Photo Processor/Manager

[Sannyasin Sivakatirswami]

I have to manage a lot of incoming digital photo images on a daily basis coming in from cameras, emails from around the world, posted to folders on a server etc. up to now iView was used to deal with all these but it is pathetically inefficient for dealing with fresh input. (great for long term archives though)

I just built in about 45 minutes a little interface in Rev and I'll continue to develop to do the following:

-- browse a directory of photos and display them, one at a time,
-- delete, copy or move those photos to a pre-set destination directory.
-- launch those images using imageReady, imageReady droplets, Photoshop or Illustrator as external "slave" services, where paths to those apps are pre-set in preferences, to scale down, rotate 90 degrees CW or 90 CCW.
-- globally move all files from one directory to another
later:
-- reorder and batch rename the photos (currently done in iView, which is good for this...)
-- caption the photos (currently done in Supercard to be ported to Revolution...)

etc. That's the context in case it is useful. Many of the above operations are incredibly simple, a few lines of code does just about everything,

but here are some challenges and I suspect many of these wheels have already been invented or looped through already:

1) GET RECT OF IMAGE IN ADVANCE:
Can we get the rect of an image on disk, or the imagedata in variable before display? I can't find any "imagedata properties" as such. I need to retain the 2048 X 1536 pixel aspect ratio and data in the imagedata of high res images coming in off camera, but constrain that to a smaller size for display. So that the image will actually fit reasonably in a stack window area of about 4 X 5 inches maximum. Also one won't know in advance the orientation which could be vertical or horizontal. If we can get the rect before display we can then script the image object size accordingly, lock it and then assign the file ref to it before display. Of course I could display it first, get the rect and then do it... but the idea is to make this as fast as possible.

b) ROTATE AND SCALE IMAGES/QUALITY ISSUE
Using ImageReady and PhotoShop as background slave processors for scaling down and rotation is pretty powerful. In terms of the quality of the final output, my assumption is that this is probably the best way to go and that to build those operations natively into the interface would be doable--using angle, then export image etc.-- and perhaps save the time required for launching, but then the quality would simply not be there. Right or wrong? And with OSX there is something to be said for offloading these tasks to other apps, because we can go back to Rev and continue work right now. But in cases where those apps simply are not available for one reason or another, if someone has built a native image import, scale/rotate, export widget, I could use that.... something simple.

c) RE- ORDERING-BATCH RENAME -- Think tank open
iView does this well, but still, consolidation into the Rev interface will save yet another 5-10 minutes and avoid the necessity for iView to be installed on the given workstation. Has anyone already built a mini image browser stack where you can move images around? or would a better strategy to use a field, set the image data of characters in a list and then drag these around in the field (haven't actually done that yet, but sounds theoretically doable) In the end, after re-ordering, we want to batch rename them in their logical numeric order: 01-11-23.jpg, 02-11-23.jpg etc.

TIA!

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami

Himalayan Academy Publications
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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

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