This article describes my effort to implement GDPR and appropriate privacy, including the famous “cookie banner”, on our web sites. (Not yet implemented on our sites though.)

Since a few years back privacy regulations in the EU (and some other regions) have become much stricter. They set up strict rules on how a web site should function and what kind of privacy it must offer visitors. It changed radically in 2016 when the EU adopted the “General Data Protection Regulation”, usually referred to as GDPR.

The US seems to be behind on this. You might have encountered some US-based sites that say “sorry, you’re not allowed to access this site since you are in the EU”, or similar. That is usually because they do not want to adhere to the current EU privacy regulations so instead the block access from Europe.

The GDPR regulation  is big and complex and you should certainly not take this post that you are reading now as a description that fully explains exactly what you must do. It has 99 article described over 89 pages in the official document. No, this is simply a description of some research I’ve done and how we have implemented it.

However, this is a regulation that all sites must follow. But reality seems not quite yet to have caught up with the law. There are many sites who do nothing regarding privacy or that have a totally inadequate implementation. But since we are rebuilding our sites from scratch I wanted to at least make a good effort regarding privacy and GDPR too.

Privacy Policy and WordPress

The first thing you should do is create a privacy policy. We have had one for a long time but one that was limited to one or two paragraphs.

WordPress has an introduction and overview to this here: Your WordPress.com Site and the GDPR, although it should be noted that this is for WordPress.com.

As you can see, there are quite a few “maybe” and “probably” in the text, which illustrates that the details of this is not entirely clear.

In the recent versions of WordPress there is a whole section on this under Settings > Privacy. There you can create a page for your Privacy Policy with quite a lot of help in a template text. But it is a template text that needs a lot of customisation for each particular case.

But that’s where I started; I created a new Privacy Policy page, I looked at several existing privacy policy pages (most of the horrible examples, either far too short or others far too complex). And then I created a text that seemed reasonable for our case.

From what I understand, you must for example explain what kind of “data” you collect about visitors (including cookies, more on that later), what the purpose of that data is, how you use it, how you store it, how long you keep it etc.

You must also tell the visitor that they have the right to access it and have it deleted if they want.

Here’s how one of our Privacy Policy pages look currently.

Cookies and the Cookie Banner

I imagine that today 99.99% of all sites set cookies today. For example, for visitor statistics (Google Analytics or other).

You should tell visitors that you set these cookies and give them the possibility to decline all or some of them. In principle, I think you should not even set any cookies at all until you have their consent.

Fail: Cookie Banner – Cookie Consent Popup – with Elementor

Since our new sites are built with Elementor I was happy to find a tutorial from Elementor on how to create a cookie banner with an Elementor popup.

Very nice and simple.

There was only one problem with this. It is not at all GDPR compliant so it does not solve the problem. They don’t tell you that in the video unfortunately, so I had spent quite a lot of time on it before I discovered it. (It is mentioned in a footnote on the page though.)

So, no good using Elementor for cookie consent or GDPR compliance.

Next step, find a plugin that does the job.

There are many plugins that claim to help you comply with the GDPR regulations. I am unsure of how many of those actually follow the regulations and give you what you need. I started with what seemed the most popular one.

Better try: “GDPR Cookie Consent” plugin

The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin has 800,000 users and has been updated recently. Looks good.

Easy to install and seemingly easy to configure and customise.

One of the items that you need to configure in the plugin is the list of cookies that you set with details of what they are used for.

The list of cookies our site(s) set? I know that we collect visitor stats (Google Analytics, StatCounter) and probably something to facilitate commentators (so our own cookie then?). But what more? In reality, I don’t know at all exactly – exactly! – which cookies our site(s) set. Maye some for social sharing? Yes, no doubt.

This really got me stuck. How do I find out what cookies my site set?

I found (yet another) plugin called cookie-cat (that required one more plugin, called oik for it to work) that claimed to show me that. It did not work.

I continued the hunt and decided to try some other GDPR plugins.

Next try: Complianz

Another popular and recently updated plugin was Complianz (50,000 installations).

This was far more complex, requiring me to fill in lots of different information about the site. Most of it quite simple. The only real difficulty was in answering how Google Analytics was configured and if we use Google Tag Manager. It had detected that we use Tag Manager, so apparently we do. Although I am not entirely sure it is correct I chose what they say is the most common configuration of Analytics/Tag Manger.

The next step in their setup was… to scan the site for cookies. Exactly what I wanted.

This did not work quite well to start with. It detected cookies from Jetpack, that I no longer use, from a chat service and from a customer support service, neither of which I use and with names I had not heard of. So, presumably, some other of the WordPress set those cookies and I am simply not aware of it. So I decided to investigate which, testing them one by one: clearing all cookies from the browser disabling all plugins and then enabling them one by one.

In the end it turned out that neither of the plugins set those cookies so it must have been old cookies left from something old. But in the end I ended up with a cookie list from Complianz that looked pretty much as I had expected it, stat cookies, social cookies plus some more. “Some more” was from our hoster and from Elementor.

But that Complianz cookie scan did not work as expected initially. That will probably lead to many people getting a cookie list that does not correspond to reality. It will show more cookies than what is actually set for a visitor.

My advice: before you install Complianz, make sure you clear all cookies in your browser before doing their cookie scan.

The next step was to really nice features of this plugin:

Complianz can create a “Cookie Policy” page automatically. This contains an explanation of what cookies are, which ones you use on your site and how the visitor can select what to accept or not. Information that you should give to your visitor.

Even better: it connects that Cookie Policy Page to cookiedatabase.org https://cookiedatabase.org/ that explains what the cookies are for and links to more information.

Success?

So, with this, I now have:

• A Privacy Policy page
• A Cookie Policy page, where people also can modify their preferences, and
• A Cookie Consent banner/popup

I am not 100% sure that this is 100% compliant with the GDPR, since I am not a lawyer competent in evaluating it. But I feel quite confident that it is better than what 95% of all sites currently have.

Complianz comes in a free version, which is the one I use, but also has a paying version with more features.

Alternatives

Doing this, I asked people for suggestions of how to do it, and here are the tips that I received for tools to become GDPR compliant and have a cookie consent popup:

• Metomic (paying)
• Borlabs Cookie (paying)
• Osano (paying)
• WP DSGVO Tools (GDPR) (free)

And of course all the plugins in the WordPress directory on GDPR, of varying quality.

Now it’s your turn: What solutions for GDPR compliance would you recommend? Write a comment.

Continue reading : Getting a cookie banner and making the site GDPR compliant

The post Getting a cookie banner and making the site GDPR compliant was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

They call it “Theme Styles”.

Theme styles, in short, allows you to define styling for the whole site (built on Elementor), a bit like styling a site with a classic theme. You can set styling for e.g. typography, buttons, colours and several other things.

Previously you had to set the styling on each element on posts and pages, unless it was set by your theme. I use the Hello theme by Elementor, that is a very light-weight theme with basically no styling and no styling options.

