Viewing Photoshop Elements Catalog With MVP

[nwboater]

After owning BTV ver. 3 and giving up on it a few years ago I am again considering PVR software if I can have a decently integrated media package. Besides all the usual PVR features and music playback we especially want to be able to view our photos using our Photoshop Elements catalog. There has been a plug in written for Beyond Media, but due to its lack of integration with BTV and support by SS I would rather not go that route.

I am considering purchasing Sage TV MC for Windows (XP) and a Sage TV Media Extender. Our computer with a Hauppage 350 (existing) will be downstairs in the family room and the MVP will be upstairs in the living room for its TV. We may want to later add more MVP's.

The Organizer in Photoshop Elements is wonderful in many ways but especially for us in that you can have multiple tags for one photo, create collections and view by a timeline. There is only one instance of the photo saved yet you can search for it many ways in the catalog.

To use the photo viewer in Sage, and most other packages it seems that we would lose many of those capabilities and all our photos would have to be saved in a manner that allows selection via a folder view. That would be going way backwards for us! And with several thousand photos we don't want to have to reorganize them all.

I know there are a lot of Photoshop Elements users and many must also want to use Sage or something similar to view their photos within some kind of integrated media center, but with a more powerful cataloging method. In our case we also want to be able to do it using a Media Extender in another room.

Does anyone have any suggestions? cncb (who wrote the PSE plugin for BM) are you around here still?

I noticed a download for Sage that allows running a separate app from within Sage. Might this work, and through an Extender?

Thanks very much,
Rod

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by nwboater

I noticed a download for Sage that allows running a separate app from within Sage. Might this work, and through an Extender?

It would work in the trivial sense that you could launch the app from the MVP menu system. But the app would actually run on the Sage server, and its UI would appear on the server's monitor. Simply launching an app from within Sage doesn't automatically remote the app's UI to the MVP.

What you could probably do, and this will involve some coding, is to write a Sage UI mod (an STVI in our jargon) that could access the Elements database and display the entries in various ways in a Sage menu. UI mods created with SageTV Studio do get remoted to the MVP. But basically this means rebuilding the Elements UI (or as much of it as you think you need) in Sage's UI scripting language. It's doable (assuming you can access the Elements DB through Java or COM or something), but it's a fair amount of work.

Also, such an add-on (like all third-party add-ons) would not be supported by SageTV LLC, but would fall in the use-at-your-own-risk category. Most Sage users are OK with that, but you said you had a problem with BTV add-ons not being supported by Snapstream.

[nwboater]

Greg

Thanks for your quick response. I was not clear in my message about lack of support by SS. My problem was not that they don't support externally written plug ins (I couldn't expect them to), It's that they have, from all I've read in the forums, given up on Beyond Media. They long ago promised integration with BTV and it seems that this will never happen. They also have not done any upgrades to BM, so it doesn't feel like a good program to hang my coat on!

Re writing code for a Sage UI mod -- that's way beyond my abilities! But perhaps someone with more talent than I would see the benefit of doing it.

Thanks again,
Rod

[cncb]

Hi Rod,

I still come by once in a while as I still can't decide what to go with .

I currently am still using Beyond TV that I launch from J River Media Center which I am using for music and photos (I gave up on Beyond Media a long time ago). I wrote a tool that brings in the tags and collections from PSE into JRMC as keywords and playlists. I can then view photos by tags or collections in JRMC's full-screen Theater View interface.

This works ok but is not ideal. I am really interested in an integrated program with extenders so that leaves me with Sage and Vista MC. I have considered "converting" my Beyond Media plugin to work in Sage but I'm not sure how difficult it would be. It looks like there is a way to allow Java (Sage) to use .NET classes (Beyond Media) so I might be albe to reuse some of the work I have already done.

Maybe Greg can answer some questions since I'm not very familiar with how Sage works? I assume Sage has its own database for images, music files, etc. Do files have to exist in the database before they can be displayed in the Sage UI? That is, could I just supply the Sage UI with a list of files (with paths) and they could be displayed in Sage? Or is there a way to store extra information for files in the database (maybe I could write tags there)? Are playlists with photos and videos supported? Thanks.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by cncb

Maybe Greg can answer some questions since I'm not very familiar with how Sage works? I assume Sage has its own database for images, music files, etc. Do files have to exist in the database before they can be displayed in the Sage UI? That is, could I just supply the Sage UI with a list of files (with paths) and they could be displayed in Sage? Or is there a way to store extra information for files in the database (maybe I could write tags there)? Are playlists with photos and videos supported?

