DigitalPhotos
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Sharp HN-IR1 beams cameraphone pics on your HDTV via IrSS
Sure, there's already a way to beam high-definition content onto your TV if you keep all of your media stored on your iPod, but for whimsical shooters that wield their cameraphone or IrSS-enabled digital camera most of the time, Sharp's kicking out a bantam liaison just for you. Designed to ideally operate with high-speed infrared devices, the HN-IR1 enables cellphones and other IrSS gizmos to transmit high-quality photos wirelessly, where it's then channeled onto your set at resolutions up to 1,920 x 1080. Of course, it'll automatically downscale if you aren't plugged into an HDTV, and interestingly enough, it purportedly interfaces with a few of Sharp's AQUOS HD recorders in order to burn your photos to HDD / DVD. The wee device checks in at just 3.1- x 2.8- x 1.1-inches, handles photos up to eight-megapixels, and boasts a maximum transmission rate of 4Mbps, and while no exhaustive list of compatible devices was noted, a good deal of NTT DoCoMo handsets should fit the bill. So if you never seem to have time to transfer your photos over to entertain the family with a big screen slideshow, those in Japan can snag the HN-IR1 in late April for ¥14,000 ($116).[Via Impress]
PhotoInfoEditor: Geocode Your Photos
It's becoming increasingly common for people to want to include meta-data with their photos about where they were taken. Geocoding is the process of adding location information to the meta-data of digital photos, similar to the Exif meta-data that nearly all digital cameras add with date, time, exposure settings, etc. There are even few digital cameras out there with built-in GPS to facilitate this. PhotoInfoEditor is a nice little utility that allows you to geocode your existing photos, either by just typing in the latitude and longitude, or even better, by marking the location on the built-in Google Map. As you can see from the screen capture above, you select the photo you want to geocode and then simply zoom into the location on the Google Map to mark it. Very slick.PhotoInfoEditor is still a little touchy (sometimes the Google Maps don't draw correctly), but it's a nice idea, and best of all it's free (donations requested). Obviously, you have to have an active internet connection for this to work, but you can mark locations anywhere in the world.[Via FreeMacWare]
CardRaider: Undelete for Memory Cards
If you've ever accidentally deleted digital photos from a memory card before downloading them you'll probably be interested in CardRaider from ecamm. Just mount the card on your Mac with an external card reader (or even in the camera itself if it is a USB mass storage device), and CardRaider may be able to find and recover the images and even send them to iPhoto. Keep in mind that this only works because the memory locations of the files are not immediately written over when you delete a photo on your camera, so it probably won't work if you have refilled the card with more photos (or reformatted the card). Nonetheless, I can image this little utility could be a life-saver if you accidentally hit the delete key too quickly when scanning through snapshots on your camera.CardRaider is $19.95 and a demo is available.[Via MacVolPlace][Edit: as usual TUAW readers are the best. We got several recommendations for free alternatives below in the comments including: Exif Untrasher and Photorec. Thanks, guys!]
Trigger an Automator workflow by plugging in a digital camera
While cruising around Automatorworld this afternoon, I discovered this great tip for triggering an Automator workflow just by plugging a digital camera into your Mac. Once you've created your workflow, save it as an application. Next, launch the Image Capture application, and navigate to its preferences. Select the workflow application you just created under “When a camera is connected, open:” and you're all set. The next time you plug in your camera, your workflow will run.A simple trick, but you could do some cool stuff with it. Like renaming images or moving copies to a burn folder or archive disk before transferring to iPhoto. I have a Powerbook and an iMac at home - keeping the two libraries in sync is a pain, and sharing those massive libraries over Airport I've found to be just short of agonizing. Now I'm thinking of creating a workflow that will logon to the iMac from the Powerbook, transfer the new photos to a designated folder and then upload to iPhoto on the Powerbook. Then all I need to do is drag the destination folder into iPhoto when I'm sitting at the iMac. Easy! After all, isn't that what computers are for? To make our lives easier?
