card reader dangers [LWN.net]

card reader dangers

Posted Feb 15, 2005 6:21 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera by dhess
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

I used to unplug the SmartMedia memory module from my camera and plug it into a PCMCIA card. It was fine until the PCMCIA card started destroying memory modules. Now I use only USB, and never remove the card from the camera.

Incidentally, I use flphoto to sort through pictures -- mainly just to turn them upright. One of its unusual merits is that it can losslessly rotate the pictures. That is, instead of reading and decompressing a jpeg, rotating it, and then re-encoding a new jpeg, it operates on the compressed jpeg data directly. Oddly, flphoto isn't in the Debian repository, so it's one of very few programs on my systems that I had to build myself.

Of course I never tried to get flphoto to work the camera itself. Rather, relying on an automount entry with a two-second timeout, I plug in the camera, "cp -p /camera/*" to an appropriate directory (usually named, e.g., 20050215), wait just a moment, and unplug.

Here's the line in /etc/auto.rmv:

camera -fstype=vfat,ro,noatime,user,dmask=0 :/dev/sda1

and in /etc/auto.master:

/rmv /etc/auto.rmv --timeout=2

(Note that the syntax for the last bit changed between releases of the automount daemons, without notice). Of course I have a convenient symbolic link from /camera to /rmv/camera/dcim/100olymp, which is how my Olympus presents its files once mounted.

It didn't take all day to set this up, but I did waste a half hour on discovering that "--timeout 2" had stopped working, and what to do instead. Otherwise, the whole project took 15 minutes. It took a lot longer to figure out that all the GUI programs I could apt-get (at the time) were useless. I wonder if a hotplug mount script would be cleaner than relying on the buggy autofs driver.

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one more thing

Posted Feb 15, 2005 8:02 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I have just tried gthumb 2.6.3, and am now ready to abandon flphoto.

card reader dangers

Posted Feb 15, 2005 18:12 UTC (Tue) by dhess (subscriber, #7827) [Link]

Incidentally, I use flphoto to sort through pictures -- mainly just to turn them upright. One of its unusual merits is that it can losslessly rotate the pictures. That is, instead of reading and decompressing a jpeg, rotating it, and then re-encoding a new jpeg, it operates on the compressed jpeg data directly.

Maybe you already knew this, but jpegtran also does lossless rotation, and it's available in Debian's libjpeg-progs. In fact, all of jpegtran's image processing is performed on the DCT blocks.

card reader dangers

Posted Feb 15, 2005 20:42 UTC (Tue) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910) [Link]

If your camera has an orientation sensor, then you can use "jhead" with the "-autorot" option to automatically rotate pictures that need rotating.

I usually do all my image processing through one big fully automated shell script. This takes care of most of what I need to do. And only a small select number of pictures ever need manual post processing.

mogrify

Posted Feb 25, 2005 20:20 UTC (Fri) by grouch (subscriber, #27289) [Link]

"Incidentally, I use flphoto to sort through pictures -- mainly just to turn them upright. One of its unusual merits is that it can losslessly rotate the pictures. That is, instead of reading and decompressing a jpeg, rotating it, and then re-encoding a new jpeg, it operates on the compressed jpeg data directly. Oddly, flphoto isn't in the Debian repository, so it's one of very few programs on my systems that I had to build myself."

apt-get install imagemagick

You can then use mogrify to rotate your images, for example:

mogrify -compress lossless -rotate +90 myphoto.jpg

some links that may help