[svlug] Any other photo geeks?

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Larry Colen wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 01:48:40PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> # Quoting Bill Ward (bill at wards.net):
> # 
> # > I have root on a hosted box, but I don't want to run up our bandwidth
> # > cost by hosting images there.  I like letting Flickr eat that cost
> # > while making my high-res pictures available.
> # 
> # This would be a good point if you had serious traffic.  I host quite a
> # few high-res photos on home aDSL, and it's not a problem.  If any of
> # those _did_ start becoming a bandwidth problem, I'd move them to, e.g., 
> # a Linode virthost (but not Flickr, et al.).
> 
> You must have much better bandwidth than I do.

Indeed.  The 40kB/s upload I get at home (on a good day) isn't really 
great for schlepping photos around, and this is just from my old 3.2Mpx 
camera; I imagine most more serious photographers have better cameras 
and take higher-res photos than I do.

Even assuming that my photo site would be low-traffic (which it would 
be), it would be painfully slow to anyone viewing it, even with only one 
visitor at a time.

> To tie this back in to the original point of the thread.
> 
> What tools do you people use for your photographic workflow?

I use a custom perl script to pull photos off my camera using gphoto2. 
It uses a CPAN module (can't remember which offhand) to pull out the 
date and time the photo was taken from the EXIF tags, and renames 
everything to  ${prefix}-YYYY.MM.DD-###.jpg (where ### is a 001-based 
counter that resets based on the day).

Unfortunately, since my camera does not have the hardware to detect the 
orientation, I have to rotate photos manually.  Usually that just 
entails a full-screen gqview window, plus an always-on-top terminal to 
paste filenames into the command line of a quick bash script I wrote 
that just uses jpegtran to rotate the files (using jhead to preserve the 
EXIF data).

I'm a bit lazy with my photos.  I generally just save them as-is 
(rotated as needed), without doing any post-processing.  My laziness is 
unfortunate, as, looking back, many of my photos could benefit with, at 
the very least, brightness/contrast adjustments.

Next I have a custom perl script that creates .thumbs and .smalls 
directories, and then uses ImageMagick to create thumbnails and mid-size 
photos.

After that, I create an '.albumdata' file that has a few 'key=value' 
pairs that set the album title, creation timestamp, sort order, etc.

Then I typically use rsync over ssh to upload the photos to my shared 
hosting provider.

On the web server, I have a (somewhat buggy, unfortunately) PHP script 
that I wrote that dynamically creates a thumbnail gallery of the albums 
and photos contained in them, and can also display the mid-sized photo 
with some selected EXIF data, or take you to the full-sized original image.

That's about it, I guess.  I'd really like my workflow to be a bit more 
streamlined and automatic, but I'm not much of an avid photographer, so 
I don't have to go through all this that often.  I guess the most 
tedious part is the manual rotation, but I'm not sure that's solvable 
without a new camera that sets the EXIF orientation tag for me.  (I 
imagine some advanced image processing software could make a good guess 
at a photo's orientation; any pointers in that regard would be welcome.)

	-brian