It seems to me that if you set styling globally for the whole site it would reduce the amount of CSS (and possibly HTML) needed. Instead of setting e.g. font type on each element on a page you can set it once, for the whole site. (In very simplified terms.)

This should potentially reduce the amount of code and make the site faster.

But maybe (?) a more important benefit of it is that it will make it much easier to manage the styling of a site. Much easier to make it look coherent, using the same styling everywhere.

So, two important benefits of “theme styles”:

• Reduced amount of code, and thus a faster site
• Easier management of the sites styling, giving a more coherent and better design

I am very keen on making the site (well, all our sites) run fast (Google says it’s important…) so reducing the amount of code sounds very attractive. If that’s actually what you can achieve with Theme Styles, which I am not 100% sure of.

So I decided to test. The site I am running these tests on was built with Elementor, when styling had to be done on each “element”. Pages can have 10, 15, maybe even 30 or more “elements” where each had been styled for typography individually. The site I did this on is our wine tour and wine travel site BKWine Wine Tours.

The styling I originally had was mainly setting the font to “Montserrat” and in some cases setting the font colour and font size. So, what I needed to do was the following:

1. Remove all this “old” styling in all elements on templates, posts, pages, wherever it was present
2. Set global styling in Theme Styles

I decided to do two more things:

1. Change the font: Use Verdana as a font, a “web safe” font, instead of Montserrat, a Google font
2. Set Autoptimize, a performance plugin, to “Remove Google Fonts”. (I previously had it set to “Combine and preload in head (fonts load late, but are not render-blocking), includes display:swap”)

Just like some other global settings in Elementor, you can only access this function from the Edit Post/Page pages. This seems silly to me. These kinds of global settings should be accessible from the WordPress/Elementor admin panels, not from an edit post/page page. No doubt there are some technical reasons why it is not.

Currently it lets you style globally (for the whole site):

• Background
• Typography
• Buttons
• Form field
• Images
• Custom CSS

So, I’m interested in Typography and Images primarily.

Previously you had to style e.g. typography in the various templates you might have (single post, single page, archives etc) or on each individual post/page. Now you don’t. Now you can do it once and for all, globally, for the whole site.

My guess is that this might simplify the code for the pages served to visitors. Instead of having each individual element styled with e.g. fonts and sizes you can new do it once, globally, is (presumably) some global css. This should mean less code to serve to the visitor. (I don’t know if this is actually true. It depends on how they have implemented it I guess.) A page/post/template can easily have styling set in 20, 30, 40 or more places, in fact, styling on each element containing text. Maybe that was not how it needed to be done, if Elementor had been used optimally. But I was not (and still am not) a wizard at Elementor. I get by.

In any case, “theme styles” will allow me to control e.g. fonts in a single place instead of in many different instances across my various templates.

Presumably this will also remove some issues, for example that the styling of headings are different for headings set with the Elementor Heading element (styling set by the Elementor settings) and headings created inside a Text Element (that styling, if any, is set by the theme, and since I use the Hello theme that means no styling at all, or rather the default WordPress styling, I assume). (After having done all this, this presumption proved to be correct. Those discrepancies disappeared.)

There is a problem:

I now need to set the global “theme styles” but I also need to remove all the corresponding settings in all the various elements I have used in my Elementor Templates. Otherwise, the styling (CSS?) code will be duplicated and maybe inconsistent: it will appear once globally and also for each element in the templates I use.

Basically, I need to:

1. Set the global template Theme Styles (and disable Default Colors and Fonts from the Settings Page)
2. Remove the corresponding settings in all Template elements defined in the Elementor Theme

This proved to be an awful lot of work. It took me a full day to go through all the site and remove all the local styling.

The easiest way to do it was to use two environments: one Live, in production, and one Development. Easily done through my hoster’s WPEngine’s admin and site management tools.

In the Development environment, not outwardly visible, I set global fonts and colours to something really ugly and easy to recognise (e.g. font Aclonica and font colour an ugly green).

I could then easily see which elements on the Dev site did NOT have that styling applied. And then I could remove that styling on the Live site.

On the Live site I decided to use a simple web safe font, Verdana, and not use the Google font Montserrat that I had before. The difference is very small, but it might mean that Google fonts will not need and will not need to be loaded.

This being done I went through and checked:

• Theme Builder Templates, every single one, header, footer, single, archive
• Templates, every single one, page, section and global widgets (*)
• Pages, yes, all published pages that can (indeed did!) have styling on them, e.g. the home page
• I also checked recent posts, done with Elementor, but they did not have independent styling

(*) Since you cannot edit global widgets from the admin panels, only from within a post (which is a silly design), I have created Section Templates that contain my Global Widgets so I can edit the Global Widgets from the Section Templates instead of from a post.

Maybe important to add: before doing all these changes, I noted down what settings I had in “Default Colors” and “Default Fonts”, in case I wanted to make sure I re-used the same settings.

In fact, when using the Theme Styles there were very few settings I needed to do. I set the font (Verdana) and line height (2 em) in Body but all the other elements (headings etc) use the same fonts cascading down (up?) and have appropriate sizes. I also set the colour for links. I will look into other settings later, in particular Image settings.

This was a lot of work. It took me a full day to do.

But it seemed worth it.

It will give me a site that is much, much easier to manage, from a styling point of view, although it seems to me that the Theme Styles need to develop more functions for styling images.

It also seems to have had a positive effect on the speed and performance of the site, a site that loads faster, as you can see in this post, Improving the speed and load time of a WordPress site with performance plugins, if you scroll down towards the bottom to “Update 4: Simplifying CSS and HTML with Elementor Theme Styles”.

Continue reading : Converting an existing Elementor site to using Theme Styles, hard work but good for performance?

The post Converting an existing Elementor site to using Theme Styles, hard work but good for performance? was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

We have just rebuilt our site BKWineTours.com and I wanted to make sure it had good “performance” so I set about to do some tests.

There are plenty of articles that have recommendations on what plugins to use. But rarely (never) do they say anything about the effect. And even more seldom do they say anything about using different plugins together.

This article will tell you about my tests:

• Which performance / speed-enhancing plugins I tested
• The performance improvement I saw for each plugin
• Which plugins seem to speed up my site the most
• How using more than one plugin worked
• The effects of using some other plugins (not related to performance) had on site speed
• My recommendations for which plugin to use

With some further updates:

• Does a CDN (Contents Delivery Network) improve performance/page speed?
• Does it make any difference if you remove unused plugins?

–

I originally wrote this text so that I would remember the results, but I then realised that many others might be interested, so I decided to publish it. Caveat emptor.

