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Finding missing photos in Lightroom 2

The short.

Grayed-out and question-mark inflicted folders in Lightroom?

This solution works when your photographs’ Lightroom directory structure remains the same but parent directories have moved (due to, for example, installing a new OS).

Quick solution :

If no parent folder exists:

  1. In the Library module, under the Folders panel (ctrl+shift+2) right-click one folder and select “Add parent folder”
  2. Make sure that the old parent folder and the new parent folder share the same name, if not, change new parent folder to match old parent folder name (not in Lightroom, but in Windows Explorer).

Once parent folder exists:

  1. Selecting the parent folder, right click and select “Update folder location.”
  2. Point to parent folder.
  3. Lightroom should now find all you photos.

Good Luck!

The long.

I recently downgraded from Windows Vista to XP. In the process of doing this I had to format my hard drive and reinstall everything. While it’s nice to have “renovated the house”, there are always headaches to deal with with any OS re-install. My biggest was that the directory structure for XP and Vista are different so that, even after I saved my Lightroom catalogue to a second external hard drive (see my post on managing Lightroom catalogues for more information on that) and added it back to my fresh Lightroom install, Lightroom thought that all of my pictures were missing in action.

I was underwhelmed with Adobe’s suggestion, in part because my catalogue structure was without a parent folder and Adobe’s solution would have me selecting each folder and telling the program where it went. With over 100 folders, this menial task seemed like too much repetitive work. I was looking for a batch solution.

After farting around, I found a surprisingly easy solution: when you right click any folder (that is, any folder without a parent folder), you get an option to “add parent folder”. Simply click this and the parent folder should appear. For me, this made “Pictures” appear as the parent folder. This is the default file folder in Vista but in XP, it is “My Pictures”. I changed the file folder name in XP to “Pictures” so that they matched. With this done, there was enough continuity with old and new directory structure to tell Lightroom where to find the photos.

Right-clicking the parent Pictures directory in Lightroom, I selected the “Update folder location” option and, using the folder tree, pointed to the parent directory. Lightroom is smart enough that once it has found a parent directory to look for all the children folders. So, once you’ve pointed it in the right direction, the process becomes automated.

Thankfully, Lightroom found all my photographs.

(Truth be told, my process was a was a wee bit longer. Prior to figuring this out, I had pointed Lightroom to a few children folders. This, problematically created two parent folders called “Pictures”. When I figured out what I was doing and tried to “update folder location” for the missing Pictures folder (that held the majority of my folders), I got a message, to the effect that this folder was already added to my catalogue. Shit! The solution? In windows explorer, I created a dummy parent folder (which I called “Dummy”) and then moved the Pictures folder into it. Now, in Lightroom, all my photos went missing again. Selecting the Pictures parent directory with the most children folders, I updated to the new folder location. Now I had to manually change the folder location for the remaining folders, but this was a much shorter process. With all the folders back together, I closed Lightroom and moved the “Pictures” folder out of the dummy folder back to its original location. Reopening Lightroom caused the pictures to go missing again, but it was a matter of following the five steps above to get everything back in order.)

Collapsing space and freezing time in birding

The following post includes ruminations and ideas emerging as I analyze the data collected for my PhD dissertation focusing on the act of birding. It doesn’t represent a final thought or particular endpoint: these are ideas in progress. I would be interested in hearing your opinion of my ideas, too.

Birders

Many birding technologies appear to serve the function of augmenting the process of  identification of observed birds. These ID technologies seem to serve two broad functions to augment limitations birders face: the first is the the distance between themselves and observed birds and the second is the ability to identify a bird during the (unpredictable) length of time they have watching it. Putting the second another way, it’s the speed with which a birder can make an identification that they think is correct.

Birders attempt to correct the first by using technologies that collapse space  and seem to correct the second by using technologies that change the nature of time. Let me expand a bit because while I think collapsing space is easy to understand if you’ve birded, freezing time might be a bit more oblique.

(more…) “Collapsing space and freezing time in birding”

Female Blue Tits use home-made potpourri in nests to to attract males and have healthier chicks

Blue Tit by Marko_KBlue Tit used under a creative commons lisence by Marko_K. Thanks Marko!

Blue Tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) nesting on the Medeteranian island of Corsica have been known to incorporate fresh sprigs of aromatic plants, like French Lavender (Lavandula stoechas) into their nest cups. New research ((Aromatic plants in nests of blue tits: positive effects on nestlings by Adèle Mennerata, Philippe Perreta, Patrice Bourgaultc, Jacques Blondela, Olivier Gimeneza, Don W. Thomasc, Philipp Heebb and Marcel M. Lambrechtsa)) reports that there may be benefits beyond a nest that smells like potpourri: these aromatic plants offer benefits to larger broods of Blue Tit chicks.

The potpourri, interestingly, does not reduce the number of ectoparasites ((Corsican Blue Tits hold the distinction of having the highest known “loads” of blow fly larvae, for example)) found on the birds in the nest. Rather, the researchers suggest that either the aromatic plants offer immune system benefits (mechanism still unknown) or, and I quite rather like this idea, the females that actively incorporate fresh sprigs of aromatic plants are indicating their fitness to males. In other words, the fresher, more aromatic the nests, the “better” the female is as a mate (and subsequently, the “better” the offspring).

Now that makes you think about that stale bowl of potpourri on the back of your great-aunt’s toilet tank differently…

Four weeks of Griff

, originally uploaded by Gavatron.

The Griffaroo turned 14 weeks this Saturday and we’ve been living with him for the last four of those. When we brought him home, he was certainly very puppy-like and he continues to be: ankle-biting, mouthing and all that good puppy stuff.

