The main reason is that I’m doing a (topside) professional Photography qualification (an HNC) at Sandwell College. This has been real fun, but has taken a lot of commitment, money and mental bandwidth.

I need to get back to Dahab in a couple of months, though … I may get to some more exotic locations if the works starts to turn up.

One thing that’s probably worth mentioning is my new blog at critical-focus.net. This is where I’m starting to deal with assorted photography / internet topics. So there’ll be a bunch of “How To” articles on blogging and photography website tools, as well as the rather dull, routine admin processes (and – hopefully – how to make them less dull and routine).

Early days, as yet, but I’ve been souping up this website with some of the things I’ve picked up over the last few months.

I also hope to be launching a website for my professional work. It’s kinda working now, but I need to make it slicker – and that’s oing to wait until after my end-of-course show in June.

I’ve got some more interesting stuff in the pipeline, but that’s got to wait for another day …

Please feel free to stop by at my photostream and comment …

The second article went through the main constraints I found in setting things up, and how I worked around some of the pitfalls.

This article explains the different phases through which my website evolved, as new technologies became available.It shows practical examples of how Keyword Classes can be deployed in an image-oriented website.

Website evolution

Before I get too into using the keyword classes, it’s probably worth going through the three stages through which my website evolved.

I’ll be looking at these pages primarily from the perspective of loading image pages.

Hand-crafted

This involves building web pages individually. You can do this by hand-coding HTML or by using a web tool such as HTML-KIT, or (most commonly) using tools such as Word and FrontPage.

The main disadvantages of this approach are that each page needs to be built separately – and needs to be individually integrated. Links need to be tested. And – most importantly – when you bring a new page into the site, then all of the other pages need to be reloaded. This maintenance overhead makes it unsuitable for all but the most simple of sites – with more than about a dozen pages, then updates become very hard work.

Keyword classes have little relevance here – there are no automated processes to use the information.

Static HTML pages

The next stage was to use a tool that generates an HTML album – typically with thumbnails and detail pages. That album is generated in its entirety, and is typically produced, and then uploaded, as a complete folder. To make changes, you typically need to regenerate and reload the entire album.

Typically, image processing software will include an album generator – Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro both supported album software, and Lightroom still offers one of these options.

The problem with most of these is that they don’t allow customisation from the basic available templates – so you’re limited to being able to change a few colours, or choose how many  columns to have on a page.

One tool stood out in this class, however. JAlbum provides a framework, and is written in a standard, openly available programming language (Java) so developers could change the look-and-feel of the albums. These are released as “skins” – and skilled users can personalise the appearance through the CSS.

Those with development skills can – as I did – can delve into the code and change the code to incorporate conditional processing to handle keywords (I had a development background, but had to teach myself Java). For my implementation, I integrated JAlbum with a MySQL database with the log of all my dives. There are still a couple of legacy albums on my site that were built with JAlbum.

Again, however, if you wanted to update your site, then you had to regenerate and reload all the HTML pages. A bit of a grind (I’ve now got 4,000 images online) but much more feasible than the first option.

Dynamic HTML pages

This method uses a web scripting language. I use php, which is a cross-platform tool – so I can develop on a PC, Mac or Linux machine (my web server runs Linux). There are Microsoft alternatives, but they tend to involve integrating several different tools.

Now the database can be held on the server, and I query it interactively.

But the most important thing is that the page generation is scripted, so (for example) introducing a new sidebar icon may involve changing only one file – and all of the pages will be updated. I’m guaranteed the same behaviour for all pages. Much less hard work.

Using the Keywords

OK, let’s get on with the serious stuff. How can we use these keywords ?
Let’s break down how I’ve got it to work for one of my pages :

Example web page

First – check out the names showing the fish – the positioning is set by the Keyword class – and the [spf] actually creates a link to another site

Use keywords for conditional formatting / positioning

I can set the page title to the value in the Dive Site name – keyed from the “dn” keyword class

Use database lookup to set (e.g.) Page title

And – in fact – I can set the title for the overall page – something Search Engines are particularly fond of.

