From Canon CR2 Raw files to the Web

A potentially interesting artefact of me playing around with a Canon DSLR is that libferris now has some initial support for CR2 "raw" files. Complements of course go to the dcraw library and tools for the heavy lifting. The upshot is that ferriscp ~/cam/foo.CR2 flickr://me/upload now works as expected. Once I update my maemo build, this should also let me use an n900 with 3G to upload from RAW while on the move.

I need to include stuff for ICC profiles and the like but at least the Web services get what they expect and everything runs smoothly, and it will for you too next release (TM). I really should look into mounting the kipi plugins as a filesystem sometime, they offer some awesome Web import/export functionality, ripe for a filesystem I tell's ya.

I still need to add "rgba-32bpp" metadata support for CR2 files. As you can imagine from the name, if you read this metadata for a jpeg, png or other supported image file, libferris decodes the image to 32 bit RGBA byte values for you. It might also be interesting to create another "file as filesystem" design where a bunch of virtual files are offered to see the small thumbnail, the roughly 1080p sized thumbnail or the ICC corrected rendering of the CR2 and others. Such virtual files are really handy for drag and drop to other filesystems ;)

I might hunt around for some Nikon raw files to add support for those too at some point. Though there is nothing like having a camera generating files to make you want to make your software support those files.

Talking: RDF and Office Documents

I should be giving a talk about RDF and ODF next saturday (8th jan) at Humbug in Brissie. The challenge is that work is reasonably embryonic in the area, but there are already useful things that can be done like drag and drop of contact and calendar information to/from ODF files. As its a technical meetup I'll be going into the range stuff and how to link semantics to document text. Sorry for the brief post, but hopefully you see it and come along if you want to bounce richer information around in ODF files between OpenOffice, Calligra, and Abiword.