The plugins I tested

Having read several articles on web site speed and performance I had decided to use (and later test) the following plugins:

• Async Javascript
  • To move render-blocking elements to the end of the page
• Autoptimize
  • Several different optimisations options: javascript, CSS, html, some image options (not used), fonts and some more
• Lazy Loader
  • To make images lazy load (without destroying anchor links)
• Speed Booster Pack
  • Several speed-enhancing options in various areas
• Toolkit for Elementor
  • Specifically built for Elementor users, doing “minification” of CSS and javascript and several “server tweaks”
• Clearfy from Webcraftic
  • Also a plethora of speed-enhancing options, some quite difficult to understand

Update: WP Optimize, a data-base optimiser and caching plugin, was tested later, separately. Se test update at the end.

–

I did not test WP Rocket that many sources do recommend. Reasons: it costs money to use it (not much, but I did not want to bother with that at this stage) and apparently it changes the WP back-end appearance quite a lot.

Many plugins overlap in their options. Is that a problem? Can it cause conflicts? After discussing with WP Engine I concluded that as long as there is no issue with the site I will not bother to try and remove this overlap. For example, if two plugins were both set to “minify CSS”, I let them both do it.

Testing the speed plugins one by one

The plugin settings have been modified somewhat from their default settings.

This was my testing sequence. For 3 to 8 only that specific plugin was active.:

1. All speed plugins Active
2. All Inactive
3. Async Javascript active
4. Autoptimize
5. Lazy Loader
6. Speed Booster Pack
7. Toolkit For Elementor
8. Webcraftic Clearfy
9. All inactive
10. All Active

–

I think one should not pay too much attention to small variations in the speed test results. Compare for example the initial two with the last two. Same settings but a bit different results. So what you should pay attention to are significant changes.

With the settings currently set, slightly personalised (some “on” settings did not work on the site I tested and some were not compatible, specifically, Autoptimize required a number of settings to be turned off in Clearfy).

The results:

From the chart, it seems that not all performance plugins are of much use.

The one that is most obviously useful is Toolkit for Elementor.

The second most obviously useful is Autoptimize.

It surprises me that Async Javascript does not seem to make much of a difference since what it changes (moves blocking scripts) is something that is often referred to as a performance issue. If anything, it seemed to have a negative impact.

I am tempted to include Clearfy to the list of the two best ones since it removes some unnecessary code. In particular, it removes the “XFN Profile Link” from WordPress. This is a link (<link href=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″ rel=”profile” />) that WordPress by default has in its code. I don’t see why I should accept a link to that URL on my site without any good reason. And without WordPress telling me about it. To me, it is unjustified and unwanted.

Autoptimize

Some testing showed that contrary to the results in previous tests I could add some more optimisation options in Autoptimize. So I changed the settings like this:

• JavaScript Options
  • Previously only: Optimize Javascript code
  • Add also: Aggregate JS files
• CSS Options
  • Previously only: Optimize CSS Code
  • Add also: Aggregate CSS files AND Also aggregate inline CSS
• And also:
  • Add Lazy load (it does not break internal anchor links. Many other lazy load implementations do)
  • Which means that I can remove one plugin: Lazy Loader
• I have also set the “Extra” options:
  • Remove Google Fonts
  • Remove emojis
  • Remove query strings

–

Now when that’s done, let’s see if any of the two main plugins has any effect.

What were the results for the speed tests for these extra options:

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 4.0 & 2.0
  • After: 3.8 & 2.1
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 94% & B 83%
  • After: A 94% & B 85%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 53 & 80
  • After: 55 & 84
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 79 & 3.51
  • After: 79 & 2.98

–

So, a slight improvement. Plus (maybe more important) I can remove one plugin: Lazy Loader.

I was using Lazy Loader because it was the only lazy load plugin that did not interfere (destroy!) internal anchor links. Now, since Autoptimize also plays nicely with internal anchor links I can remove Lazy Loader.

The following tests are done without Lazy Loader and instead using Autoptimize lazy load.

Update on Autoptimize:

A later test with AO turned off and turned on confirms that it does have a positive effect, with one contrarian result. It is as usual Google PageSpeed that shows surprising results, where the performance actually deteriorates, especially for the mobile result. But PageSpeed varies very much from one run to the next so I am starting to think that it is actually very unreliable and a poor test tool.

You have to experiment a bit with the settings in Autoptimize. I am now running slightly different settings than the once described above.

It also seems that Autoptimize may be interfering with the WordPress admin bar on the front-end pages, causing the WP admin bar not to show on (some of) the front-end pages. Am currently trying to debug that. This seems to be some kind of conflict with WP-Optimize. Set both plugins not to serve cached pages to logged in users and it seems to go away.

The second test: using more than one performance plugin

So, let’s do a second test:

Take the two best-performing plugins, “Toolkit” and “Autoptimze”, and let’s see if adding one of the others to them makes any difference. I also decided to do some additional tests at the end, including testing the effect of deactivating other plugins (that have nothing to do with speed) from the site. Read my reasoning below.

(Also, add the Pingdom speed test.)

So, test sequence:

1. All Active
2. None active
3. Toolkit and Autoptimize active
4. Add (only) Async JavaScript
5. Add (only) Speed Booster
6. Add (only) Clearfy
7. Toolkit and Autoptimize only active
8. None active
9. All active
10. Only Toolkit
11. Only Autoptimize
12. TKit and AO active, and some other non-performance plugins deactivated (1)
13. Same, but add back: StatCounter
14. Same, plus Pingdom RUM
15. Plus Google Site Kit
16. Add back other “backend” (?) plugins (2)
17. Add also Clearfy
18. Add also Async Javascript (many say that this should have an effect)

(*) Deactivated “non-essential” plugins:

• Admin menu editor
• Classic Editor
• Health Check
• Stat Counter
• Pingdom RUM
• Show Dimensions
• Site Kit
• WP Optimize

–

“Backend” (?) plugins:

• Admin Menu Editor
• Classic Editor
• Health Check
• Show Dimensions

–

(All other occasionally used plugins can be activated when needed.)

Here’s the result overview:

Looking at the results section by section:

A. Compare using no performance plugins with using some plugins

Clearly, using no performance plugins gives by far the worst result.

Using Toolkit for Elementor and Autoptimize gives a considerable improvement.

However, adding all the other performance plugins in the text (Async Javascript, Speed Booster Pack, Webcraftic Clearfy) seems to add no additional benefit. If anything, it makes the performance a little bit worse.

B. Toolkit and Autoptimize plus one other

What about adding just one of the other performance plugins in addition to the two that seems best (Toolkit for Elementor, TK, and Autoptimize, AO)?

None of the three (Async Javascript, Speed Booster Pack, Webcraftic Clearfy) added alone on to TK and AO seems to give any significant benefit.

I am particularly surprised (disappointed) by Async Javascript. This is what it does:

“Eliminate Render-blocking Javascript in above-the-fold content with Async Javascript. Render-blocking Javascript prevents above-the-fold content on your page from being rendered until the javascript has finished loading. This can impact on your page speed and ultimately your ranking within search engines. It can also impact your user’s experience. Async JavaScript gives you full control of which scripts to add an ‘async’ or ‘defer’ attribute to or to exclude to help increase the performance of your WordPress website.”