The title is key for Search Engines

I can load a whole lot of information about the dive from my database – it would be a real pain to load it all, and virtually impossible to present it :

You can retrieve lots of data from a database

Just to show how things show up “under the bonnet” (View-> Page Source from your browser) you can see that I’m setting the keywords for the Web Page as well as just the image.

HTML source - populating title and page keywords

If you’re really into the web design side of things, you can pretend that the selected keywords form part of the image filename. This means using .htaccess redirects on Unix/Linux, but is a very powerful tool (although its often viewed as a form of voodoo. Here, the image name is actually abu_B050216.jpg, but it appears as yellow-spotted-triggerfish-pseudobalistes.jpg in a folder called abu_B050216

View Image Info

Again, this gives more credibility with the search engines (although not as much as lots of words, unfortunately).

You can also use the keywords to make your search engine Sitemap more relevant – I’ve automated the production of my sitemap with a php script that uses the same parsing functions as the web page script. You could do the same, perhaps, with RSS feeds (I’ve not worked on that yet !).

Here’s a snippet (for the same photo) from my sitemap file :

… I’ve picked up the Dive Site and the name of the fish in the caption field.

It’s unfortunate that Google doesn’t actually seem to look at the image sitemaps they specified, but I guess they’ll get around to it eventually…

The third article demonstrates how I’ve used these keywords to drive the content of my site. (It might be worth taking a look at that article if you don’t understand what I’m going on about)

I’ve called my solution “Keyword Classes”, but they could equally be referred to as “Structured Keywords” or “Smart Keywords”.

This article talks about how I’ve made ‘em work…

Disclaimer

To really use these classes to best effect, you’ll need to be able to parse the entries using a programming tool. If you don’t know how to code – or don’t know someone that does – then I’m afraid you probably won’t be able to get this done.

For those who want to read on anyway, I should explain the phrase “parse” – which (in programming terms) means splitting up a long string into its individual components, so that each can be processed separately.

So parsing a keyword string that looks like

should give three entries:

This keyword string would be parsed by php as having two keywords – the semicolon in front of the [dn] would be the break point.

Delimiting Class Identifiers

So that the programs reading the keywords can know 1) that it is a class item and 2) what type of class item it is, I needed to set up an identifier system.

I figured the best way to do this is to start the keyword with a delimited string, containing a class identifier (stay with me – I’ll get to this in a minute). Separate start- and end-delimiter characters would work best, and they should ideally be characters which wouldn’t normally turn up in your keywords.

Just to complicate things a bit more, certain delimiters have specific meanings for HTML (the language that drives browsers). These are often changed by scripting languages – or may behave unpredictably – so quote characters are out, as are the GT/LT angle brackets (<>) Forward- and back-slashes are also out. If you want to geek out a bit, then you can check out the HTML Entities page on the W3Schools website for more details.

(For the techies : I did try to embed XML, but – apart from entity encoding – it got much too unwieldy trying to guarantee closing the entities).

Ideally, the delimiter at the start of the string would be different from that at the end. The most natural fit is, therefore, either the square brackets ([]) or curly parentheses ({}). The former doesn’t need a shift key, so I’ve gone with those.

Class Identifiers

Now we get to the heart of it. Each class of keyword needs a separate identifier. These can, actually, be of any length (but keeping it to two or three characters is probably more efficient). I like to use abbreviations that are easy to remember.

So for my underwater albums :

• dn – is the Dive Number, a key into my logbook database
• sp – is the binomen – or “latin name” of the species
• spf – is like “sp“, but a bit more specific. These are species which can be referenced in the Fishbase database, so I want to link to it (that means different processing, so its a different class).
• fi – is the “common name” of the fish, as listed in Fishbase.

So entries for my 204th dive will have the keyword

You can create a keyword  with more than one class – e.g.

.. As all Humphead wrasse belong to the same species, there’s no point in having two separate Tag items – they’d only get out-of-step, and you’re giving yourself twice as much work.

