Unfortunately the video is almost useless unless you can see the slides that I am presenting, so here they are again:

Again, I would love to know what you thought of it, so please let me know!

Slides from the presentation can be seen below….Enjoy!

I would love to know what you thought about the presentation so please let me know!

Their arrival signifies the start of a European expansion in conjunction with the continued push for developers and sites to adopt the Open Graph Protocol. At the event a number of interesting statistics were announced by Zuckerberg and the other executives.

The major announcement was that Facebook has now reached 26 million unique users in the UK. Also announced was 50% of all “Likes” originate from within Europe, which is about 50 million out of the reported 100 million likes so far, an early indicatator of the popularity of the Social Plugin platform released at f8 a few months ago.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

During his introduction Mark Zuckerberg talked about the interesting applications that he’d seen at the Facebook Hackathon the previous day, and reiterated what was said at the f8 conference, how important the Open Graph and Social Plug-ins are to enable social experiences across the web and how easy it is to implement. He also talked a bit more about the Instant Personalisation feature that has recieved so much critisism in recent weeks, explaining that the reason for it is to allow users to have a seamless and frictionless social expericence while browsing other sites than Facebook, removing the need for them to “Connect” or “Login” to Facebook in order to see a the site in a social context.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

After Zuckerberg’s keynote several high profile partners were brought on stage to discuss their success stories on the Facebook Platform, amongst them was Gustav Söderström, VP of Products from Spotify about how they used the platform to create a new generation of social music application.

Mike Vernal, Platform Engineering Manager

Mike Vernal spoke about all the new technology innovations in the Graph API and the Social Plugins, he talked about the evolution of the platform and a number of other things to help developers understand the latest offerings from Facebook.

Joanna Shields, VP of Sales and Business Development, EMEA

Joanna Sheilds has recently taken on the role of Sales and Business Development in Europe, she spoke about how important it was for Facebook to continue it’s expansion in the EU and talked about the ways they will be engaging with the developer community to help the platform grow.

Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard and Mike Vernal chatting in the Q&A

At the end Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard, Mike Vernal and Joanna Shields sat and answered questions from the room full of press and developers, amongst the topics talked about was the new “Credits” system that Facebook has been testing with a select number of partners such as Zynga and PlayFish, all they revealed was that they are working on fine tuning the payment methods to make it as frictionless as possable to end users and that they would be talking more about it in the coming months, they did say however that eventually the Credits platform will be open to all developers to use in their applications.

In response to a question about a Location API and a set of services built around a users Location Zuckerberg simply answered that they were working on their Location services but offered no timeframe for when we will begin to hear more about them.

Zuckerberg was also asked about the 5,000 friend limit on all Facebook accounts, to which he explained that it was not high on the development list since not very many people had over 5,000 friends in real life, and explained that the reason for the limit in the first place was due to people with high volumes of friends having a poor experience due of the sheer amount of friend data that needed to be processed on each page request.

The event marked a good turning point for all European based Facebook Developers and it will be good to see more of a Facebook presence outside of their Palo Alto offices in California.

No matter how hard you try there is still going to be a chance that at some point a card will fail and you will have to try and recover the photos on it. Thankfully in most cases, this is possible. I won’t go into the boring and technical details but because of the way hard drives and memory cards store data, even if you delete a file, you can recover it until something else is stored in its place. Whenever I’ve had to recover a failed card (when you’re the family & friends tech support guy it’s more often than you’d think) I’ve found one tool that has so far never let me down – PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is a command line utility that allows you to recover files from all types of memory cards from SD and XD cards to CompactFlash, it can do them all, and the best thing is – it’s free!

Step by Step

To start off, you will need to download the tool from the downloads page of their site. It’s a small utility so it should only take a minute or so to download. Once downloaded, install the application, insert your memory card and launch the PhotoRec application. The exact steps will vary depending on a number of things, but these are the options that have so far always worked for me.

1. Select the corrupt card from the list, this usually is the smallest sized drive in the list.
2. When asked to select a Partition, select Intel/PC Partition
3. When asked which partition you want to recover, select No Partition (Whole Card).
4. When asked which file system, select Other – FAT/NTFS/HFS+/ReiserFS
5. When asked what space you want to be analysed, select Whole
6. You will then need to specify a place for the recovered images to be copied to before the recovery process is started.

