Ever Forward

One would think you could simply take a bunch of photos, connect your camera to your computer and upload the images to your website.  Alas, it just isn’t that simple.  My digital images are large, the filenames overly simple and the format tag is always capitalized as JPG, instead of the normal jpg.  However, I tend to use two libre-licensed applications to prepare my digital images for uploading.

A magnolia flower

Let me say up front – this is not so much a howto as a ‘whatto’, as in ‘what to use’ to process your images for posting on the web.  These are not the only two, of course, but definitely two great applications anyone can use.  I asked about this on one of the Linux4Christians mailing list I subscribe to, and the folks there were pretty helpful.  So I’m really just passing on what others have passed down to me.  I may come back with a proper howto article later.

The focus here is also on working with multiple files – batch processing, if you will.  If you’re a big GIMP fan, or you have some specialized task that you need to perform before uploading a particular photo, that’s one thing.  But when you need to rename and shrink a bunch of files at once, it’s time to pull out a different toolset.

Once I am ready to transfer all my cool photos, and maybe some that aren’t so cool, to my computer, I usually place them in a ‘holding tank’ of sorts.  I have a folder named for whatever the current set of photos is all about where I copy the original images to.  Having done that, I normally like to run pyRenamer, a program that renames whole sets of files at once.  I use the Images tab, which has a preset renaming pattern that works for me.  I then re-run it to change all the UPPERCASE letters to lowercase.

Once I’ve done this, I import the originals into F-Spot (my desktop photo album), thus creating a duplicate set of images.  Now I can have the full-size originals and play with the ones in the holding tank.  I then run an ImageMagick command to resize the photos from their original 3000×2000 (or something like that) resolution to 102×768.  ImageMagick is a command-line tool, but even a novice computer user can run the simple command to resize images.

The resizing process takes a few minutes, and once it’s done, you should be able to see the difference when looking at the file sizes of your images in a file browser.  KDE users may prefer KRename (I believe that is the correct name) for renaming files.  At any rate, ImageMagick and pyRenamer both work very well at getting my images ready to upload to my blog.