(Just to clarify my terminology, a “Tag” – in PSE – may incorporate more than one “Keyword”)

Reusing classes

After a few years, I decided to show some topside wildlife images on some parts of my site. So I used the same keyword classes for bird, mammal and insect species as I did for Fish. I introduced a new class – [ln] to denote a non-dive location. A bit of recoding my scripts, and everything appeared in a consistent way.

Programming considerations

PSE (and – probably – other applications) won’t necessarily write the tags in any particular order. It may also insert its own delimiters between keywords.

So any software which parses these classes may need to

• ignore semicolons which precede a prefix
• deal with class instances occurring in any order
• potentially deal with multiple instances of a class (more than one fish species in a photo)
• potentially deal with the absence of a specific class within a specific image

Depending on the software tools you use to create the tags, and to parse them, you may need to ignore delimiters (such as semi-colons or commas) introduced by the software. These are becoming less common now.

If you’re using the PHP toolkit to generate your web pages, this will parse the individual keywords, which makes everything much easier.
Unstructured comments (or those relating to individual images) can be included in another field – such as the the “Caption” or “Title” fields .

Introduction to Metadata

Well, most digital images have the ability to store “metadata” – information about the picture. A lot of this information is automatically recorded by the camera – details of the exposure, and the date and time the photo was taken. This information is also often referred to as “EXIF” data (although (to be pendantic) that’s only part of the story).

Some of the metadata is expected to be stored in a specific format, while other fields are free-format. These fields – such as the caption – will normally be input by the photographer. Increasingly, metadata can also be populated from other sources, such as GPS units. There’s more about metadata in the Wikipedia EXIF page.

Up to a couple of years ago, metadata was patchily supported in software – many applications just “dropped” it. Most current software now recognises it, although (frustratingly) it can be stripped out when uploading to (for example) social networking sites or news sites.

These fields recently came to prominence as it can contain information about the copyright and licence.

Standard metadata fields are now generally accessible in most image processing software – particularly Adobe’s software, but also Google’s Picasa, and webservices such as FlickR. Crucially, there are now libraries available for scripting tools such as PHP and Java – which mean that web developers can easily integrate this information.

Also crucially, the metadata is supported by – and can be carried across when converting between – most image formats (JPG, TIFF, DNG, PSD etc).

One of the main free-format fields is called “Keywords” and is actually stored in the IPTC section.

The Keywords metadata field

Originally an unstructured text string (with keywords delimited by semi-colons or commas), individual keywords are now often stored as array elements – a far more flexible and professional approach. Software can parse the array to break it into individual keywords, which can then be dealt with individually.

This is really useful for image processing software (and more so for asset management / cataloguing software such as Aperture, Lightroom and Picasa), as it allows software designers to build in “filtering” allowing selection of image sets based on individual keyword selection.

There are additional uses of the keywords – they can be “externalised” by web services, and used to tag the image, or to drive the HTML META keywords on a web page – making the page more relevant for search engines. This can actually be very relevant – Google Image search doesn’t look at metadata – so you can write a script to output keywords into your Google Images sitemap (although at the time of writing, that doesn’t work too well either !).

That’s great. So what’s your problem ?

This is all very well, but I wanted to more. The problem is that all keywords are treated as free-form text only. They have no meaning – a computer program can’t distinguish, for example, between the subject’s name and the colour of their clothes.

I wanted to treat certain types of keyword in specific ways. My image might contain a number of different keyword types. These are going to vary from one photographer to another, and – potentially – from one subject matter to another (I want to use different keywords for underwater and topside images).

What I wanted to do was to “tag” all of my (underwater) photos with details of the dive. I’d already got these details in my logbook software, and it seemed easiest to get all of that data from the database, rather than rekey it into every image.

I also wanted to identify the different species of fish (and there may be more than one) in an image, and I wanted to output these on the web pages in different positions and formats. I wanted to show both the scientific binomen (aka “Latin”) name, and the common name.
So, straight away, we’ve identified three types of keyword – a reference to the dive, and the common and Latin names of the subject. These are the different “classes” of keyword.

