Photo Processing , Gallery and IPTC Data app

[Sivakatirswami]

We are beginning work on an in-house semi-industrial strength photo 
processing tool, for remote correspondents for Hinduism Today and 
Himalayan Academy Publications. The idea is to provide a streamlined 
tool for photographers on location, without not too much overhead... but 
enough bells and whistles to meet  basic production needs: A 
photographer should be able to download his camera; quickly process all 
the photos in a given folder to 2-4 different specifications, run 
perhaps one or two simple filters- or not-- (we will finally put 
Wilhelms cool filters to use), add metadata the folders, zip and email 
them to us... It has to be simple, fast and easy. e.g. in cases of large 
shoots we may want him to ship us 300-400 thumbs for evaluation and then 
later we ask for originals we choose for publication. Other scenarios 
will be for slideshows where our blogs will want next day publication of 
events happening on the other side of the world, but I need to get all 
the 30-60 photos here, but they will get processed a second time... 
another scenario will be to process the photos to spec on location and 
these will go on-line with hours of receipt here. etc.

Much of which is all standard stuff and many of our revolutionaries 
already way ahead in these areas... I'm interested in see if anyone has 
done any work that they can share in the following areas:

1) Display of thumbnails of images in a folder in a "gallery" type 
window where images can be moved around, reordered, renamed, deleted 
etc. where the window, if resized. will scale the number of row and 
columns of thumbnails automatically (the app needs to  scale nicely for 
a user on we 30 inch cinema display, and also run sweetly on a 15 inch 
MacBook Pro.

Or if anyone has thoughts to the best way to tackle this. I currently 
have hacked a little previewer where I assign the image data to chars on 
a long line of 1000 chars and can shuffle these around by cutting and 
pasting... you just put a row of aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa  and then 
assign image data to the chars and viola you have a poor man's gallery 
where you can cut and paste images around...and they wrap automatically 
inside a field...  very easy to code,  but it's a bit buggy. For some 
reason, if I select say ten photos and cut them and paste them to 
another location, I don't always get the expected results, the image 
data for  chars 4,5,6,7 which I cut and paste inbetween chars 12 and 13. 
is not always swapped... I find char 5 somewhere I don't expect it to 
be... but I'm not sure debugging that is going to be us what we want.

Other options which would be to have actual image objects in a group 
that would dynamically move round as users dragged and dropped them 
seems enormously complicated to code if one had to do the geometry for 
this. But I suspect some wizard math person might be able to come up 
with some general algorithm that could handle it...

2) Reading and writing "standards quality" binary EXIF-IPTC-XMP data to 
JPG or TIF files from inside revolution.

I know it can be done... but it's tricky.

http://www.iptc.org/IPTC4XMP/

All the rest is "child's play" (Saving, rotating, copying new files, 
renaming etc...all simple rev stuff...)

The above 2 aspects of the application present the most challenges (well 
filters would have been also,
but thanks to Wilhelm we have those!)

If anyone is working in these areas, please share on list or email me 
off list.

thanks!

Sivakatirswami
www.hinduismtoday.com
www.himalayanacademy.com