[ANN] Photo Loader-Captioner

[Sannyasin Sivakatirswami]

This is pursuant to threads on photo galleries, previewing thumbnails, 
etc.

Run

go  url "http://www.himalayanacademy.com/outgoing/rev/TAKA_Photos.rev"

in your message box to get a stack that:

1) inputs photos to cards
2) Creates a preview of the photos in a second stack
3) Offers option for a caption of each photo.
4) offers option to load "banners" (html chunks) that are in external 
files that will be inserted above the photo in final output
5) outputs an html chunk for all photos and captions.
6) allows you to rename all the photos (and files on disk at the same 
time)
7) you can use the preview to move photos around and the cards in the 
main stack will be re-ordered accordingly.
8) allows you to insert photos from another folder, coping them to your 
working folder directory.

Notes,
--excuse my xTalk which is "baby talk" but it works, mostly
--The directory to the banner's files is hard coded to our local server.
--the preview uses a text field, and you can insert the cursor, cut and 
past photos around to different locations, add line breaks to make the 
photos "wrap" etc.

--some of the html building and renaming code is "localized" for the 
specific task at hand, which is the daily build of 
www.gurudeva.org/index.shtml

But those items could be easily adjusted for your needs. The rest of it 
should just work fine.

YET TO DO (and if you have any thoughts, they will be appreciated)

a) The photo previewer loads photos at the imported size... i need a 
simple way to take them down to a max width or height of about 120 
pixels. (that's arbitrary, I don't like to work with really "tiny" 
thumbnails, but they could be even smaller)  It works fine on our 21 
inch Cinema displays, but small screens could be challenging for the 
user.
b) We will trim this project down to a simple import photos, write 
captions, save captions as individual texts files, then FTP everything 
to a remote server... this will be for correspondents in the field who 
can contribute digital photos  to projects with captions attending them 
without resorting to email

The preview photos in a text field is pretty cool, if I can just find a 
way to dynamically make them smaller... and then revert them to full 
size in the main stack ..... without double loading the data.

Note, that I've experienced a some of instability (recipe as yet not 
clear) when imageSource of chars in a field are set to file on a remote 
machine, when that machine off line or not mounted on the local system. 
Rev can just lock up Max OS X completely if the link for the 
imageSource is not available. The work around is to always clear this 
field when the main stack is closed, then save. so that when the stack 
is re-opened, Rev doesn't balk at trying to load imageSource data that 
is not available.

all input welcome


Sannyasin Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

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