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Condensed Knowledge – November 24, 2008

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Flash Player 10 breaks teh internets

Shortly after upgrading to Adobe’s new Flash Player, version 10, I noticed I could no longer upload photos to my blogs. And I also noticed that FriendFeed’s image uploader didn’t work the same way. I didn’t relate that to the Flash Player upgrade at first, and tried to rule out problems on my own machine. Then I did a bit of research and discovered that others were in the same boat.

Quoting from this thread on the WP forums:

“The new Flash version 10 is incompatible. The latest version 9 of Flash is what you want. There will be a workaround (ugly hack) for this in WordPress 2.7. But since the problem is actually with Flash 10 itself, stick with Flash 9 for the time being. Hopefully, WordPress 2.8 will get rid of the Flash altogether, since Adobe has made it clear that they consider this problem to be a security fix.”

On FriendFeed (FF), people complained about image uploader issues as well. In that same FF thread, I found out that Adobe archives their old versions of the Flash Player, something which is not readily apparent on their site, nor easy to find. I also found that I need to uninstall Flash Player before downgrading — should I decide to do it — using Adobe’s Flash uninstaller.

Now, we’re faced with an issue: stay with Flash 10 and a non-working image uploader on WP sites, or downgrade to Flash 9? I’ll let each of you decide what to do about that. Since there appears to be a security issue in Flash 9, it’s not something you should take lightly, but at least you’ll have options.

You may think I’m joking in my post title when I say that the new Flash Player broke the internet. Not necessarily. When you consider that there are about 3.8 million blogs at WordPress.com, and at least a few hundred thousand self-hosted WP installs from WordPress.org, that makes over 4 million websites whose WP Image Uploader broke when Flash 10 was released. I’m not sure how many FriendFeed (FF) users there are, but there should be 100,000 or more by now.

The FF developers came up with an alternate image uploader fairly quickly when they discovered the problem with Flash Player 10. WP is going to release a workaround in WP 2.7, then possibly do away with Flash for the Image Uploader in WP 2.8. WP also has an alternate way to upload photos, through the old, form-based browser uploader, where you can only do one photo at a time. That’s what I’ve been using while I wait for the new version of WP to come out.

Still, when you consider that over 4 million internet users were negatively impacted by this new version of the Flash Player, that’s not a number to take lightly. I do wish Adobe had worked with WordPress ahead of time to make the transition smoother or to offer them some sort of workaround. I found out about this the hard way, and my guess is you did, too. That’s not the ideal way to do business when you’ve got Silverlight nipping at your heels.

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How to transfer photos between Lightroom catalogs

This screencast will show you how to transfer photos between different Lightroom catalogs, and it will go beyond that by also demonstrating how the whole process could be made a LOT easier if Adobe wanted to.

In the screencast, I refer to an article I wrote a while back, entitled “The next stage for Lightroom“, where I put forth a proposal for improving the way Lightroom stores photos, with an eye on catalog portability (laptops, for example). If you have the time, please read through that article after you see the video.

The video is about 10 1/2 minutes long, file size is 78MB, and it’s 720p HD, MOV. You can view it online by clicking on the screenshot below, or download it.

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Problems with meta-data entry in Lightroom

I’ve been having problems with meta-data entry in Lightroom, particularly the location meta-data. It’s not my computer that’s to blame. The problems exist on both the PC and Mac versions of Lightroom, although they’re more apparent on the Mac version.

When I first mentioned this on Twitter and Friendfeed (see here, here and here) I promised I’d put together a video if I found a good screencasting application. Ken Verburg pointed me to iShowU, which I used to make a short screencast demonstrating the problems. Thanks Ken!

I uploaded the video to my Vimeo account last night, but don’t try to view it there. The compression is terrible and you won’t be able to see what I’m doing. Instead, go there and scroll down till you see the download link. Click on that and view it locally on your computer (you’ll need Quicktime or iTunes). Another option is to download the video directly from my site. The original video has no loss in quality and you’ll be able to see everything properly.

The video will do a good job of conveying my frustration with the user interface in Lightroom. I really do hope the final version of Lightroom 2 will address these issues, because entering location metadata in Lightroom right now is terribly frustrating.

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Condensed knowledge for 2008-03-19

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