Photo Processing , Gallery and IPTC Data app

[Ian Wood]

On 24 Jan 2008, at 19:27, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> Ian Wood wrote:
>>
>> On 21 Jan 2008, at 01:34, Sivakatirswami wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> You're assuming it's all going to be JPEG images? What will you do  
>> if someone wants to shoot RAW?
>
> Good question. If someone is shooting RAW, typically the setting can  
> be set to include an adjacent JPG copy (we would require it)

True, RAW+JPEG could work. Just watch out - if the photographer isn't  
using the manufacturer's own RAW software the converted RAW files  
could end up looking quite different to the JPEGs. :-(

> we would have the photographer, write captions against the jpgs,  
> send us the entire shoot as 200 px wide thumbs... it can run as high  
> as 400-600 shots for a 3-6 day gig...

Hmm. What I'm wondering is if there's too much re-invention of the  
wheel going on - why write yourself an app from scratch when there are  
existing apps such as Aperture, LightRoom or Photo Mechanic which are  
specifically designed for rapid sorting and tagging of images.
If you *do* go down the route of building something yourself I'd have  
a good look at the SIPS (Simple Image Processing System) shell  
commands available in OS X - at a minimum you're going to have to make  
reduced size copies of all the images for the thumbnails as Rev simply  
can't cope with the pixel dimensions you are going to get from any  
current pro dSLR. SIPS can resize, crop, pad, rotate (increments of  
90˚) and change file type. I think on later versions of 10.4 it will  
even produce JPEGs from RAW files as long as they are on the list of  
supported cameras for OS X.
<http://www.apple.com/aperture/raw/cameras.html>

My personal favourite is Aperture due to it's organisational strengths  
and a reasonable AppleScript dictionary, but it can be quite slow for  
some tasks and it's getting a fair amount of bad press at the moment.

> but meanwhile we start comps and layout right away.  Portfolio will  
> have cataloged all the jpgs and we can pull up an index of the  
> metadata for the entire shoot later, and then we only have to open  
> the RAW files for those shots we know we are going to use when the  
> disks finally arrive.

Sounds sensible. Use the lo-res placeholders and replace with full-res  
once they are available.

> Have you ever tried doing photo selection on 200 Raw images!

I'm a photographer, who is also a programmer... ;-)

459 RAW images from the Malta conference got edited in the evenings  
and on the flight home:
<http://ianjameswood.co.uk/eurorevcon_2006/>

A panoramic photography conference in Berkeley, ~ 1200 RAW files,  
again mostly edited down in the evenings and on the way home, although  
there was quite a bit of work once I was home again:
<http://ianjameswood.co.uk/ivrpa/berkeley_report/>

The same for a panoramic meeting in Switzerland, ~2000 RAW files:
<http://ianjameswood.co.uk/ptm-luzern/report/>


Photographic workflows and automation are my special interest at the  
moment, feel free to email me off-list if you want to discuss things  
in more depth. I've also developed an extensive Rev library for  
Aperture-related automation.

Ian