Once it has completed scanning the card you will see this:

Depending on the size of card recovery can take quite a few minutes, once done, you can navigate to the folder you specified in the previous step and see what photos were recovered.

Hopefully all being well this will have recovered all of the photos that you lost!

When using services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter it can be a nightmare to get to your data, you may find individual applications that do it, but it can be a laborious task.

This is where Backupify comes in, Backupify is an easy way to backup all the popular cloud services in one place using the API’s provided by each service, simply sign up, configure the backups and Backupify will do the rest for you – all from one central location.

I was first introduced to Backupify on Net@Night where the founder Robert May was interviewed. After listening, I signed up for an account and set it up to backup Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Blog and Gmail account, the process was surprisingly easy, some of the services require you to login and authorise the Backupify service, others require you to enter your user name and password, but I had it all set-up within about 5 minutes.

The best part about Backupify is that until the 31st January 2010 you can sign up for a FREE account, after this time there will still be a free account but it will have limitations unless you pay for a premium account. Personally I recommend signing up now and setting it up – just in case!

Of course this isn’t something that happens all the time, but when it does it’s usually at the most inappropriate of times, either you still need the card to work so you can take more photos or the ones that are already on it are important and you can’t take them again – this goes for the casual photographer as much as it does the hobbyist / professional.

To some people the idea of trying to limit the impact a card failure has is an alien concept, they just expect things to work forever, but the more technically aware know that this is never the case, so the best thing to do is try to stop or reduce it from being a big problem.

Carry a Spare

It may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people only carry around 1 card, or perhaps even more worryingly, only own one card.

Having a second (or third) card will present you with an option if your first card fails during a crucial moment - you just swap out the failed one and replace with the secondary one – leaving the data on the first in a better position to be recovered and allowing you to carry on shooting.

Small but many

With the cost of memory cards so low these days it can be tempting to buy the biggest card you can get, and while this is good for situations where you will be taking a lot of photos – it’s not very good if it fails since all your photos are going to be lost.

The solution is to buy multiple, smaller cards. Yes this does mean that you will have to change them more regularly, but it means that if one goes bad, you haven’t lost all your photos.

Backup on-the-go

Although not exactly an exciting task – it does pay to backup your photos as you go.

You can do this using a Laptop / Netbook, or even using a dedicated device, each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

A Laptop / Netbook will allow you to see the photos that you have taken on a nice display as well as being able to back up the photos, but is less convenient, it takes time to boot up and can have limited battery life – which once depleted can be difficult to recharge on the road, not to mention having to carry it around all the time.

A dedicated device such as the Epson P-3000 Multimedia Storage Viewer or the Nexto-eXtreme (and there’s many more) will allow you to plug in the memory card and copy the photos onto its internal hard drive. Some of these devices come with a small screen to view the photos on but it’s going to be no way near as good as viewing them on a laptop for example. If you don’t really care about reviewing them at this stage then this is probably the type of device to get, and it’s going to fit into your camera bag better than a laptop.

Out with the old

Memory cards don’t last forever, and the older they are the more chance there is of them failing. If you have had a card for a few years and used it quite a lot, then maybe think about replacing it. Or maybe even get a new one and use the original as your backup.

If all else fails…

Not really a mitigating step – more of a last ditch attempt to salvage the wreckage is using a recovery tool such as PhotoRec to recover the photos on the failed card – it’s not guaranteed to work all the time but does present you with a final option.

For me at least iTunes crashes during the transmission of Genious data to Apple, stopping this process with the “X” that appears in the notification area resulted in an immediate crash, if it was left it would simply crash a few minutes later.

If you really can’t wait for Apple to fix this issue and aren’t really bothered about using Genious then the most obvious solution would be to turn off the Genious feature until a fix is released, unfortunatly for me the Store > Turn Off Genious option was unavailiable so here is how I managed to get round it:

1. Go to your iTunes folder (mine was in C:/Users/Myles/Music/iTunes but yours may be somewhere else)
2. Find “iTunes Library Genius.itdb” and rename it to something like iTunes Library Genius.itdb.old (Make sure you can see file extenstion – if not untick the “Hide extensions for known file types” option in the Folder and Search Options Menu)
3. Start iTunes
4. iTunes will still try to generate Genious Data but after renaming the file you should be able to stop the process by clicking on the “x” in the notification area at the top without it resulting in an immediate crash.
5. Then Select Store > Turn Off Genious from the menu at the top

For some reason that seemed to sort the problem for me, or atleast long enough for me to disable the Genious Feature, it may not work for anyone else, but its worth a shot – iTunes has been running for about 10 minutes so far and no crash as of yet.

