Joho the Blog
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July 22, 2004
Here's an image from my new Canon S60, shot on automatic, by someone with no eye and less talent.
I altered it only by cropping it. I refrained — for demonstration purposes only — from tinkering with the color and contrast with my photo-shoppish software, but in general I'm with Tim Bray on the question of photographic "integrity." I've spent most of my leisure hours over the past couple of days writing a VB script (I have no shame) that does the following with a single button press once you've dragged a photo(s) into it: Runs imagemagick and produces a copy sized appropriately for my blog and a thumbnail version Displays the image, and lets me enter a caption and an Alt tag FTPs the copies to my web site Downloads and displays the copies to confirm that the FTP worked Moves the copies into the designated directory on my hard drive Writes the relevant linking lines of html and copies them to the clipboard so I can paste them into my blog Don't get me wrong: What I wrote is a horrible, kludgy bit of disasterware that will fail to work in a rich variety of everyday situations. But doesn't every blogger who is hosting her own blogging software go through roughly the same thing? So, why isn't there freeware that does this for us automatically? (Here's where you get to tell me that it exists, it's great, and everyone uses it already.) [Later: It sounds like Britt's been thinking along related lines...way ahead of me, as usual.] Another complaint about the software that came with the Canon. I've already uninstalled the photo management stuff because it was just too cumbersome. But I kept the ArcSoft Camera Suite because its photo editing tool seemed ok. But, it turns out that when it saves an edited photo, it doesn't save some of the data that ImageMagick needs to work with the photo. (Is it stripping out EXIF stuff?) I learned this by spending about 2 hours trying to figure out why certain photos just weren't being accepted by the program I describe above. Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 22, 2004 07:17 PM
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Comments
I've had lots of problems with photo editing programs that strip out the exif information when they save the altered image. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until I had lost information on a bunch of my photos from a while back. Sucks.
I started using Picasa yesterday and I like it a lot so far. Combined with my script (written in Python which sort of does similar things to what yours does), it's what I need to crop, resize, and publish photos.
Posted by: will | July 22, 2004 08:03 PM
I was an early Picasa user and liked it a lot. I'll take another look at it.
And, see, we're all writing the same damn scripts over and over!
Posted by: David Weinberger | July 22, 2004 08:20 PM
The guys at http://www.exposuremanager.com have set up a free site for Convention bloggers at http://www.electionphotos04.com. 1GB of space, easy uploads, easy grab of html for 200 ot 400 pixel reductions, convention-based metadata tagging, etc.
I like it because I helped specify the features. Sign up for your free account and tell them what you want improved for the general purpose blogger version.
Posted by: Britt Blaser | July 22, 2004 08:27 PM
David,
I noticed that the resized picture is 142KB. Maybe you should set the compression a little higher (i.e., lower the quality) to make downloads somewhat faster. There must be some setting in ImageMagick you missed. In Photoshop, at "High" quality (60), I get a 24KB file. Anybody know the right settings in ImageMagick? I found something about a "-quality" setting on http://www.imagemagick.net/www/ImageMagick.html#details-quality
The EXIF information is apparently being saved: I see that you took the picture at 5:37pm yesterday (is your date right?) with a Canon S60...
-DanB
Posted by: Dan Bricklin | July 22, 2004 10:50 PM
Hi
Can I suggest Flickr - http://www.flickr.com . It's evolved quite a bit from the beta at Etcon, and recently I've flipped over to using it for all my photo storage (albums are coming soon, and then I'll be completely happy).
Chris.
(nothing but a happy customer)
Posted by: Chris Heathcote | July 23, 2004 03:11 AM
Er......is it me or is this photo just a tad bit...ummmm....pudendal? They way it's floating there, smack dab in the center, you can't avoid it.
Something's missing. Maybe a steer's skull?
GO'K
Posted by: G O'Keefe | July 23, 2004 04:58 AM
Take this a stage further and really support Camera Phones. The Camera should insert location and time information automatically. The software should extract this and use it intelligently. The whole process on the phone should be no more than 3 clicks.
Here's hoping.
Posted by: Julian Bond | July 23, 2004 05:19 AM
DanB, imagemagick has a -quality parameter that takes a value from 0 to 100, with 75 as the default. I'll try tinkering with it.
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/ImageMagick.html#details-quality
And, yes, the posted image has EXIF info because I didn't use ArcSoft to crop it. I used PaintShopPro. I think that if you save a jpg with any compression in PSP, it too strips out EXIF. So, I saved it losslessly.
I was disappointed that imagemagick wasn't robust enough to handle a jpg that doesn't have EXIF, if that's what the problem actually was. On the other hand, imagemagick is amazingly full-featured, fast, and free, which makes me inclined not to whine.
As for Flickr: I want to keep the photos on my server because they're mine, dammit. I'm just an old fashioned guy.
As for the O'Keefian aspect of the photo: God made 'em; I just took the photo. And, as Piet Hein once wrote: "Everything's either concave or -vex / so whatever you dream will be something with sex." (It does make clear the absurdity of the cliche: "I don't care if you're white, red, brown or purple..." I think I actually do care if you're purple. Time to see a doctor at the very least.)
Posted by: David Weinberger | July 23, 2004 07:43 AM
one trick pony me again. i downloaded imagemagick but haven't installed yet cuz looking at their sample pics of what it can do, i didn't see anything significant that isn't done by the amazingly full-featured, fast, and free irfanview. i refuse to ever again even consider paintshopphooey. in irfanview, saving exif image info is an option in the same dialogue where you set compression.
semi-informed, i believe the scale is format based, not program specific. so, 1-10 or 1-100, with 6.5 being same as 65. 9 or 90 still being accapted by most image geeks as high quality. i save 320x 240 progressive jpg's for the web at 65 in irfanview, getting files between 15-30kb. if you need them to look as good forever as they do now, definitely stay over 90. if you want fast loading for us on dialup you can prolly go as low as 50.
Posted by: kim | July 23, 2004 09:58 AM
kim, I need imagemagick's ability to be driven from the command line. I didn't see that in irfanview, but I didn't check because I was already set up with imagemagick.
Posted by: David Weinberger | July 23, 2004 11:50 AM
I guess the problem you had was the "lossless" setting somewhere along the line. Default ImageMagick should be OK compression, though 60 might be a little more friendly than 75. If you crop with Irfanview the few times you need to crop, and then do the rest with your VB app, maybe that will work fine. Just test things and make sure that the image file sizes end up reasonable. 20-40KB is reasonable, 140KB is not for 400 pixel wide images.
Posted by: Dan Bricklin | July 23, 2004 12:08 PM
Shame on you!
Hasn't RageBoy suffered enough that now you are competing with his weblog by showing this type of images?
Posted by: Hanan Cohen | July 24, 2004 05:16 PM