101-Handling Images

Taking pictures is the easy bit, tidying up the resulting files so that they can be uploaded is a little more fun. I have two main sources, my mobile phone, which is fine for the odd quick picture, but framing the shot and still maintaining resolution is not easy, and my trusty old Sony A100 which is still using the lenses from my earlier Minolta film camera ( which is still around somewhere ). The key of cause here is the lenses and while most work is fine using the standard 18-70 autofocus lens, the 70-120 one is useful for long distance, and a macro lens comes out at times when working on close-up pictures of PCB's and models. And all the images are stored on CF flash cards as a useful long-term backup. The difficulty with both sources is the file names used which is simply a numeric value and so having uploaded to the desktop, the first step has to be to replace this with a more meaningful file name. What would perhaps be nice going forward would be to record the original camera file name somewhere, such as in the image metadata, but that has not happened so the memory cards simply have the original numbering.

So first step in my process is to duplicate the memory card onto the desktop, for which I like to use 'BeyondCompare' which has a number of distinct advantages. It obviously picks up files that have not yet been copied over, but it's view facility displays both the image differences along with the metadata. For some file formats these can be edited, but images are read only which is probably a good thing. While the camera memory card has to be physically moved to the desktop card reader, the phone is simply another storage device on the network and can be uploaded remotely. Belt and braces approach is also to duplicate the raw images to the server in addition to the desktop machine, so there should be three copies of those raw images. In addition of cause to the renamed versions that are processed and uploaded to the websites. I do tend to take a couple of images of each subject, so selecting a subset of images that provide the sharpest version of what I'm covering is step one, and something which Gwenview comes into it's own in assisting with. Starting first by selecting all the images from a set and duplicating those into a folder with a suitable name. One can quickly toggle between images and then delete those that are not needed. Following this, one can rename the images along with cropping them as appropriate. At one time I would resize things to keep things tidy, but since bitweaver produces a set of thumbnails then there is no real need. The high resolution image is always available in the website attachments store.

At this point we have a gallery of images that can be seen in the Gwenview browser but the Sony images have an annoying little niggle that there 'Description' in the metadata defaults to 'SONY DSC' which bitweaver then duplicates to the image title, rather than using the file name. I have a quick script that tidies this up by replacing the description with the file name, and also tidying the .JPG to .jpg just for consistence since Linux actually respects the case of a file name and extension. This can be fun when mirroring to a windows computer which can't cope with what it thinks are two files with the same name. There is also the problem of windows baulking at a couple of characters such as the colon which Linux also happily uses in a file name.

Once we have a set of files all tidied, they can be zipped up for quick transfer to the bitweaver upload. The other nice thing about bitweaver is that it will also respect the directory structure in the zip file, and will create new galleries and sub-galleries as required. It's not often needed to handle multiple sub-galleries, but simply wrapping all the images of a project in a single directory allows bitweaver to create that as a new gallery in the relevant location on-line. I do however have a growing library of material from recovered websites which will be easier to upload to a collection of galleries matching their original site layout.

TODO - add more detailed notes as to how to use BeyondCompare, Gwenview, the description tidy script and bitweaver upload