go offline that much, but blogs/websites certainly do! Many times I've opened a bookmark only to find the content is no longer there. So I want to save it, but keep it organized.

I do use Scrapbook for exactly this purpose, but it imposes its own structure and is hard to sync. I've tried syncing it using Dropbox and it didn't work too well.

8

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox CPU usage

« on: December 23, 2012, 08:10 PM »

I wish Firefox had a SIMPLE counter about memory and cpu being consumed by each tab/extension/window. Not sure if this is possible without each tab being an individual process (which leads to the Chrome nightmare of multiple running exe's), and even then XUL is still shared right?

The current situation is unmanageable. I am a heavy user - right now I have Waterfix x64 with about 60+ tabs (out of which about half are loaded), 20+ extensions. a bunch of styles and scripts etc. This is on a fairly decent pc - Q6600 with 6GB Ram, so it shouldn't slow down. Yet, completely out of the blue, cpu will spike to 40-60%, then fall back sometimes, other times it stays high.

The only 'fix' is to restart the browser (which causes everything to be unloaded except 1 tab), and play the extension game - selectively enable/disable each one, and restart. This is not fun.

9

General Software Discussion / Suggestions for a RSS reader

« on: December 23, 2012, 07:59 PM »

My goal is to use the RSS reader as a one stop app for all my news reading/searching etc. I've tried a number of them - web based such as Feedly, and desktop like RssOwl, FeedDemon, and none seem to meet my needs. This is what I want -

1. offline support. Download all the feed content, including comments, images etc, so it can be viewed anytime. I want the app to act as a cache of the blog, essentially.
2. syncing - whether it is via Google Reader, or their own service. So things like unread, favorites, saved searches/filters can sync
3. Portable mode if possible
4. Support for comments to be seen inside the app

#1 seems like the hardest to do. Some of the apps have an offline mode but it seems to act like a web browser cache, i.e if I need to reinstall the app, then its lost. There are a lot of important blogs, and my goal is to keep their content available to me by saving it, and also use the reader as a way to manage them, search, filter etc.

10

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Aero (transparent window borders, etc.) is dead.. Good riddance

« on: May 22, 2012, 04:57 PM »

I liked Aero It didn't use up any cpu since it was all gpu rendered and got disabled on pc's which couldn't render it. And it was a very nice look.

11

General Software Discussion / Re: Waterfox has now been accepted as a Mozilla project

« on: January 24, 2012, 08:26 PM »

Look, I realize this is the beauty of open source. But I don't need 3 separate release channels, nightlies, PaleMoon, Waterfox, the other customized builds on mozillazine. I don't need SrWare Iron, portableapps versions etc.

Just give me one damn install package that works. Give me an option for a portable install. Have an option in the app to accept beta updates, or only stable ones. This browser fragmentation is ridiculous, and no one cares about it.

12

General Software Discussion / Re: Betanews.com - What was once a great site, is no longer

« on: January 24, 2012, 08:22 PM »

Even with Admuncher furiously killing ads, it loads slower than the old site.

13

General Software Discussion / Re: Software Uninstallers

« on: January 24, 2012, 04:30 PM »

I think this is how it roughly works -

- Program X lists stuff in its msi manifest that it needs - these are files, registry entries etc. Windows Installer creates these, or checks they exist etc
- When it runs, X creates more stuff. Windows has no knowledge of these
- When you uninstall, stuff in the manifest is removed. Rest is left alone
- Programs like Revo do a scan of the registry looking for references to the program path, its known reg entries etc, and try to remove orphaned entries

It's all extremely inelegant and error prone. Even Microsoft has finally given up the idea of shared install binaries with Windows 8 - Metro mandates a single app folder with all the binaries it needs contained within.

14

General Software Discussion / Software Uninstallers

« on: January 24, 2012, 04:06 PM »

A few issues I want to talk about -

1. Is the uninstaller in Windows enough? 3rd party uninstallers just call the same entry point to uninstall anyway, all they do is have a nicer GUI and maybe list more stuff.

2. Uninstallers that work by diffing - i.e. taking a snapshot before and after install, then comparing. Are these reliable? There's too much going on in the OS, and no way to determine what's related to the app you're installing, or is just additional filesystem/registry activity.

3. Does Windows even support true uninstalling? I say not. Because every single program that has a trial version leaves behind remnants, so you can't install it again and restart the trial.  And many programs never uninstall properly. e.g. crap like Acronis TrueImage, and leave behind tons of stuff.

15

General Software Discussion / Re: Drive Extender replacement due out in 2012. It's called Storage Spaces.

« on: January 11, 2012, 04:27 AM »

Windows server products such as Storage Server have SIS on all data. WHS also has it for backups.

16

General Software Discussion / Detecting duplicate videos

« on: January 10, 2012, 09:12 PM »

I turn to the experts and hope something like this exists. It should detect duplicates by analyzing frames in the video and be able to identify clips that share parts of the video (e.g. a movie rip, and  youtube clips from the movie, ) and mark the ones with the highest resolution and quality.

I found research papers that propose methods of doing this -

http://scenic.prince...t/edge-lab-video.pdf
http://ieeexplore.ie...60&userType=inst

Obviously this will be very expensive computationally but it doesn't matter.

17

General Software Discussion / Re: Drive Extender replacement due out in 2012. It's called Storage Spaces.