Moving render-blocking javascript from high on the page to the bottom has repeatedly been recommended, both by articles on the subject and by speed test tools, as something that can substantially improve the performance. Apparently, it does not. At least not on the site in question.

It is even more surprising since it has been created by the same author (Frank Goossens) as Autoptimize that seems to be one of the most effective performance-enhancing plugins.

Clearfy even seems to degrade performance.

C. Re-running the baseline tests

Just to compare, I re-run the three “baseline” tests to see if they changed. Ideally, they should be the same as earlier.

There were some minor changes, but nothing really significant. Overall, in this run, the performance was a little worse. Maybe due to heavier traffic on the internet or on the home server?

There were two instances of significant deterioration, but I would guess that this is just normal variation. (Or maybe an error in my testing protocol?)

This also shows that the results of these performance tests naturally vary quite a lot. You should never focus too much on small variations.

D. So how do Toolkit and Autoptimize do on their own

Just to compare to the result with both Toolkit for Elementor and Autoptimze separately, a test with each one on its own. (A test which is basically just repeating the one done earlier on in the text.)

Both Toolkit and Autoptimize seem to give very significant speed / performance improvements on their own.

But it seems also that they do work well together and seem to give an extra boost to page speed if you use both. (With the exception of the Pingdom Load Time measure.)

E. How do other plugins in general affect performance?

It is always said that using fewer plugins is one way to improve performance. So, let’s test the effect of deactivating other plugins. See the list above of plugins I deactivated.

Deactivating all those plugins did indeed give a very, very significant improvement. It is the only occasion when GTmetrix returned to As.

But one really does not want to run a site without some of these plugins. So how does each one affect performance? Maybe some should be avoided and some kept?

Let’s add them back one by one and see how performance is impacted in each step.

Statcounter: activating it gives you easily understandable stats: Adding that back has a slightly negative impact but very small.

Pingdom Real User Monitoring (RUM): I had my suspicions that this might pull down performance. But no, not really. A slight deterioration, but not much. On some test points even an improvement. I guess that this improvement is due to normal variation. (Stat Counter still active. I’m activating one more plugin in each step.)

Site Kit By Google: This had a very significant negative impact on performance. Very ironic since Google is the big champion of fast pages and even uses it as a ranking factor in searches. Well, obviously they are not following their own advice. The recommendation seems to be: “if you want a fast web site or web page, don’t use Site Kit By Google”.

This is a great pity since it does give you a lot of useful data, and in a much more easily understood format than Google Analytics.

Maybe the solution is to only turn it on when you want to look at the info in the WordPress admin console. I don’t know if that will work. If it collects all its information from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then it should work. Connect when needed. If, however, it also collects separate info from the WordPress site when it is active it won’t work. I don’t know. I will deactivate it

Various other back-end plugins: (See list above.) Do plugins that just do things on the back-end of WordPress have any performance impact? With the theory “the fewer plugins you have, the better performance”, it should. Adding back a number of back-end plugins (Classic Editor, Menu Editor, Show Dimensions, Health Check) did not have a negative impact. Curiously, some indicators even gave it a positive score.

Simple back-end plugins don’t necessarily harm speed and performance.

Clearfy and Async Javascript again

I am quite keen on Clearfy, since it removes the “parasitic” link that WordPress puts on each page (the “XFN Profile Link” from WordPress. This is a link (<link href=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″ rel=”profile” />).) Why should I, or you, allow that you the site?

Also, many people recommend to use something like Async Javascript that removes “blocking elements” from the page, or rather, bunches them together and moves them to the end of the page.

So I decided to give them another go. Maybe the result would be better this time?

But no, both had a negative impact on performance.

But I really wish I could find a good way to get rid of that link to gmpg.org. Is there some other way to remove that inappropriate link?

Conclusions

My conclusions from this are:

• It is hard to understand exactly what it is that impacts performance.
• It is even harder to understand the recommendations from speed tests (at least for a non-coder)
• Different speed tests give very different results, so you should use several
• Speed / performance tests are not very exact and vary a lot from one instance to another

–

And my recommendations:

• Two performance plugins seemed to give the best results (for the site I tested them on):
  • Toolkit for Elementor
  • Autoptimize
• The others did not have a significant positive effect and sometimes seemed even to have a negative effect. Don’t use them. Or if you think they are useful, do some tests to see if they work in your environment. Or maybe you should use them but with different settings than mine.
• Do NOT use Site Kit by Google. At least, don’t have it active all the time. Deactivate it when not needed. Update: This is not a workable solution. If you deactivate Google Site Kit you cut the link to Google Analytics so you don’t generate any visitor statistics, since Site Kit inserts the tracking code on the site. Then you have to add the tracking code in some other way. It is really sad that Site Kit has such a bad effect on performance.
  
• The other back-end plugins (not relating to performance) seemed to have only a minor impact on speed, if any.

How the speed tests were done

All these tests were done on the live site bkwinetours.com.

The site is hosted at WP Engine, a hoster that prides itself on its performance. As an aside, WP Engine is an expensive web host but I am using them since almost when they started. I think they are worth the money. Their performance has (almost) always been great. At one occasion I had 1000 times the normal traffic (fun story, social media trending) over two days; not a glitch in the site performance. They also have outstanding technical support that has been tremendously helpful in many cases.

The site is built using the Elementor and Elementor Pro plugins. Fantastic tools to build a web site, but not as easy to use as it is sometimes said. Elementor is sometimes reproached for creating convoluted (or bloated) code. I don’t know if that is true but the code (front end code on the pages served to visitors) is certainly much more complicated to understand than on a traditional web site.

The first set of tests was done on a Saturday.

Round 2 of the test were done on a Sunday morning in as short a time-frame as possible, to have minimal impact from other sources. That round probably took me around three hours.

The speed test tools I used:

• WP Engine Speed Test
• GTmetrix speed test, with test location set to London
• Google Page Speed Insights
• Pingdom Web Site Speed Test, also with location set to London

–

The Google test is the only one that gives you a result as seen from a mobile device. It systematically gave me a worse result for mobile. I don’t know why. I think GTmetrix also can test simulating a mobile device but I did not do that.

All tools return different results and have different metrics. I often find the recommendations difficult to understand and even more difficult to act on on the WordPress site.

Between each speed test run all WordPress and WP Engine caches were cleared (and the sites reloaded in a browser and a mobile device).

Caveats

The results of a test like this must obviously depend on many factors, not least exactly how you configure the settings in the plugins and what kind of site you have. For example, perhaps the result would be totally different on a site not built on Elementor.

So, the best thing to do is do your own testing.

Update 1: Testing WP Optimize

WP Optimize is a plugin for maintenance of databases and tables. It can also be used for a few other “optimization” things, notably caching, and has a premium version with additional settings.

The site I am testing on runs on WP Engine, who already has a built-in caching. However, when asked if it is a good idea or not to also use WP-Optimize’s caching the answer was, “it probably won’t hurt, some people like to have cache in two places”.

