photoshop actions allow you to record and automate frequently used procedures, much like the “record macro” feature does in microsoft office.
for example you could automatically insert a text or image into a photo, move it to the top left corner (0/0), set opacity etc., and merge the layers.
it’s that easy! well, almost.

usually, copyright notices are placed in the bottom right corner of a photo, so you’ll get a problem if you’re working with different image sizes – i.e. landscape and portrait orientation.
the top corner will always be at 0/0 pixels, but the position of the bottom right corner is variable.

i’ve been searching for a solution to this for a very long time, and eventually settled with two separate photoshop actions – one for standard 640×480 (landscape), and one for 480×640 (portrait) photos. everything else had to be modified manually.

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here’s a list of useful wordpress plugins that i use to extend the functionality of this blog:

• akismet (plugin homepage) makes comment spam history.
   
• all in one SEO pack (plugin homepage) takes care of search engine optimization.
   
• around this date in the past (plugin homepage) shows posts from previous years.
   

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during a sight-seeing-tour through austria last year, i took some extra pictures of various sights for panorama-stitching. there’s a powerful panorama photo stitcher called hugin, that makes things very easy – and it’s open-source!

here’s an exapmle of what hugin can do:

i took a set of 11 pictures (not using a tripod!) to get a complete view of the collegiate church at stift melk (melk abbey), austria.

importing them into hugin, all i had to do was specify an estimation of the horizontal field of view (it’s automatically recognized from newer cameras), and hugin started computing away. [more...]

i’ve never been fond of windows’ animated search assistants, even though i must say that i liked Clippit (”Franz Klammer” in german) best of them all.

here’s part a blog post about microsoft’s history of animated character patents (including pictures):

It’s hard to take Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP’s Search Assistant doggie seriously. But a dozen years’ worth of patents relating to the basic idea shows that Microsoft takes it very seriously indeed–and I’m convinced that someone, somewhere within the company is still working away at it.

The Secret Origins of Clippy

this is probably more of a “memo to self”-sort of post that saves me the time of searching, next time firefox decides to cause problems.
still, you might find some of it interesting:

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here’s a refreshing new way to search for photos:
using the idee inc. multicolr search lab, you can browse through flickr photos by specifying their colours.
the more colours you add, the more interesting it gets.

you can even search for images similar to one of yours’ with the BYO image search.

ever since mr. cheng ;) introduced the ingenuity that is piclens (a free firefox plugin), i’ve been enjoying a completely different way of looking at pictures online.

however, there is a situation when it’s acting weird, so in case you have the same problem as i did:

my main pc has a desktop which stretches over two displays, and i’m using firefox 2.0.0.16¹ with piclens 1.7.1.3900. when piclens is showing the 3D-wall on one of the displays and i click on a window on the other screen, piclens minimizes to a black rectangle just above the windows start button:

it behaves the same way when i use “alt+tab” to switch to a different window.
switching back to firefox, piclens seems to block any action there. double-clicking the black frame sometimes reopens the black screen, but doesn’t show any images.

the workaround: i reactivate the firefox window using “alt+tab” or “shift+alt+tab” (which goes backwards, and the piclens icon is at position 1 on my pc). not sure if this works for everybody, but it does for me.

oh, and you can now use piclens in my galleries when looking at any single album such as this.