If it were Apple Only it would be so easy, but we need a cross platform
solution. Andre is looking into SIPS (yes if you have code we could use
it!) and he is looking at a VB /ASP solution for Windows.
But, at least for version 1.0 if photos are coming in at 2.5 Megs of
smaller (typical for my users) a clean native transcript solution for
the downsizing and preview thumbnails is not all that bad...open, scale
down, write image data to a new image and save out... if you do it as
invisible. You would be surprised... naive users are also fairly
patient. If you tell them "It will take me about 5 minutes to process
your 50 images" that's just fine with them.. they do something else, go
do email for a few minutes and come back. They are happy if a) it works
b) they don't have to know how it works c) nothing breaks. Professionals
tend to be speed addicts and they can't stand it. they want the computer
do everything right now...
Those impatient users who do have knowledge and skills usually have no
problem with two step process: they can use Photoshop batch process
(Adobe killed Image Ready which was too bad...) or that cool little
program called "Down Size" and *then* open them in my app... save us
the trouble of trying to bundling all that.
So then we only need to write a small bit of IPTC data, data, caption,
author of caption, that's about it, keywords possibly...back into the
files... so that's were EXIFTools comes in.
Ian Wood wrote:
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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