So I decided to do a simple test:

• Enable Page Caching – on
• Generate separate files for mobile – on
• Serve cached pages to logged in users – on (*)

(*) Update: Serving cached pages to logged in users seems to cause a problem with the WP admin bar, possibly when WP-Optimize is used in conjunction with Autoptimize (see above). Set it to OFF.

Here are the result (measures as above):

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 3.8 & 2.5
  • After: 2.8 & 1.5
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 96% & A 90%
  • After: A 96% & A 90%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 64 & 80
  • After: 56 & 79
  • After2: 59 & 91
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 85 & 3.07
  • After: 85 & 2.1

So, not really conclusive.

Better onWP Engine and marginally better on Pingdom.

Unchanged on GTmetrix.

Worse on Google Page Speed Insights. That was curious, so I did a second run on GPSI (15 minutes after the first one). It showed radically different results, at least for Desktop. First time I’ve had a “green” result on GPSI. I think that’s a good illustration of that these speed test have a very high margin of variability.

Conclusion: seems a good idea to use WP Optimize.

Caching in general

It is not clear to me at all how it works with more than one caching function. This is a bit nebulous.

As it is, I now have:

• WP Engine’s own caching.
• WP Optimize caching
• Autoptimize caching
• Toolkit for Elementor caching, that also includes an option to “clear master cache” (not sure what they mean with “master cache”)

Over-doing it? Conflicting? I don’t know.

Update 2: Using a CDN, Contents Delivery Network

My understanding is that using a Contents Delivery Network should speed things up even more, since the assets of the web site is spread out in multiple places, nearer the user.

WP Engine has a built-in CDN that you can turn on with a simple click on a checkbox: WP Engine Content Delivery Network (CDN). Some plugins may need to be configured when you use a CDN, in my case Autoptimize.

Here are the result (measures as above):

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 2.9 & 1.3
  • After 1: 2.8 & 1.9
  • After 2: 3.6 & 2.7
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 96% & A 90%
  • After 1: A 96% & A 91%
  • After 2: A 96% & A 91%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 63 & 87
  • After 1: 43 & 80
  • After 2: 54 & 86
  • After 3: 58 & 92
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 85 & 2.26
  • After 1: 86 & 2.8
  • After 2: 86 & 2.93

Quite inconclusive results. Overall, it seems that the CDN did not particularly improve the performance of the page. Possibly even a slight deterioration. But again, the test results vary much from one time to the next.

Conclusion: I really don’t know what to make of this.

Update 3: Does it make any difference if you remove unused Plugins?

Almost everyone, including WordPress itself, recommends that you remove unused plugins rather than just leaving them “deactivated”. So let’s test if it makes a difference.

This is slightly inconvenient since there are some plugins that are used occasionally and therefore more convenient to keep installed but inactive. But let’s test it and see if it has any effect on performance.

• Remove occasional use plugins:
  • Duplicate post
  • Find Post Using Attachment
  • Fix Media Library
  • Health Check & Troubleshooting (first deactivate it)
    • NB: Health Check is built-in to WordPress. It seems that this plugin only adds to tabs on the Health Check: Troubleshooting and Tools. (And the Tools tab seems not to work.)
  • Media Cleaner Pro
  • Regenerate Thumbnails
  • Search & Replace
  • Webcraftic Clearfy
• Keep
  • Site Kit by Google (I think I will use that fairly often)

Here are the result (measures as above):

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 2.6 & 1.9
  • After 1: 2.6 & 1.9
  • After 2: 3.0 & 2.5
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 96% & A 91%
  • After 1: A 96% & A 91%
  • After 2: A 96% & A 91%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 50 & 90
  • After 1: 34 & 77
  • After 2: 56 & 90
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 86 & 1.89
  • After 1: 86 & 1.46
  • After 2: 86 & 2.85

Conclusion: Removing unused plugins (at least those that I had) seems pointless. The before-after comparison results are all over the place, some better, some worse.

So: Don’t worry if you have some unused plugins, as long as you keep them up to date so they’re not a security risk.

It also seems to illustrate that Google PageSpeed Insight gives vastly varying results from one run to the next, all other things equal (and tests done within a few minutes of each other.

Update 4: Simplifying CSS and HTML with Elementor Theme Styles

Early this year Elementor introduced what they call “Theme Styles”. This should potentially reduce the amount of code and make the site faster. (Another benefit is that it makes the site much easier to manage.) Read more on this in this post Converting an existing Elementor site to using Theme Styles, hard work but good for performance?

So I decided to test. The site I am running these tests on was built with Elementor, when styling had to be done on each “element”.

What I needed to do was the following:

1. Remove all this styling in all elements on templates, posts, pages, wherever it was present
2. Set global styling in Theme Styles

I decided to do two more things:

1. Use Verdana as a font, a “web safe” font, instead of Montserrat, a Google font
2. Set Autoptimize, a performance plugin, to “Remove Google Fonts”. (I previously had it set to “Combine and preload in head (fonts load late, but are not render-blocking), includes display:swap”)

It was difficult to do a good before-after test, which I think should be done within a short time frame (to avoid variations due to extraneous factors). Modifying the site took a full days of work, so a speed test run in the evening compared to one ini the morning could inherently be quite different. Instead I compare a “before” from two days earlier in the morning to an “after” also run in the morning.

Results:

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 3.0 & 2.5 (or an earlier run: 2.6 & 1.9)
  • After: 2.6 & 1.6
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 96% & A 91%
  • After: A 98% & A 93%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 56 & 90
  • After 1: 64 & 87
  • After 2: 67 & 92
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 86 & 2.85 (or an earlier run: 86 & 1.89)
  • After 1: 88 & 2.98
  • After 2: 88 & 1.75

After 1 and After 2 were made within 5 minutes of each other for the results I was curious about. The variation was substantial.

Conclusion: With the odd exception, this seemed clearly to have a positive effect, albeit fairly small. But we’re already at quite low numbers.

So, if you want to improve the performance of an Elementor site, it seems a very good idea to convert it from having styling on individual elements to have Theme Style styling, and also to use a “standard” font instead of a Google font. But admittedly, it is difficult to know which of these had the biggest effect in this case. My guess is, though, that the styling with Theme Styles is important. What do you think?

Update 5: Removing a slider

On the home page we have a slider that shows a small selection (~5) of photos in a random order. Many people say that sliders on a web page is not really appreciated by visitors, rather considered not wanted. A slider also takes some time to load. I use SmartSlider 3 Pro, the only good option I found to present images in a random order. It has some good optimisation options but it still seems to take a not insignificant time to load.

An idea: replace the slider with a random post featured image. Elementor has a Post Widget that allows you to present posts in a random order (but you have to turn “random” on in WordPress).

Time to test:

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 2.6 & 1.4
  • After: 2.2 & 1.4
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 98% & A 93%
  • After: A 99% & A 95%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 65 & 92
  • After 1: 74 & 88
  • After 2: 80 & 98
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 89 & 1,21
  • After: 89 & 1.91

Conclusion: Not entirely conclusive but it seems to improve the site speed to remove the slider and instead display a random post using the Elementor Post widget.

