Photoshop Album Hackery

Posted on by

In the last episode of “Alan Does Sketchy Things,” we updated post formats in a WordPress 3.2 installation.
Today, we bring you “Mass moving photos in a Photoshop Elements 5.0 organizer album.”

So Photoshop Elements organizer does have a built-in “Reconnect Missing Files” tool. However, this tool is super slow and clunky, and can only update one folder of photos at a time. In my case, I wanted to move well over 100 folders of photos, which amounted to over 100,000 individual files. Doing this through the reconnect files tool would have been way too slow. (It is also prone to causing the program to freeze, which then requires a lengthy database recovery process on next startup. Not fun.)

Fortunately for us, the photo album file (Catalog.psa) is nothing more than a Microsoft Access database. Even though the extension isn’t right, Access can still open the file without any problems.

So do that, and we see a few tables. There’s only one relevant to us: ImageTable. Open this up and you’ll see a list of every image in the catalog. There are two columns in this table that store the path to the file: fImageOriginalFilePath and fMediaFullPath.

Fixing them is as easy as doing a find-replace (which you can access via Ctrl-F). We’ll do each of the two columns separately.
Enter the old file path (for example, G:\0_Galleries2\), replace with the new file path (for example, G:\0_Galleries\), look in the fImageOriginalFilePath column only, and set match to “Any Part of Field”. Replace, and you should be set. Repeat for the fMediaFullPath column.

In my case, I had way too many rows in the table (277072 rows). This causes occasional “You can’t replace the current value of the field with the replacement text.” errors. Fortunately, retrying seems to work fine. It took me about 25 search and replace operations per column to fix up all of the relevant rows.

Once you’re done, save and open the album back up in Photoshop Organizer. I asked it to reconnect all missing files just to make sure things looked good, and then opened a few of the moved files to make sure it was properly detecting them.

Done!

People Wars

Posted on by

I started work on People Wars’ Booooth expansion today. I redid the templates slightly to give more room to the photo. I think it looks much nicer this way.


Investigations has also had a few new additions. I went through and screencapped the first episode of Torchwood today, so Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, and the first episode case have been added to the game. I should actually playtest the thing at some point. Anyone interested in helping?

Yay card games. Maybe I’ll get unlazy at some point and continue work on RPG Get!, which has pretty much been on hiatus since last January.

In other life things, Ben moved away last week for Seattle and his new job at Sage. It’s kind of sad since I’ve known him since my Sophomore year of college, and so few old people are left in Pittsburgh. He had a going-away party where we drank his random booze and ate his random meat.

I’ve been taking more photos recently (as shown by my photo stats). Perhaps I should take fewer photos. Although more photos means that I’m actually doing things, which I guess is good. Photoshop album tells me I have taken 276,797 photos since September 2000. Yay photos.

I’m glad the semester is starting up again… for me, it means Tartan on weekends and awesome Tartan people around for games.

Happy New Year

Posted on by

So it’s 2012. That’s not allowed. How does such a year even exist? :(

life (both stats and life proper) have been updated. People didn’t change much in the last 3 months, so the stats update isn’t terribly interesting.

Life has been full of new music lately. My purchases over the past month have included Mylo Xyloto, Break the Spell, Own the Night, Redemption, Clear as Day, Don’t Waste the Pretty, and Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes Session.
I probably should branch away from American Idol contestants (especially since I haven’t watched the show since season 2, and don’t really follow it). There’s a lot of other great music out there.

Did some more work with the Investigations card game. I revamped the rules a bit (so it’s less like Memory now, with a grid of cards laid out), and hopefully it’ll be shorter to play now. A preliminary (and currently incomplete) website for the game is up at http://investigations.alanv.org. If you have some time, read over the rules and let me know if they make sense. :)

This break has been way too short. More time to vegetate needed. :(

Groceries

Posted on by

There was a Christmas. It was nice. I got some iTunes gift cards, which I used to buy Kelly Clarkson’s new EP. We also got a really nice toaster oven to replace our crappy half-broken toaster (and so I can bake without heating up the huge oven).

Relatedly, I bought and watched Food, Inc. about a month ago, and it’s pretty much changed everything about how I eat.
I’m buying almost exclusively organic fruit and vegetables now (and generally buying and eating more of them than before). I’ve switched away from the “cheap” pork and beef to the turkey and free-range chicken. (Giant Eagle also has some grass-fed beef I think I’ll try soon.) I’ve started buying organic yogurt and free-range eggs instead.
Our grocery bill has gone up a bit, but for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling good about my purchases when I leave the store. Strangely, prices for organics are often only 20 to 50 cents more than the regular counterparts, when they’re not on sale. But I think buying fewer processed foods is what’s making the bill go up, since fresh produce is expensive (and also not usually on sale like the processed stuff is). It’s actually scary when you look at the labels on some packages, because something as simple as “corn meal” has like 10 ingredients. WTF, guys.

Good food is nice. I think it’s become one of the areas where it’s okay for me to pay a little more, because the quality of what you get is so much higher.

Not looking forward to going back to work on Tuesday. This break hasn’t been nearly long enough.

Birch Beer Cupcakes

Posted on by

I made cupcakes. Recipe adapted from this one.

1/4c butter
1c white sugar
2 eggs
2c flour
1tsp baking powder
1/4tsp baking soda
1 1/4c birch beer

Melt butter, mix in sugar. Beat in eggs. Combine flour, baking soda, and baking powder, then mix into butter/sugar mixture with the birch beer.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes. Makes 15 cupcakes.

I baked them in Pokemon cupcake liners, so I decorated them like Pokeballs with M&Ms as the centers.

Unrelatedly, Zeke linked me to this today. It’s SFW porn. It’s kind of amazing.
(Apparently the audio track is still present though, so mute your computer or something. I didn’t have sound on when I watched it.)

Life goes, still. Looking forward to the upcoming break. So much.