Drowning in pixels...
The upside of a digital camera is that it takes nice pitures with immediate gratification, the down side is that you suddenly find yourself swimming in hundreds of 1.5mb+ sized filles. The old way of shooting film limited you to 36 shots or so per roll which cost anywhere between $8-$20 to have developed...so it cut down the volume and you had something physical to either file away or put in a scrapbook, etc. With 500 JPEG files in a week or so it quickly transforms into a much larger problem of how to organise them and how to manage them.
The software that comes with the Canon D30 is nothing to write home about but does an adequate job of extracting the photos from the CF card and transferring it to, in my case, the iBook. I quickly found that the Microtech ZiO! comes in very handy for hoovering off the photos without having to have the camera around. I've also started using Image::Info along with MacPerl [ thanks to Matthias and Pudge :) ] to bypass the Canon software altogether and gather all the EXIF information in a far more convenient manner than I would otherwise be able to do with the vendor software. Translating the Canon MakerNotes into useful information is not quite as clear and simple as one might hope though.
I've got lots of original files from the camera, a bunch of resized files for the web and, now, a whole lot of data relating to each. So, I'm thinking it needs a database, something small and simple but even with all the data that is extracted from the picture there is value added data such as location, type, comments, etc. which really make the data useful yet takes a lot of time since it cannot be automated.
And, of course, the logistics of sharing them becomes something of a task as well. The elderly couple who lived next door to my family when I was growing up would usually take an exotic holiday 2 or 3 times a year and invite us over for dinner and a slide show of photos with colourful stories afterwards and mail us picture postcards from their destinations too. Sharing pictures over the web removes all of the personal elements...I usually feel like a dirty old man looking at other peoples photos of family and such online without the personal commentary that would normally accompany such pictures. How do you share photos that are meaningful to you or meaningful enough to want to share while removing the personal? Well, I've looked at a lot of photo album software for the web and I figure if the personal can't be present then at least a certain amount of simplicity and utility should be. Pekka Saarinen is about to release his newly named exhibit engine which he's spiffed up in the last few weeks but the list feature is something I've not found in any other software. Pudge also has a nice photo gallery plugin but, at least on the boxes I use for photos, I can't install slash 2.x yet due to software conflicts. I'm hopeful that EE won't have any such issues.
And now I have to figure out the best way to send print orders to the photo shop so I can get physical copies to send to Mom :) Digital cameras are great if you can avoid drowning in the sea of pixels and info....
4 Jan 2002 at 0:48, Helsinki