I can try to answer some of these questions, although I'm not a big user of Sage's photo-browsing features myself.

Sage does have its own database of media files, and there are APIs for searching and accessing that DB. However you do not have to put files into that DB to view or play them. You can view or play any media file given its file path. (But obviously files that aren't in the Sage DB won't be found by the built-in search features.)

If you want to display a scrollable list of media files that aren't in the Sage DB, you can create a UI for that in Studio. This involves generating an array of filenames (or tags or whatever), feeding that to UI widgets that generate lists and tables, and writing code to translate each array element into displayable UI elements (text strings, thumbnail images, etc). For instance I've written code that uses the WMP COM interface to get track info for a loaded CD and display it in Sage, without going through the Sage DB. Basically whatever your source of data is, you can create menus in Studio to display it in Sage.

Video playlists are supported. Not sure about photo playlists; again, that's not a feature I've played with much.

[cncb]

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like it wouldn't be too bad. Do you know if there is a way to store extra custom information in the Sage database for each file?

[GKusnick]

You can add metadata to the Sage DB using .properties files. There's a sticky post about that here and a list of valid property names here. You might also want to look at the SageTV API docs.

There is no provision for adding arbitrary custom data beyond those predefined properties. However it's always possible to create an auxiliary DB of your own that stores additional data in parallel to the Sage DB. So for instance you can get the MediaFileID of a file in the Sage DB and store any data you like under that key in your own DB.

[nwboater]

Originally Posted by cncb

Hi Rod,

I still come by once in a while as I still can't decide what to go with .

I currently am still using Beyond TV that I launch from J River Media Center which I am using for music and photos (I gave up on Beyond Media a long time ago). I wrote a tool that brings in the tags and collections from PSE into JRMC as keywords and playlists. I can then view photos by tags or collections in JRMC's full-screen Theater View interface.

This works ok but is not ideal. I am really interested in an integrated program with extenders so that leaves me with Sage and Vista MC. I have considered "converting" my Beyond Media plugin to work in Sage but I'm not sure how difficult it would be.

Well, a lot has happened since this last post:
You have written the pug in to allow viewing JRMC.
I have bought & are using SageTV and a HD 100 Extender.
I have a trial version of JRMC on my computer.

I have seriously considered using your plug-in to view Elements within Sage, but since you understandably don't want to update it to work with the newer Elements versions this doesn't look like a good long term approach for us.

What looks like our best approach is for my wife to continue organizing and editing within Elements (she is way too un-nerdy to organize in JRMC) on her computer. We would then like to import her tags and collections to JRMC on my computer which also has Sage on it and would use your plug-in to use JRMC within Sage. I will handle this end which leaves my wife still working only with Elements.

You mentioned above that you had written a tool to import tags and collections from PSE into JRMC as keywords and playlists. Is this something that you are sharing? Does it work with the later versions of Elements? We are still on V4 but may soon want to upgrade. Any other thoughts?

Anyone else have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Rod

[cncb]

Originally Posted by nwboater

Well, a lot has happened since this last post:

Well, it has almost been a year . I still have the PSE to JRMC import tool that works with PSE 5 and earlier but I don't think this would be the best situation for you since you would have to manually do the import all the time (not automated). But, I can give you this tool if you want it.

I am considering going back to PSE and upgrading to version 7 since some things with the image handling in JRMC is a little clunky. If I do I will update the Sage PSE plugin accordingly to work with v7. I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I will keep you posted.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by cncb

I am considering going back to PSE and upgrading to version 7 since some things with the image handling in JRMC is a little clunky. If I do I will update the Sage PSE plugin accordingly to work with v7. I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I will keep you posted.

Count me as interested in a PSE plugin supporting v7 as well if you decide to do it.

[gplasky]

+1

Gerry

[heffe2001]

I would be interested as well. Anything that improves the UI over what's available is a good thing . Especially if it works with SageMC .

[nwboater]

Originally Posted by cncb

Well, it has almost been a year . I still have the PSE to JRMC import tool that works with PSE 5 and earlier but I don't think this would be the best situation for you since you would have to manually do the import all the time (not automated). But, I can give you this tool if you want it.

I am considering going back to PSE and upgrading to version 7 since some things with the image handling in JRMC is a little clunky. If I do I will update the Sage PSE plugin accordingly to work with v7. I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I will keep you posted.

