I found myself suddenly lusting for a second monitor (Lightroom 2 supports two monitors), and with visions of a tax writeoff dancing in my head, I opted for the mid-level Eizo FlexScan SX2461W, a 24" widescreen that offers a 1,920 × 1,200 desktop in luscious relatively-wide-gamut color.

(If I'd had visions of hitting the lottery dancing in my head, I'd have gone for the $6,000 Eizo ColorEdge CG221)

I had trouble setting up my XP box for dual monitors until I installed the latest drivers for my ATI graphics card -- ATI's new "Catalyst Control Center" made it trivial to [...]

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Details on the piglet, along with an example of it applying exiftool to each image, is on the Run-Any-Command Piglet's page.

A few warnings about today's plugin updates:

There were a number of behind-the-scenes infrastructure changes in these updates, so there may be some version churn for a few days as any bugs get shaken out. My MacBook died halfway through development of the piglet, so I couldn't run final tests on OSX. It should work, but we'll see. As with any plugin update, be sure to save a copy of any fourth-party piglets (such as Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify [...]
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Piglets are for Lightroom 1.x plugins only, and are not needed in Lightroom 2 or later.

The four export plugins for Adobe Lightroom that I've written – for uploading to Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web – are useful, I hope, and offer lots of options and ways for the user to configure how their images are processed. If I had more time and more skill, though, the plugins could do more. So much more.

For example, Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify Lightroom Export Plugin offers a lot of nice features that I wish my plugins offered, including:

the ability to [...]
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Alexander Kiel's has developed some insight into the "FormatMessageW failed" error that plagues some Windows users of Lightroom export plugins, including my export plugins for Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web. From his reports, the problem seems to be related to IE7 and slow internet connections.

He poses a potential solution, so those running into this error are encouraged to see his writeup on the subject.

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In a recent post about silly extreme macro photography, I commented that some of the small-aperture f/22 shots weren't good for much except illustrating that I need to clean my image sensor. Just as a small light source like a flashlight casts a sharper shadow than, say, a large light source like a picture window, a small aperture lens setting highlights any dust on the camera's sensor by allowing it to cast a sharper shadow on the sensor's photosites, yielding noticeable spots in the resulting picture. Some of my silly macro shots had blotchy dust spots on them.

I clean [...]
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