Compared to Ollie, he certainly was (and is) much more assertive. The first two weeks on putting him on his back was always a struggle–he would squirm and bite as though he didn’t want to be there and couldn’t understand why I was doing this to him. Hallmarks of a dominant dog.

During those first weeks in new situations, such as meeting another dog or person, his reaction was to bark. And not a friendly “let’s play” bark but a puppy version of “eff-off…if you come any closer I’ll kill you”. It was worrisome. He would also growl at us in particular situations: once when I took a bull penis away (don’t worry, they’re dog treats) and also once when picking him up. Our reaction to this was to continue to do the actions and not accept a growl as an appropriate behaviour. Letting him know that we’re in charge and he does what we want him to do, we started to hand feed him and interrupt other acts of daily life to see what reaction we would get. 99.9% of the time, he’s fine with everything that’s going on.

We’ve worked hard on this growling and barking through socialization; with other dogs and people. He’s improving on both fronts, and we’re both feeling like he’s making progress toward a less fearful reaction when in threatening situations.

It doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and lollipops at this point. Dad came to visit today and, with Griff in his lap, bent down to say hello. When he got close to Griff’s face, Griff growled and moved away. An improvement, but still growling in a situation like that is unacceptable. We got the treats out, and had Dad continue to be close to his face and feed him the treats. No more growling and even a few licks. Now, hopefully he’ll be less fearful when a stranger picks him up and gets close: good things happened the last time this happened to me.

All of this is challenging. We need Griff to be a well-balanced, predictable dog. Acting out of fear is not a reaction we can live with. And while it’s scary not to know what the future holds (will he get worse? Become that monster of a Terrier that you can’t trust with anyone?) he’s such a smart, sweet boy the majority of the time that we’re committed to making this work.

Double-crested Cormorants self medicate by swallowing stones

Double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) in silhouette

Thanks to Flickr member mikebaird for sharing the DCC photo with a creative commons license.

A just-published paper suggests that Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) in the Great Lakes may swallow stones to reduce the number of parasitic nematodes–and in so doing, are self-medicating. Many birds ingest stones to help with the digestion of physically hard objects, but fish, the primary meal of the DCC are soft-bodied and don’t need the kind of mechanical assistance. So why are DCCs found with ingested stones?

Researchers found that:

At a Lake Ontario site, females more often had small stones in their stomachs and were less parasitized by nematodes than were males, and males with small stones had fewer nematodes than males without small stones. We did not find similar patterns in small stone presence or parasitism at a Lake Erie site; however, Lake Erie birds had fewer parasites and lower proportions of birds with small stones.

Which, in turn lead to the conclusion that since the birds that had stones were less likely to have nematodes, then the stones are the bird-equivalent of some anti-worm medication. Smart birds.

Small rant:

Interestingly, the Lake Ontario site was located at Presqu’ile Provincial Park and the Lake Erie site was located at Middle Island, Ontario. These are two sites where DCC culls have taken place in the recent past, with websites reporting a May 2008 cull on Middle Island that matches with the date in the paper’s method section. I can’t find any mention in the paper to the “source” of the birds or how the birds were “collected”.

Some may say there is no space for politics in scientific research and regardless about your feelings about recent DCC culls, I think that because the article makes no specific mention of how and where the researchers got their DCC gastrointestinal tracts, it does nothing but reduce the transparancy and therefore, the quality of the work.

Spring feels around the corner: things are moulting away…

The past two days in Toronto have been warmer than normal, leading to a large snow melt and the promise of spring (and I know it’s a tease, but it’s a nice break from what has felt like an especially cold winter). With spring comes the return of migratory birds, so this research seems relevant.

First, some background. Feathers, unlike our bones, lack an ability for self-repair. They can be attacked by feather-loving bacteria ((Better described as bacteria that degrades the Keratin, the protein that makes up the feather.)) and suffer from UVB damage (and sunblock doesn’t really help out). So birds moult, or replace feathers, up to twice a year. According to my Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behaviour, most North American birds replace feathers in a complete moult in the late summer or early fall. Some birds undergo a second moult in the spring, before the breeding season.

Birders out there have experienced these two moults when faced with confusing fall warblers: males no longer are in their colourful, easy-to-identify plumage (which appeared during the spring moult) and we humans suffer under the burden of having to learn, what could easily be described in some cases, as a whole new bird.

Willow Warbler
Creative Commons License photo credit: Taz-Voll

Why there is a difference in moults is the subject of this research by Thomas P. Weber, Johan Borgudd, Anders Hedenstram, Kent Persson & Garan Sandberg. Comparing the mechanical strength of flight feathers from two species of similar birds that have different moulting strategies, researchers found that the bird species that moults twice ((In this case, the willow warbler, Phylloscopus trochilus, which is a small European insectivore.)) have comparatively weaker (more prone to fatigue) feathers than the species that moults once. Since the authors suggest that “the species with feathers that fatigue faster moults twice annually and not once” it would seem the willow warblers moult out of a form of necessity: they would suffer from the consequences of weakened feathers as they migrated to or from their breeding territory.

Now, if this feather weakness is a similar case for birds of the Americas that moult twice, it’s interesting to note that Wood Warblers (Family Parulidae) also change the colour of their plumage with the two moults. Because of this breeding plumage / winter plumage dichotomy, it would seem that feather weakness isn’t the only reason why a bird would moult twice. The interesting question would be if the adaptation to two moults a year “allowed” wood warblers to have a colourful breeding plumage–the ability for males to “change” their appearance for the breeding season and visually demonstrate just how fit they are.