I wanted to use these different classes to behave in different ways on my website..

How did you sort it out ?

We’re going back several years now, and I was using Adobe’s Photoshop Elements (“PSE”) for photo management at the time, and this lets you set up custom XMP fields (excellent) – but only for files with an xmp sidecar file (booooo). So these could could work for RAW and PSD files, but were really tricky for JPGs. Lots of software wouldn’t even look for them.

With PSE Organiser “Tags” (as they were called at the time) you could just drag-and-drop, and you can re-use existing ones. You could even import/export between different PSE catalogs. And as the export file is in XML format, this can be processed separately as well, if you want.

But – fortunately perhaps – these actually used the IPTC Keywords metadata field. So they were accessible from JAlbum, but can also be read by PixVue, IrfanView, Exifer, Picasa, etc. etc., so … Keywords looked like the way to go. (At the time, I was using JAlbum to generate my web pages).

And when Adobe came out with Lightroom in 2007 – with metadata filtering, and using the same field – then it all fell into place. (Lightroom holds metadata in a catalogue – dng files need to be manually updated after changes)

I’ve now got the full version of Photoshop. These classes, of course, work in Bridge as well.

Workflow and Software Packages

Well, when I first developed all of this stuff, I was using PSE to organise and tag my photos. I then used JAlbum to generate the web albums – I’d modified a JAlbum skin to let me read the logbook database (MySQL), which was held locally. (The main reason for moving from JAlbum was just because I needed to reverse engineer my changes into the latest production version every time I upgraded).

Since then, I’ve moved from PSE to Lightroom (I very rarely need anything else to process my photos now). The tags still work. I’ve re-engineered the web presentation to php scripts – first of all as individual scripts (one per image), then using XML data as input to a generic script. A copy of the logbook database now resides on the web server, so I can look up the dive record dynamically.

Oh – and I’ve shifted my desktop from Windows to the Mac platform.

And each step of the way, these classes have let me replace individual tools without breaking the rest of the chain. And more opportunities to use them keep popping up (there’s something else really cool on the way, but more about that later …)

The next article gets to how to set up Keyword Classes, and the third article shows how I’ve used them in my website (you may want to jump through to that one first before you get into the technical stuff..)

Mostly because of a number of non-diving things going on in my life.

Most significantly, I guess, is that my job came to an end last December. So I’ve got more time to go diving … but less money to do it with !

I’m quite comfortable with this idea, but need to earn some money. It’s time for a change from what I’ve been doing for the last 30 years, so I’ve started an HNC in Photography at Sandwell College. This is going to take a couple of years, and I had to wait for the course to start (about 3 weeks ago), but I’m really enjoying it. I’ll be keeping that side of things mostly separate from this site.

Then, at the end of June, as I was heading up to Scapa Flow, I slipped and dislocated my shoulder – which put a real cramp on my diving. Just about recovered from that now, so I can start with the next bit of my life.

It’s not been a boring year, anyway …

I’d never been at this time of the year before, and the life was subtly different – and there were some real highlights.

One of the busiest sites in Dahab is the Canyon – which you get to through a sandy lagoon. Well, we found a ghost pipefish on day 1 (Gilbert reckons it was a mangrove leaf, sculpted with nail scissors). This is the first one I’ve managed to photograph in the Red Sea, although I saw one on Shark & Yolanda a couple of years ago (I didn’t have a camera with me though).

Another busy site – often used to train “newbies” – is Lighthouse – and we found a Seahorse (another first) and a Sea Moth (aka “Short dragonfish) there.

There were also lots of Red Sea walkmen (aka “Two stick stingfish”) – ugly blighters. We’ve really had to look hard for these in the past.

In terms of camera gear, I took my 50mm macro lens, but usually used it with a 1.4x teleconverter – so those images show up as “70mm” in the metadata. Otherwise, I used the 14-54mm.

We stayed at the Hilton – very pleasant – and ate n the town most nights.