Hope this works for you!

EDIT: Didn’t realise this fix had already been suggested on the Apple Support Forums, you can follow the discussion at: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1938223&tstart=0

Remote Desktop has its uses but nothing beats 3 screens to make yourself look busy

So I took it home to my underground laboratory and started the pain staking procedure of recovering the data from the card.

After analysing the card it turns out that the card didn’t have a file system structure, something must have corrupted it, I tried Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional but it only found 5 of the photos and could only find 7MB of unpartitioned space on the card. So I pulled out PhotoRec and scanned it. If you need to get photos off of a camera memory card PhotoRec is the app to do it, it works like a treat and has earned a place in my arsenal of applications.

It took about 30 minutes to scan the card fully, all 115 photos that Kim took were recovered, but here’s where the weirdness starts, along with the 115 photos I expected to be recovered there were also 50 or so photos of people I’ve never seen before at Goodrington and other locations…

The sealed SD card bought from the London Camera Exchange contained OTHER PEOPLES photos and videos!

Obviously they had been wiped from it previously, but even though it had been formatted, a low level scan of the data revealed photos in the sectors that hadn’t been overwritten. Below is one of the photos I found on there…It looks like someones holiday snaps.

One of the photos on the SD card

Looking at the EXIF data they were taken between April and May 2007 on a Nikon Coolpix S6 Camera, I have no idea why they were on the card and I have no idea why the London Camera Exchange sold a card that was sealed and apparently ‘new’ but obviously wasn’t.

It just goes to show what these companies get up to, recycling what is probably a useless card that had been returned into something they can sell again.

In the photography industry there is almost the same problem, for those of you who don’t know, for the past few years camera manufacturers have created their own proprietary RAW formats, RAW is much better than conventional JPEG images because it takes the data directly from the cameras sensor and allows you to manipulate the exact image the camera saw, JPEG on the other hand compresses the image which in turn loses quality and also doesn’t allow you the same granular control.

Canon have their CR2 format, Nikon has their NEF format and Adobe has their DNG format, each company supports their own format with the exception of Adobe who provide the Camera RAW plug-in for Photoshop to convert RAW images to other formats.

A few weeks ago Canon released plans to research the feasibility of changing their current format (CR2) and move towards another proprietary format, so far they assure people that it’s only an idea, but it will be inevitable that they change it at some point.

As much as I like progress and welcome new features and better quality images, is there really a need to change the format yet again, beyond of course annoying customers and rendering all current cameras outdated? Some of my previous posts have touched on the topic of organising my many photos and making sure they are accessible in years to come, this throws even more turmoil into a problem that already has enough.

I already have to contend with some photos in JPEG format, some in CR2 format and then, if I want to make my images a bit more future proof I’m going to have to convert all my CR2 images into DNG images. Why do camera manufacturers make it hard for people to future proof their photos, in 10 years time none of these formats will be supported and people who haven’t spent hours of their lives converting their entire collection won’t be able to enjoy looking back at the memories – which is after all what we’re taking them for. Most of the problems have been occurring with RAW formats, however JPEG’s could be a thing of the past as well. Microsoft HD Photo format is the JPEG killer that Microsoft has submitted to become the standard image format used in digital cameras, although reading the press release it also allows data to be stored directly from the cameras sensor, which means that it’s also a contender in the RAW format war. On the face of it I like it – the retention of dynamic range data is a definite plus, and let’s face it, any better quality alternative to JPEG is always a good thing, but I can sense this being yet another nightmare to deal with, what do I do with the old JPEG’s that I have, do I convert them? Leave them as they are? And why can’t all these different formats be combined to give consumers a super format that will last?

In my opinion there needs to be some path for people to follow, applications to covert and manage all these different formats won’t be supported forever either, so if you’re going to rely on something like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (which is an awesome app) then you’re going to have a very bad headache in years to come when the product may not exist anymore.

I think Adobe have got a good position, each format may have its own killer set of features, but it may as well be a piece of paper if there isn’t going to be the software to deal with it in a decade, Adobe’s DNG I hope does exactly what it says on the tin…Allow Digital Photographers to create archival versions of their images that aren’t going to be replaced by something new.