Here are my steps to getting pictures into the “system”. Basically,

1. Save pictures to some folder on the desktop of whatever computer I happen to be using. Remove the obvious “bad” photos.
2. Add the library to my Gallery2 library that’s hosted by Dreamhost. Gallery2 is one of the best online photo-view apps I’ve found, and since it’s hosted on my Dreamhost account, I have unlimited space to put pictures (unlike Picasa Web Albums which caps you out 1GB)
3. However, Dreamhost is by no means a secure backup location (they don’t claim to be, and they recently lost a bunch of user data), so I don’t feel very safe having my photos only stored there. Therefore, after my photos are uploaded to Dreamhost, I rsync the photo directory onto Dropbox. Dropbox is a great online storage and file-syncing utility, so it doesn’t matter which computer I’m using — the Dropbox folder is always the same on all of them. When I rsync to my Dropbox folder, the files are automatically backed up online and synced to the other computers that have Dropbox installed. If you’re curious, here is the rsync command I use:
   
rsync --verbose --progress --stats \
--compress --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh \
--recursive --times --perms --links \
/source/directory ~/Dropbox/Photos/.

   Note: That’s a space between /source/directory [space] ~/Dropbox/Photos

   From here, all of my computers have Picasa installed (since it works on Linux, OSX and Windows), and the Dropbox photo directory is set as a “watched” directory. This means that as new pictures are synced to the Dropbox folders on other computers, Picasa on that computer picks it up and adds it automatically.

4. The final, and probably unnecessary step is rsyncing the files to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk. This doesn’t really offer anything in the way of additional backup security, since Dropbox is S3 based on the backend anyways (so if anything happens to S3, both will go down). The reason I do this is because I look at S3 as my long-term “vault” and Dropbox as a shorter-term, more convenient storage place. The rsync itself is the same command as above, but replace the Dropbox destination directory with your Jungledisk directory.

If you’re on Windows, you can replace the rsync steps with a straight copy — you’ll still get most of the functionality. Rsync works fine on OSX and Linux.

Clearly, it’s an involved process when I add pictures. However, it’s not too bad — a bulk upload onto Dreamhost and then running 2 commands from the command line to get the photos onto Dropbox and Amazon. You can even remove the Amazon step if you want. Last time I checked there was no way to add photos to Gallery2 using a script, but if and when that becomes available, this whole process can be turned into a quick script to run in the background.

Follow these steps, and you’ll have secure, accessible and useful photos on all of your computers.

SealedMedia using nearly 100% of my processor

Finally, I gave up and chalked up the battery problems to an older (about 1.5 years) computer and the fan problems to poor heat management in my laptop. It wasn’t the perfect Apple experience that Steve Jobs maybe have liked, especially with a noisy fan running constantly, but it worked.

One day, I was poking through my process viewer, and changed the filter to show ‘All Processes’. Lo and behold, I noticed that one process was taking up 97% of my processor. Since at that time I was only browsing the web with Safari, this was entirely unexpected. After a bit of Googling, I found out that the process, titled ‘SealedMedia Righ’ belonged to some sort of DRM installed on my computer. Whether it came with the system somehow or was installed with a program remains a mystery, but what I do know is the following:

• It was started by launchd, which is a system process kicked off by the kernel
• Killing it immediately brings the processor usage back to normal, the fan almost immediately from 6000 rpm to under 2000 rpm, and the battery life moves to over 3 hours from about 1hr on a full charge
• It doesn’t come back (that I’ve noticed) after I kill it
• It does come back a short time after a reboot.  
• Killing it doesn’t seem to have any undesired effects whatsoever
• I’m running OSX 10.4, not sure if its unique to this version or not

Given that 100% processor usage generates a lot of heat, which is particularly bad for the expensive battery and hardware inside, this malware DRM app is destroying my computer. Googling for a while didn’t turn up much to solve the problem, so I’m asking users — anyone else have any more information about this program, what it does, how it got there, or how to stop it?

SealedMedia killed, CPU usage back to normal.

Unfortunately, while I’ve come to expect nasty DRM from Apple, this takes the cake because ultimately it will greatly reduce the life of my laptop.