Photo Processing , Gallery and IPTC Data app

Sivakatirswami katir at hindu.org
Thu Jan 24 21:18:53 EST 2008


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?)

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.

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.

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.

years ago i create a small app called "Caption writer"  users point it 
at a folder, they click on a list of image names, and enter a caption 
and the caption is saved as an adjacent image file

DCSN12345.jpg
DCSN12345.txt

I got new "instant" success with this and it is still in use. It's so 
easy to use I can tell just about anyone to download and install and 
just read help menu and I never hear back from them... it just works... 
I just need to a a few features to this and we are good to go...



 Ian Wood wrote:
>
> 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_______________________________________________
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