Photo Processing , Gallery and IPTC Data app

Ian Wood revlist at azurevision.co.uk
Thu Jan 24 22:10:44 EST 2008


On 25 Jan 2008, at 02:18, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> Ian:
>
> Thanks for your insights and input. I'm happy to have a professional  
> Photographer on the scene! (we are in touch with many...where are  
> you located?)

SW England.

> Yes, right we are doing a bit of re-inventing here... but I *think*  
> we have the kind of functional specification that will provide a  
> most *only* 2 user choices:
>
> -Size;
> - output quality (and both of these from pull down menus with  
> defaults preset)
>
> Reinventing the wheel here is about building a tool UI for naive  
> users. That delivers what you want to  a specification that is  
> otherwise relatively complex in terms of the processing requirement.

Doh! I derailed things with the mention of RAW and assumed from your  
reply that it was going to be used by dedicated photographers.

> 1)  download camera, resize, help them with selection
>   with some CMS in the background
>  (save originals in one folder, build thumbs in another etc)
> run filter (unsharp mask)
> 2) add captions, save that data as part of the IPTC
> 3) bundle and email or upload
>
> I have yet to see any application that does that and only that.

Photo Mechanic would be about the closest, but leaves out the sizing,  
USM and uploading.

> I've already seen what happens if you try to ask these same naive  
> users to buy (they won't) get their heads around (they can't)  
> properly use (they won't) tools like Aperture,  iView (now  
> Expressions owned by MS.. our favorite)  ...  These apps are   
> wonderful, to be sure, but a) costly b) feature heavy to the point  
> of being difficult to use.

Agreed. They are specialist apps which require time (and interest) to  
learn.

 From your mention of MBP & Cinema Displays, will it be Mac-specific  
or wider? There's quite a few bits in OS X which will help.

A few ideas in the order of your steps above, assuming OS X:
1)
a. Image Capture can be set to send all the images it downloads to an  
application (such as your ingester). A short screen video showing how  
to do this will keep life really
b. SIPS for making thumbnails in a new folder, I can probably dig out  
some code for this. Note - SIPS can also be called via AppleScript but  
this is considerably slower.
c. Wilhelm for USM. :-)
2)
a. Might be worth adding keywording as well, unless you want to do all  
of that in Portfolio once the files are   back at base.
b. Definitely EXIFTools for adding the info to the files. I don't  
(yet) have any direct experience of using it, but from everything I've  
read it's pretty easy if you are confident in the command line. I  
believe that it can be distributed and used freely.
3) No comments.

Interface-wise, I think the moving of thumbnails around the screen is  
likely to be the tricky bit, but it sounds like you've already noticed  
that...

Ian



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