Photo Processor/Manager

[Sannyasin Sivakatirswami]

I have to manage a lot of incoming digital photo images on a daily 
basis coming in from cameras, emails from around the world, posted to 
folders on a server etc. up to now iView was used to deal with all 
these but it is pathetically inefficient for dealing with fresh input. 
(great for long term archives though)

  I just built in about 45 minutes a little interface in Rev and I'll 
continue to develop to do the following:

-- browse a directory of photos and display them, one at a time,
-- delete, copy or move those photos to a pre-set destination directory.
-- launch those images using imageReady, imageReady droplets, Photoshop 
or Illustrator as external "slave" services, where paths to those apps 
are pre-set in preferences, to scale down, rotate 90 degrees CW or 90 
CCW.
-- globally move all files from one directory to another
later:
-- reorder and batch rename the photos (currently done in iView, which 
is good for this...)
-- caption the photos (currently done in Supercard to be ported to 
Revolution...)

etc. That's the context in case it is useful. Many of the above 
operations are incredibly simple, a few lines of code does just about 
everything,

but here are some challenges and I suspect many of these wheels have 
already been invented or looped through already:

1) GET RECT OF IMAGE IN ADVANCE:
Can we get the rect of an image on disk, or the imagedata in variable 
before display?  I can't find any "imagedata properties" as such.  I 
need to retain the 2048 X 1536 pixel aspect ratio and data in the 
imagedata of high res images coming in off camera, but constrain that 
to a smaller size for display. So that the image will actually fit 
reasonably in a stack window area of about 4 X 5 inches maximum. Also 
one won't know in advance the orientation which could be vertical or 
horizontal.  If we can get the rect before display we can then script 
the image object size accordingly, lock it and then assign the file ref 
to it before display. Of course I could display it first, get the rect 
and then do it... but the idea is to make this as fast as possible.

b) ROTATE AND SCALE IMAGES/QUALITY ISSUE
Using ImageReady and PhotoShop as background slave processors for 
scaling down and rotation is pretty powerful.  In terms of the quality 
of the final output, my assumption is that this is probably the best 
way to go and that to build those operations natively into the 
interface would be doable--using angle, then export image etc.-- and 
perhaps save the time required for launching, but then the quality 
would simply not be there.  Right or wrong? And with OSX there is 
something to be said for offloading these tasks to other apps, because 
we can go back to Rev and continue work right now. But in cases where 
those apps simply are not available for one reason or another, if 
someone has built a native image import, scale/rotate, export widget, I 
could use that.... something simple.

c) RE- ORDERING-BATCH RENAME -- Think tank open
iView does this well, but still, consolidation into the Rev interface 
will save yet another 5-10 minutes and avoid the necessity for iView to 
be installed on the given workstation. Has anyone already built a mini 
image browser stack where you can move images around? or would a better 
strategy to use a field, set the image data of characters in a list and 
then drag these around in the field (haven't actually done that yet, 
but sounds theoretically doable) In the end, after re-ordering, we want 
to batch rename them in their logical numeric order: 01-11-23.jpg, 
02-11-23.jpg etc.

TIA!

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami

Himalayan Academy Publications
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com, www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org, www.Hindu.org