Update 6: Removing CDN makes the site faster?

In Update 2 I introduced a CDN and tested what effect that would have. It was inconclusive.

I have used the CDN sice then but it has caused me some issues. When working on the Development site (a copy from the Production site) I have to remember to turn off a certain number of caching options. More irritatingly, the WordPress Admin Bar frequently disappears on the front end, so is not visible on posts even when I am logged in on the back-end, so I have no easy link to edit the post. This is “fixable” by clearing the Autoptimize cache. If this is a problem due to the WPEngine CDN or Autoptimize, or possibly a conflict of the two, I don’t know.

What if I turn off the CDN? Since it did not show any clear performance advantage, perhaps I might as well do without it?

So, testing, with CDN (before) and without CDN (after):

• WP Engine (lower is better)
  • Before: 2.2 & 1.4
  • After: 1.9 & 1.0
• GTmetrix (higher is better)
  • Before: A 99% & A 95%
  • After: A 98% & A 92%
• Google (higher is better)
  • Before: 80 & 98 (or earlier 74 & 88)
  • After 1: 72 & 92
• Pingdom (higher is better for the first, lower for the second)
  • Before: 89 & 1,91
  • After: 92 & 1.27

The “before” numbers are from the previous test (Update 6) that I did only a short moment ago.

Conclusion: Overall it seems better not to use the WP Engine CDN (contents delivery network). Strange.

Additionally, when the CDN was active, it seemed that both GTmetrix and Pingdom had difficulties reading the site. Both displayed thumbnails of the site that did not have proper styling/design.

An added benefit: not using the CDN will remove one layer of complexity.

Some general conclusion:

• It is very, very difficult to get a good score on Google PageSpeed Insights for a mobile device.
• Test results vary very much from one run to another.
• Different test tools give very different results.
• But with a bit of effort you can improve the speed of your site.

Comments and thoughts are more than welcome!

Some further reading

• Increasing your PageSpeed Insights speed (Consuunt) – Very interesting with somewhat different results than mine
• Get faster with the new Speed report in Search Console (Google)

Continue reading : Improving the speed and load time of a WordPress site with performance plugins

The post Improving the speed and load time of a WordPress site with performance plugins was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

It is an interesting part of the city to stroll around in. In the evening it is fairly quiet, or really quiet actually, unless you find one of the not very numerous restaurants. It is mainly an office block part of the city.

But there are many things here that make a few hours’ stroll interesting, as I discovered. There is the beautiful railway station Gare do Oriente / Gare Internacional de Lisboa / Estação Ferroviária do Oriente designed by Santiago Calatrava, a cable way along the water that really serves no particular purpose other than that it gives you beautiful views, you can look across the water at the almost infinite bridge Vasco da Gama, the luxury hotel called Torre Vasco da Gama, and many other things.

Here are a few pictures with various shapes, forms and colours from my stroll a sunny Lisbon morning (and evening). Just for fun.

Continue reading : Shapes and forms in Oriente in Lisbon

The post Shapes and forms in Oriente in Lisbon was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

This video, shot by Raja Picture Company, is a beautiful illustration of what you can see on a safari and of how beautiful the South African landscape can be. (It is a huge country so you have many different kinds of nature.)

It is all shot using a fairly small “consumer” drone (a DJI Mavic Pro). In fact, it is apparently one of the first experiences with a drone for this photographer so it is shot and edited without much fancy effects.

Looking at things from above can be beautiful. There are some stunning views.

Two things strike me though, as a photographer, about this short video.

One is that when filming with a drone you apparently tend to get a lot of animal bums in the footage. Animals tend to run away from unidentified noisy flying objects…

The second thing that struck me, especially the second time I watched it, is that when using a drone I think there is a danger to move too much. All the time the camera is moving which can sometimes take away the viewer’s attention from the beautiful landscape and the majestic animals. The camera is moving all the time.

It might work better if the drone had been stationary sometimes. A mix of moving shots and some where the camera is just simply still and you can enjoy the calm scenery. Maybe just an animal that moves in a frame.

But perhaps I am being too picky? This is a beautiful clip and maybe it can inspire you to come on our safari add-on, and of course on our South Africa wine tour.

Continue reading : Beautiful drone footage from South Africa

The post Beautiful drone footage from South Africa was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

It was not the cover, the cover was simply a graphic of this year’s 100 best wines. My photography was actually from Greece, so somewhere inside this issue of The Wine Spectator they talk about Greek wines.

Continue reading : Christmas present from the Wine Spectator

The post Christmas present from the Wine Spectator was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

Amazon Prime is a subscription service that currently costs 49 euros 50 euros per month in France. The price is similar in other countries, e.g. USD 50 in the USA. Prime gives you a number of premium services from Amazon. Exactly which services that are included depends on the Amazon site you subscribe to (or perhaps the country where you are), mainly:

• One day delivery at no cost, for some products
• Access to some Kindle books (but you must have an Amazon Kindle)
• Access to some movies and TV shows (this is not available in France though)
• Unlimited music streaming

And, most important for this article and for you (and me) as a photographer:

• Unlimited photo storage. This is included in the Amazon Cloud Drive service.

Is online backup a viable option?

As a professional photographer (or serious amateur) you must have a backup strategy for your photos. Your backup strategy should have several “levels”, i.e. include several different copies of your images.

At least one of the copies of your images must be stored in a different location. You should not have all backups in the office or at home. What if it burns down? Or…?

Currently I have one copy of my backups stored in a bank safety deposit box. I swap it out with an updated copy every so often (not often enough though).

As online storage is becoming more easily available, is it a viable option?

There have been two main hurdles for online storage:

Cost

Even if prices have gone down it is still expensive if you have a substantial photo archive. My archive currently includes this:

• More than 140,000 original RAW files
• Over 40,000 “developed” (processed) tiff files
• Around 5 terabyte (TB) of data

Even with a “cheap” service like Dropbox this would cost something like more than $700 per year, it seems. That can instead buy me another brand new file server, every year.

If however, I get “unlimited” space for a reasonable cost then the price is no longer an issue.

Speed

With this kind of volumes it can take some time to upload things over the internet. With a traditional ADSL connection it would hardly be feasible. It would simply take too long.

But if you have access to a fibre internet connection, which is becoming more and more frequent, speed has improved very much. Exactly how much can sometimes be difficult to know exactly. This was one of the things that I decided to test with Amazon.

If the upload speed is sufficient online storage can be viable.

Does “unlimited” really mean “unlimited”?

But does “unlimited” really mean “unlimited”? If, for example, the online storage is simply defined as a mirror of a folder on your computer (as e.g. a Google Drive folder on your computer or Box) then unlimited is not really unlimited, then it is limited by the size of that folder on your local hard disk.