Diving was with Reef 2000 again – Little Mo looked after us on most days. We had a day on the boat – a trip out to Gabr El Bint. The currents can get a bit fierce out there, but it’s the best place to find long-nosed hawkfish.

The photo album is loaded and available in the images area. The seahorse shots are around index page 8.

The most obvious change is that I’ve introduced adverts. These are all served through Google. I hope these aren’t too intrusive, but the site needs to pay for itself now.

Another set of buttons allow you to “like” pages on social networking sites (such as Facebook or Twitter).

At some stage, these changes will also be applied to the ‘blog area.

There’s now a “Privacy policy” button on the pages as well. If you have any issues with the policy, then please email me. I won’t be doing anything different, but Google or its partners may set up cookies on your browser.

The biggest changes are actually going on “under the hood” – you shouldn’t notice any difference, but I’m hoping these will generate more visitors to the site.

Keyword Classes

The first – taken way back when I was using Photoshop Elements and JAlbum to generate “static” albums – was to “structure” my keywords into classes. This means analysing the type of keyword, and was fundamental to linking all the images to the dive logbook software.

So – to recap – the dive number (for example) is prefixed by the characters [dn]. The value is extracted and used to get the dive site (etc.) details from a database.

I’ve also analysed the common and scientific names of the marine creatures (where I can). This let me link through to the wonderful Fishbase site.

By assigning these in the editing / photo management software (using the IPTC Keywords metadata field, for those who are interested) I can parse them and use them in smart ways. In the early days, the treatment was a bit patchy (some software just discarded them), but most image software handles them now. I use Lightroom, but Picasa can do it just as easily.

This means that I don’t have to keep typing “Amphiprion bicinctus – Twoband anemonefish” into the caption field. And the different classes can be processed (and presented) in different ways – so I can (and do) include the details from the keywords in the HTML keywords, and in the page title, for example.

php

The other key technology was to use a server-side scripting tool, and I decided to use php – I can develop it on my PC / Mac, there aren’t lots of components to be integrated, and it’s pretty well self-contained. And free.

At the back end of last year, I reloaded most of my image albums to use this technology.

The big advantage of a server-side tool is that changing the behaviour of the site can be achieved by changing a single script, rather than each individual web page. As I’ve now got several thousand images, this is an advantage.

But as well as this, each page is generated dynamically, which means that logic can be introduced in terms of the presentation (so the layout can change depending on the content) – I can use the data to “drive” the page content.

Coupled with the arcane voodoo of Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality I can make it appear as though there are individual web pages.

Search engines and photos

But the big problem with getting these photos recognised by the search engines – particularly Google – is that those engines don’t look at the metadata. In fact, the vast majority (almost all) of the weighting in Google’s image search is the title of the image.

This was brought home to me when I was catching up with the TWIP podcast, and a interview with John Pozdzides, CEO of WOOPRA. John P pointed out that to get Google love, you need to rename all of your photos to include the keywords.

Obviously, this would be a real pain, and I’d end up with lots of photos called “twoband_anemonefish.jpg” – many of them living in the same location. But, I thought, that data’s available in the metadata. And using Mod_rewrite and php, I can take a file called (for example) 115PC110016,jpg and make it appear as though the file is called “twoband_anemonefish.jpg” (taking the title from one of the keywords), living in a subfolder called 115PC110016. I can put a bit of Mod_rewrite code in to ignore the bits I don’t need, so I don’t need to physically rename any files.

And all I need to do is to change the version of scripts each album uses …

I’ll be checking to see how this impacts the number of visitors I get …

Hotel

We were staying (half board) at the Zabargad Resort Hotel. The rooms were clean, and the food was straightforward, mostly buffets, although there was a barbecue one night. There don’t seem to be many alternatives – you’re 10km or so from Berenis, the nearest town (we didn’t try it). Most people seemed to head straight off to bed after dinner, but Bob’s Bar stays open for a while.

There doesn’t seem to be much for a non-diving partner to do, if they aren’t keen on sunbathing – although there are bird-watching tours, and there’s a Kite Village (as in Kitesurfing) up the road.