Craig,

Thanks very much for the prompt and informative response. Glad to hear that I'm not alone in thinking "image handling in JRMC is a little clunky." The Organizer in Elements is just so darn intuitive and simple and powerful that it would be wonderful if you could update your plug-in to work with it. I recall your saying in another post that you didn't like Adobe's upgrade policy of charging so much for them. I feel the same, but since we are still using V4 and they are up to V7 it now seems worth the cost. In fact I would be more than happy to chip in for your upgrade cost and I'm sure many others here also would be. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

So for now I'll hold off doing anything further in the photo department and just hope that you will want to do your update.

BTW, should we perhaps change the title of this thread to "Viewing Photoshop Elements Catalog with Extenders" or even to just "Viewing Photoshop Elements Catalog with SageTV"? I cant help thinking there are a LOT of users interested in this!

Rod

[cncb]

It doesn't look too good. I was going to go back to using PSE5 to get my catalog, collections, and tags in order before upgrading to PSE7 and I'm having nothing but problems. It only imports about 10% of my photos and claims that the rest are "damaged". Every other program can open the images as well as the PSE Editor but the Organizer can't handle them!!??

I read on a PSE forum that the Organizer might think that the JPG headers are messed up and you can "Process Multiple Files" in the Editor to "repair" them. I did this on a few files and I can then indeed import them into the Organizer but it is significantly altering the files (all the photo attributes seem the same after the processing but the file size will jump from 1.70 MB to 230 KB, for example). I don't have the patience to mess with this silliness at the moment so my PSE upgrade plans are on hold.

[nwboater]

Craig,

When I first saw your post I got all enthused, but then.... What an absolute bummer! It doesn't make any sense.

At the end of the month Adobe will have a trial version of Elements 7 available. Unless it's all dumbed down I wonder if it might be worthwhile to try it and see if it handles the importation any differently.

It would be so great if somehow you could get this to work!

Good luck,
Rod

[cncb]

Originally Posted by nwboater

At the end of the month Adobe will have a trial version of Elements 7 available. Unless it's all dumbed down I wonder if it might be worthwhile to try it and see if it handles the importation any differently.

Hi Rod,

Other people having this problem were using PSE6 so I don't have a lot of hope it will be different in PSE7 but we'll see (maybe if someone has PSE7 I can send them a file and see if it imports). The other problem is getting my JRMC Playlists back to PSE as collections/albums. I have the means to do this relatively easily in PSE5 so that is why I wanted to get it squared away before upgrading. Frustrating...

[cncb]

Oh, my. I'm not very impressed with Adobe right now. I tried to open my "old" PSE catalog (from when I stopped using it in May of this year) and PSE5 just hangs and never recovers. So, I decided I would try to download the PSE7 trial to see if it fixes my issues and the download link hasn't worked for the past day! I'm starting to think all signs are pointing for me to just keep using JRMC...

[cncb]

Rod and others,

I'm not sure if you are still interested in this, but I wanted to let you know that I decided to keep using JRMC so I unfortunately won't be updating the PSE import. I was finally (and painfully) able to get past the problems I was having with PSE 7 but one problem I could not get past was the incredible slowness of the interface when loading a catalog from my network drive. It consistently took 30-60 seconds to open up the PSE 7 Organizer with my catalog (I did not have this problem in PSE 5). It is pretty speedy when I copied the catalog to my local drive but that makes it painful to try to share the catalog between multiple PCs.

In any case, we are comfortable using JRMC for photos now and we still use the PSE 5 editor for editing. It's not as easy to use as PSE but much more flexible, faster, lighter, and cheaper.

[nwboater]

Hi Craig,

Very sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you, but thanks very much for the valiant effort you made. I'm sure you have a LOT of time in this!

Guess I'll have to really learn JRMC now. I take it this is the best way you have found to view photos in Sage. Does anybody else have suggestions for another approach? We have one HD100 Extender and soon an HD200 and several thousand photos in our PSE catalog.

Thanks again, Craig

Rod

[cncb]

Hi Rod,

Yes, I find Sage with my JRMC import an effective way to view photos. You can pretty much browse photos in any way you want (by date, keywords, size, etc. and/or any combination). You can also make smartlists in JRMC that can give you a list of files meeting some criteria (show all photos of Rod in April of last year, for example). If you decide to use JRMC let me know if you need any help getting it set up.