An online storage for photo archiving purposes must be independent of any single physical drive that you have locally. I have my photos on two file servers attached to our local network. You might also have photo storage that are detached, e.g. drives that are not permanently on the network.

Therefore some of the “unlimited” storage services are not really unlimited.

But in this respect Amazon Prime really does offer you unlimited photo storage. You can upload whatever you want to Amazon Cloud Drive and it is not a mirror of anything that you have stored locally. (This, however, leads to another problem that I’ll come back to below.)

One point to Amazon!

What is a “photo” on Amazon Cloud Drive?

Another important question for a photographer is if you can store all image file types on the Amazon Cloud Drive, or more correctly, if all relevant image file formats are included in the “unlimited” calculation? For example: jpeg, tiff, raw files of different camera formats, Photoshop PSD etc. Or is it limited only to “consumer type” files like jpegs?

The answer is yes, all of these file types are included.

On the Amazon help pages they have the full list of file extensions that qualify as image files.

One point to Amazon!

For other file types, for example video (that is not considered as images!), you have 5 GB of storage.

Amazon Ts & Cs

In the Amazon Terms and Conditions it says that the Cloud Drive storage can only be used for personal use and not for business. Does this mean that if you are a photographer you cannot use it as an archive? After all, photography is your business…

This is clearly a very important point. You don’t want to be breaking the terms of the agreement.

It has been discussed in several places and some people have also contacted Amazon customer support and asked the question. The answer from Amazon is comforting: Amazon has responded that if you are simply using it to archive your photos then it is OK. Google it and you will find some discussion threads that deal with this.

One point to Amazon!

My guess is that if you instead use it for delivery of images to customers or other type of “front end” services in your business (sharing pictures with customers, perhaps), then it might be a violation of the terms. Worth keeping in mind.

So how does it work, using Amazon Prime and Cloud Drive for online photo storage?

I decided to go ahead to test it. I signed up for Amazon Prime with my French Amazon account (I’m based in France). Perhaps I should have used my Amazon.com account instead so I would have had access to the wider range of services that they have. On the other hand, that might have been a violation of terms perhaps.

It was very easy to sign up and you even have a 30 day free trial period.

And I started uploading.

Desktop and browser access

You can access Amazon Cloud Drive either through a browser or with a desktop app that you download from Amazon.

I quickly concluded that using the desktop app was useless. It only gives you the possiblilty to upload files to the root of the Cloud Drive. For anything else it simply redirects you to a browser window. Not very useful.

Instead I use the browser interface that looks like this:

I decided to keep exactly the same folder structure (hierarchy) that I have on my file servers so that it would be easier to keep track of the images. This means I created three Amazon Cloud drive folders: 01-01, 01-02, and 01-02 that correspond to the three file server units where I store images. Under these top-level folders I have kept exactly the same organisation as on my file servers (in fact, to the extent you upload folder hierarchies, this is done automatically):

Here you can see one first annoyance with Amazon Cloud Drive: it organises everything by default by “date added” in reverse order. Perhaps understandable for personal use where you want the most recent things first. Windows, however, organises everything alphabetically. Well, you just have to click on the heading on Cloud Drive every time. Easy but annoying.

Uploading is very easy:

1. You position yourself in the folder where you want the files to be placed on Cloud Drive,
2. Click on the plus icon on Cloud drive and
3. Just drag and drop files from your computer folder to the Cloud Drive

After the upload is completed you get a confirmation message giving the number of files uploaded.

One IMPORTANT thing:

You can upload folders to Cloud Drive and all files and sub-folders will be uploaded with the same hierarchy. However, this folder upload seems not to work with Mozilla Firefox. But it works fine with Google Chrome. With Chrome you can upload folders and folder hierarchies in one go. Or perhaps it is some conflict with a Firefox extension? I much prefer Firefox, it’s my standard browser, but it is not a big issue to use Chrome for Amazon Cloud Drive.

File upload errors

Every once in a while I had an upload error. One file (or sometimes a handful) did not upload. Cloud Drive gives you an error message and you can then upload the failed file(s) separately.

This, however, mean another very important thing: after each upload you must check the result. You must verify that all files were uploaded OK. If your computer shuts down during or after the upload (night time backup with shut-down option, for example) then you will not know if all files were uploaded or not.

Overall this was very easy.

How much time did it take?

It took quite a while to upload all my images but it nevertheless went quite smoothly. I uploaded modest amounts of files (1000-5000) in each batch and let it run in the background. Either during the day when working on other things or overnight for bigger batches.

As an example it took around 4 hours to upload 1000 files in a batch of 24GB. I imagine the time will be different depending on the file size, upload speed and perhaps also on other traffic parameters. My files range from 18MB to well over 50MB.

After having done uploads over a few weeks, not continuously of course, but when I had the time, it is now all uploaded. It went smoother than I expected. And I have had no complaints from Amazon, nor any deterioration of service as far as I can see.

Issues, weakness and improvements

No syncing

The biggest weakness is that there is no way of knowing if a folder on Cloud Drive is properly replicating what is in the same folder on my file server. The only way to do that is to check manually each and every folder.

No file and folder information

On Cloud Drive you get only two pieces of information:

• How many images you have in total
• How many items there is in the folder that you are currently in

(You also get the date added for files and folder, as well as date added and size for individual files.)

This means that it is very difficult to verify the contents on Cloud Drive.

For example: Amazon Cloud Drive tells me that I have 183,076 image files uploaded. If I check with Windows > Folder Properties or a tool like WinDirStat (a very useful tool!) I can see that on my file servers I have 183,079 files.

There are three files missing on Amazon Cloud Drive and the only way of checking which files that is is to go through every single folder manually and check the number of files.

Hopefully Amazon will open an API for Cloud Drive and some clever programmer will develop a syncing or simply a file comparison tool to compare folder. Beyond Compare is one such tool that is very handy on Windows but it obviously does not work on Amazon Cloud Drive.

No log file for uploads

It would be a great improvement if after each upload Amazon sent the user a log file (or gave it as an option).

Sort order not sticky

I would like the sort order to be sticky. I always want my files and folder to be sorted alphabetically but Amazon Cloud Drive always does it in reverse chronological order. Each time I open a new folder I have to change that setting. I wish it was sticky.

Some more statistics and search tools needed

It would be useful to get some more statistics on what is stored on the drive, eg. number of files of different file types. And perhaps to be able to display folder hierarchies, not just one folder at the time.

It would also be useful with some more clever search tools, eg. to be able to search on file extension only.

What more?

Do you have any more suggestions? Write a comment!

Conclusion: yes, it IS a viable option!

After these initial tests I think Amazon Prime’s Cloud Drive is a decent alternative for an online backup archive. It is far from perfect but quite good.

You will have to do a lot of things manually, eg remember to upload new files to Amazon Cloud Drive.

And more importantly: you also have to remember to upload files if you change them in your local archive! If, for example you add metadata to existing files in your archive then you will have to upload those changed files to Amazon Cloud Drive. That will be a tricky and time consuming task I fear. Would be made simpler with some kind of syncing or file/folder comparison tool.