There were a pair of Ospreys nesting at the hotel

There are quite a few wading birds at the marina (spoonbills and heron amongst others) – and also a few wandering round the grounds.

Dive Centre

We dived with Orca divers, who are based on site. The Hamata marina is about 5 minutes drive away, and we’d normally set off at either 8am or 8:30am, depending on the sites. there are a couple of excursions which start out earlier.

Orca have two boats but we were stayed on the “El Masry” all week. The crew were very helpful. I don’t bother with lunches on boat, but I’m told they were well up to standard. We did like the way Orca treated us as “grown up” divers – they gave us a briefing on the site, and we then dived as buddy pairs. So we didn’t have to play “follow my leader” – on some dives, there wasn’t a guide in the water. The remoteness of Hamata means that most (or all) of the clientele are experienced divers. Orca is a German-run operation, so there’s no problem finding a DIN valve. We were diving on 12L steel “dumpy” tanks all week and Nitrox is standard if you’re certified.

This is the dive boat we used most days - a 5 minute trip down the road

Most of the customers are German as well (apart from us, there were a few Dutch). All of the dive staff gave briefings in English as well as German, so we weren’t at all excluded.

The Diving

The dive sites are nearly all on Fury Shoals – a complex of off-shore reefs and pinnacles. This is far more subtle than – say – Sharm, and we felt that it would be best appreciated by divers who’d been to other Red Sea locations. The marine life is recognisably Red Sea, however, albeit that you’ve got to look a bit harder to find it. We felt that Hamata would suit divers who’d already been to most of the more commercial resorts, who would appreciate the differences.

Except for the porites hard corals. Now, I’ve read all of the books and seen the documentaries that tell how these little polyps have been building structures for millennia, but most of the locations I’ve dived could – to be honest – just be rocks with a veneer of corals. On Fury Shoals, though, you’re in no doubt about the amount of work these little chaps have been putting in. And the visibility – which is just huuuuge – only adds to the sense of awe.

These reefs are out in the open sea, though so there can be some strong currents. Orca were pretty good at avoiding them for us, though, so it didn’t spoil our diving.

There were a couple of dives worthy of special mention.

We started off on Sha’ab Ramadan, named after the boats skipper. This is an superb dive and different from all the others. This is two pinnacles, rising from the sea bed at around 30m to about 5m short of the surface. They’re heaving with gorgeous soft corals, and there’s a long-nosed hawkfish down around the bottom. We dived it twice, and both times there was a big swirl of jacks (Herring scad, I think, but there were other species lurking). Sorry no photos as I couldn’t get focus. And there were a couple of nudibranchs.

But, where this is experience can probably be repeated, the second dive – on Sha’ab Zabargad was right our on its own. We were heading along a plateau, with a few bommies to investigate, when a pod of 8 dolphin overtook us. They’d gone before I had a chance to sort my camera – and get over my astonishment. This is really rare on scuba gear, as the bubbles tend to scare them off. John (who’s been diving much longer than me) tells me he’s only ever seen one on scuba before.

I was just about getting used to this – and trying to deal with an especially territorial anemonefish – when I looked up and saw the mother and calf from the pod about 20-30m away. I got some of my settings right, and snapped off a couple of shots. Then – rather annoyingly – something got into my viewfinder. The rest of the pod were right alongside me – but had were past by the time I got my breath. Blessed and privileged.

The following day we had an early start, on one of the “premium” dives – with more dolphins to snorkel with in the interval. This was – by comparison – a bit of a disappointment, as they were heading off by the time I got into the water. Just to clarify – all of these are wild animals, not part of a dolphinarium setup.

We saw Napoleons, a Hawksbill turtle a free-swimming flatworm. We went through the caves in Sha’ab Claudio – coincidentally after reading the Dive Magazine article (Nov ’09) on the flight out.

We’re planning on going back at the end of 2010 …

Sunsets can be spectacular - if there are clouds

You can see the photos in the Hamata photo album