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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