Should you go “all in the cloud” now?

So Amazon Prime unlimited photo storage is great news for photographers. But I would never ever use it as the primary or the only archive. You must have your own local archive in your office/home that should be your primary archive. That should contain all your files and also all your metadata. (This means that you should not keyword and add descriptions only on an online service, like eg. Photoshelter.) Google “Digital Railroad” if you wonder why.

What are the alternatives?

There are a few alternatives to Amazon Cloud Drive.

The most interesting one is Photoshelter’s recently announced unlimited storage for their Pro account. The price tag is much bigger but for a photography business the other services that they offer – having a photography site, online customer-facing archive, display, sales features etc, etc – can easily motivate the extra cost.

Or perhaps you are, like me, already a Photoshelter customer and then the cost is effectively zero.

I will be sure to test that in the coming weeks, so come back later and read more about it.

There is also Google Drive for work, part of Google Apps. For an organisation of at least 5 users and for a price of $10 per month, i.e. $600 per year, in case you are not yet a customer at that level, you get “unlimited” storage.

Any other services you would recommend?

Continue reading : Using Amazon Prime (Premium) “unlimited” for photo backup and archiving

The post Using Amazon Prime (Premium) “unlimited” for photo backup and archiving was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

Once there was back-ups on CDs, then DVD and ultimately BlueRays.

Disk storage became cheap enough to use hard disks for backup too and many photographers (I think) also went for NAS servers. I’m not sure how many terabytes I have today but it is well over 20. (Everything must be in several copies.)

But online photo storage for archiving and backup has not been a viable option, both for cost and speed reasons. But recently two things have changed:

1. Fiber is now widely available which is a quantum leap for the speed of your internet connection. (Take a few minutes and do the maths on how long it will take you to upload 1000 50MB images over a standard ADSL connection, and then multiply that with 10 or more, and you’ll understand.)
2. A few “unlimited online storage”-offers have appeared.

Photoshelter just announced that they are now include unlimited online storage in their Pro subscription. This is fantastic news!

I will be sure to test this as soon as I have the time to look into it. Photoshelter is a fantastic tool to manage an online archive, to display your pictures online and to sell photography online.

Photoshelter is, in my opinion, the best tool there is to manage you own online photo business, selling stock photography, but it can also be used for other types of photograph, art, wedding etc. And excellent tool to showcase, display and sell.

But it has not been a tool for archiving and backup.

This has now changed. With unlimited online storage it may also become an outstanding tool to manage an online backup of your archive.

If this will be the outstanding solution it sound like depends on how you will be able to manage the online archive. I have yet to test that out for backup purposes. It is very good to manage your online library that you want to display to customers, but that is a different thing.

I look forward to trying Photoshelter also for archiving.

One word of caution thought: Never, never, NEVER, use any online service as your ONLY archive. Always have your primary archive physically in your own possession. (Google “Digital Railroad” if you wonder why.)

If you want to try the Photoshelter online photo platform you can use this link. It will give you a 14 days free trial, a special offer if you decide to go for it, and it will give me a small referral fee if you do, using this link.

They have three levels of service:

• Basic @ $110/year
• Standard @ $330/year
• Pro @ $550/year

It is only with the Pro subscription that you get unlimited storage. Photoshelter is not the thing to choose if you only want an online archive, but it is an excellent choice if you want a photography site to display, sell and deliver your photos. You get a lot for your money.

Read more about the unlimited storage offer from Photoshelter here.

(On a side note: Another very interesting unlimited online photo storage offer is Amazon Prime, or Amazon Premium as it is called in some countries. No frills and certainly not comparable to Photoshelter, but still interesting. I am currently testing that and will write something about it in the near future.)

Continue reading : Unlimited photo storage online from Photoshelter (and Amazon)

The post Unlimited photo storage online from Photoshelter (and Amazon) was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

The founder of Daminion, Murat Korkmazov contributed a number of comments on my article and was also very responsive when I had questions on the Daminion DAM on their user-to-user forum.

I am in the process (a long one) of retiring my old DAM (Extensis Portfolio) and am using some new DAMs in parallel with the intention of one day swapping over fully to a new one. Daminion is probably today the lead contender for that.

One thing led to another and one day Murat asked if he could do an interview with me to publish on the Daminion blog.

Yes, why not? It is always interesting to be put in front of someone asking questions like that.

So, the other day the interview was published: Interview with wine photographer Per Karlsson.

Here’s how they start it all:

Paris-based, Swedish wine photographer and businessman Per Karlsson gave up a promising career as a top manager with an international corporation in order to follow his passion for photography and the wine travel business.

The photography, which started out as one of many other activities involved in promoting the wine travel business, has grown to such an extent that today Per has one of the largest collections of wine photography in the world.

Per’s photographic work has appeared in many leading wine publications including Decanter, the Wine Spectator and the Wine Companion. What’s more, he and his wife both write about wine in their own online publication, BKWine Magazine, and are regular contributors to Forbes’ wine-related column. They have also published five award-winning books on wine. And, needless to say, the photos that illustrate their articles and books are all taken by Per.

There are plenty of questions in the interview. For example: How did it all start? How do I define (photographic) success? Do I ever find photography boring? What gear do I use? And much more.

Thank you Daminion!

Continue reading : Featured and interviewed on the Daminion blog

The post Featured and interviewed on the Daminion blog was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor

How copyright works is somewhat different in different countries even if the basics are generally accepted principles. But “generally accepted principles” are not sufficient when it comes to legal matters such as copyright.

Here is an excellent article from Canon Professional Network: © is for Copyright: how well do you know yours?

How well do you know the rules when it comes to Copyright? Sal Shuel, a respected expert on the subject after many years as administrator for the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) lifts the lid on a law that confuses many – yet is actually quite clear. In her own words she explains British copyright legislation, with a nod to EU Copyright law too…

The basic concept of photographic copyright is absurdly simple. Whoever pressed the shutter owns the rights. It doesn’t matter who owns the camera, the iPhone, the Canon, the Box Brownie or the Gandolfi. Copyright in the result, whether analogue or digital, belongs to whoever pressed the shutter.

Continue reading : Know your rights. Your copyrights

The post Know your rights. Your copyrights was originally published on BKWine Photography and written by Per Karlsson. Copyright BKWine and BKWine Photography. If you see it published elsewhere in full it has been republished without our permission.

BKWine Photography - Wine, winery and vineyard photos. Food, gastronomy, travel pictures | Images by Per Karlsson

Read more:

• BKWine Magazine, on wine, travel and gastronomy
• Sveriges bästa vinsajt: vin, vinregioner, vingårdar, vinresor mm | Sedan 1996 | BKWine Magazine
• On BKWine’s Wine Tours: Wine and food tours to the world’s wine regions | BKWine Tours
• Om BKWines Vinresor och matresor: Världens bästa vinresor och matresor | BKWine Vinresor