Re: "What do you do with your images?"

["Thomas J. Baker" <tjb unh edu>]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 15:39 -0400, Garrett LeSage wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I posted a little item on my website about digital photograph workflow;
> basically what people do, and how they'd like to do it.
> 
> I asked this:
> 
> <quote>
> You have a digital camera. You want the pictures on your computer. You
> want them marked somehow (grouped or tagged) so you can find them later
> and do stuff with them now. You want to share the images. You may also
> want to print them…
> 
> What matters to you? How do you currently get your photos in the
> computer? What do you do from there? How would you like to have it work
> in your ideal world?
> 
> I’m wondering, as I want to make F-Spot work the way you (or at least a
> lot of you) want it to.
> 
> Leave a comment below… and/or post to the mailing list.
> </quote>
>  
> http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2004/10/20/what-do-you-do-with-your-images/
> 
> 
> I posted it before lunch.  After going out to grab lunch (to-go), and
> getting back to the office, I already had around 7 replies.  I currently
> have 18 comments on that one post.  There is a lot of interesting stuff
> on that item.
> 
> I figured I should send email about it here in the mailing list.
> 
> What do you all think about the questions posed and the discussion
> following?
> 
> Garrett
> 

I've been maintaining photo websites for quite a few years, first dogs
for the public then kids for family. 

Since FC3, I use gthumb-import to import photos automagically when I
plug my EOS 10d in. It then runs gthumb where I auto rotate all images
appropriately. From there, I run a custom script that copies the raw
images to the web server, runs gthumb again so I can weed out the ones I
don't want family to see, and then it makes static html using more
custom perl scripts. 

After photos are read in in a YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD directory structure and
auto rotated using gthumb, I treat them as read only, almost like
negatives. (How about the concept of rolls? A roll is the batch of
photos coming off a camera. Everyone does remember film, don't they??) I
don't rename the files as I have the camera set to keep incrementing.
It's only been reset once during a firmware upgrade but this means I do
have duplicate names.

I do any modifications to copies. I use gthumb to browse them but I
haven't really done much in terms of tagging them. I've got too many
photos and too little time to go back and tag everthing to make it
meaningful. (I think gthumb just incorporated tagging recently.) A
comprehensive system like f-spot would certainly encourage me to go back
and tag things though.

I like jimmac's concept of albums but I hope I can keep my current
archive structure of 'rolls' organized by date. I suppose though that if
it were done well enough, I wouldn't care. 

As far as html exporting, one thing that may be beyond the scope of f-
spot is permission levels and access to pictures. Log in as me and you
can see everything but log in as someone else and only see what I want
you to see. Maybe a public/private flag as a minimum. Maybe this would
have to be implemented in an export plugin for a smarter web system. As
I said before, I use my own scripts so I'm not familiar with the
capabilities of other photo web software.

Anyway, it will be nice to have a comprehensive photo cataloging system
for linux.

tjb

P.S. The list seems not to be set to reply-to-list by default. Is this
by design?
-- 
=======================================================================
| Thomas Baker                                  email: tjb unh edu    |
| Systems Programmer                                                  |
| Research Computing Center                     voice: (603) 862-4490 |
| University of New Hampshire                     fax: (603) 862-1761 |
| 332 Morse Hall                                                      |
| Durham, NH 03824 USA              http://wintermute.sr.unh.edu/~tjb |
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