« on: January 10, 2012, 09:03 PM »

I believe this is very different from the spanning/dynamic volume support already present in Windows.

- data is written in 256MB slabs, which also include metadata. Thus the physical disks are readable in any other Win 8 pc, as long as you have enough to form a 'quorum'
- support for parity, mirroring and resiliency
- probably built on top of a new filesystem layer called ReFS, details on which are scarce

This is the work the WHS team was doing for DE v2 when they decided to scrap DE completely from WHS 2011. I hope its will include features such as Single Instance Storage and automatic error correction and detection (the 2 missing biggies) soon.

18

General Software Discussion / Re: xplorer2 at Bits Du Jour soon....

« on: January 02, 2012, 05:24 PM »

I purchased xplorer2 but didn't upgrade to 2.0 since it required a new license (and because it didn't really offer much new features). If the lifetime upgrade is cheap I'll bite.

19

General Software Discussion / Re: Finally made it to Windows 7 -- looking for partitioning reccomendations

« on: October 25, 2011, 06:39 PM »

The goal of partitioning should be (or at least is for me) the ability to wipe and restore a partition without affecting others. Doing it for space/categories doesn't make sense because

1) folders work just as well. If you must, mount a folder as a drive letter
2) sooner or later you'll run out of space while another partition has free space

So what I do is make a OS partition (40-50gb is enough) and a data one. On the data partition are 2 folders - Data and Apps. Then I move my user profile folders into Data, so that all docs, music, pictures are in there. All portable apps go in Apps. Everything else is installed by default in c:\.

This allows me to reinstall Windows or restore an image of the OS partition without affecting my data. I try to use portable apps, and if not (e.g. Visual Studio), reinstalling is simple. Data gets backed up as usual, and I don't worry about data on c:\ since by definition it is expendable.

20

General Software Discussion / Re: Couldn't be more disappointed in Windows 8 :(

« on: September 22, 2011, 12:17 AM »

Not sure where you've been for the last 10 years, but for most people the desktop is not their primary computer. That ship has sailed. Their phone, tablet or other device is what is increasingly what they turn on first. MS currently has almost no share of that market, but are gunning for it. The desktop PC is that boring thing they create spreadsheets on at work and couldn't care less if it disappeared tomorrow.

-craigvn (September 21, 2011, 10:00 PM)

Phones and tablets are a tiny minority. The shift has been from desktops to laptops, and those don't have touchscreens. Even if Metro is not enabled for desktop devices, it still doesn't mean we'll get any improvements for desktop apps over Windows 7. Sinofsky has made it clear that Win8 is 'touch-first' experience. Based on previous releases, its very unlikely we'll see major changes from this point onwards. And WinRT has a lot of nice features, and its useless for desktop apps. Its quite clear where the focus is, and its not on non-touch devices.

21

General Software Discussion / Couldn't be more disappointed in Windows 8 :(

« on: September 21, 2011, 07:55 PM »

After months of anticipation and excitement, the W8 reveal was such as huge letdown. I was hoping for something fresh and exciting, similar to the Windows 7 M3 build. Instead, what we got is this -

- an OS designed for tablets and phones. 'Touch-first' really means 'screw you mouse and keyboard users'
- Nothing new for desktop users except inconvenience of being dropped into Metro. Ok, Explorer ribbon, file copies, faster startup, and new task manager.
- As a developer, WinRT is a failure - its only good for Metro apps, any desktop app will still need the old frameworks like .NEt, WPF, Win32

In other words, for 99.9% of the population running a desktop OS, there's absolutely nothing new and no reason to upgrade. Nothing new in the OS, nothing new for developers.
On the other hand, if you wanted to write the next version of your iPad app for Windows tablets (which won't be out for at least 6 months) you're in luck.

22

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: June 08, 2011, 02:56 AM »

Are there any xplorer2 users who've tried (or even switched) to DOpus? I love xplorer2 because its design philosophy seems to be built to cater to power users - there are many hidden powerful functions (the help file is daunting) but lots of little nice touches that don't have a wow factor but soon become indispensable. And its fast.

23

General Software Discussion / Re: Why don't browsers show page title in the titlebar anymore?

« on: March 17, 2011, 07:54 PM »

Fx4 is a usability disaster anyway. I'm rather happy that we have Dactyl/Vimperator and (on my main machines) add-ons that bring back my old Fx3 layout...

-Tuxman (March 17, 2011, 06:48 PM)

Link (or names) to the addons please? Is it this one - https://addons.mozil...-theme-for-firefox/?

24

General Software Discussion / Why don't browsers show page title in the titlebar anymore?

« on: March 17, 2011, 02:55 PM »

I think it was Chrome that started this stupid trend - the page title is only displayed in the tab, and the window title is empty. Now they all do it - IE, Firefox 4. It makes it impossible to see what page you're on when there are more than 5-10 tabs open, without hovering over each.

I don't see any reason to do this.

25

General Software Discussion / Re: A LOUDER Internet

« on: March 15, 2011, 06:13 PM »

The no. of people who don't want to click 'play' on a page with embedded media will always be a LOT greater than those who do. So this is never going to change.

The point of the web is to provide a rich user experience. If a website has music, I of course want the music to start playing when I visit it. The fact that this feature is abused doesn't mean autoplay is bad.