Some software for photographic freelancers:

FotoBiz looks pretty comprehensive, with a FotoQuote stock pricing module. It's written in FileMaker and is extensible. $229.

An index of software for photographers over at stockphoto.net. Not a very focused list, but maybe worth a look if you can't find anything else.

I've been trying to find some relatively easy software solutions to the problem of tracking photography submissions to various publishers. There are a bunch of options for freelance writers, but none I can find for photographers.

However, I did find this nifty run-down of IMS (Image Management Systems) software, at the Technical Advisory Services for Images, an academic standards group.

Here's a page which describes how to change GTK themes under fink.

The fink project doesn't include GTK Theme Switch, which I hope to remedy immediately after posting this 'blog entry.

Serious nerdy talk ahead. You are warned.

When I shoot a panoramic image, I use a piece of software called hugin to take the pieces and stitch them together. hugin is free, and is designed to be a front-end for a bunch of other software.

Some of that other software includes the venerable panotools, nona, enblend, and autopano-SIFT.

Autopano-SIFT is a piece of software written to automate the generation of control points in stitched images. That is, it looks at a bunch of pictures and guesses how they overlap. It then tells other software what it learned, by generating control points.

Here's a tidbit of information most folks don't realize:

Apple makes a web browser called Safari. This isn't the part no one realizes. The part no one realizes is that Safari is built around a web framework originally written for a linux project called Konqueror. That is: Given the nature of open source projects like Konqueror, other folks can come along and use them and even make money off them. I don't think Apple's making money off of Safari, though it is a nice browser, and an enticement to use Mac OS X.

But the point here is that, in the same spirit as that of Konqueror, Apple didn't just write a web browser, they created a framework which other software developers could use within their own programs. In theory, you see, some enterprising people could come along and use the Safari framework, known as the Web Kit, to build a whole other web browser. It would be at least as good as Safari under the hood, and would improve whenever Apple improved the framework.

Album Shaper is an open-source answer to iPhoto.

Once upon a time I wrote a piece of software for Mac OS 8.1 to 9.2 called Wowser.

What it did was it allowed you to choose which web browser was your favorite, and launch that one if no other browser was open. But if a different browser was open, it would use the one that was running, rather than launching your favorite one.