Scripted workflow for preparing images

I’ve finally written a very small shell script to prepare my Digital Rebel photos for web posting. I used to do this manually, but that’s just silly. I shoot in fine-resolution JPEG, which results in images 3072x2048 (landscape) - pretty huge for a web gallery. I’ve found that shrinking them down to 2048x1365 results in a decent sized file. In addition, Coppermine Gallery can create good looking thumbnails from these images - if I shrink the images too much, the thumbnails turn to crap. Because I’m too busy, I don’t spend much time editing in The Gimp. If I screw it up badly when I click the shutter, I probably won’t bother fixing it after the fact. I could shoot in Canon Raw, but the files are too huge. I’ve already bought a tape drive for backups - I’d rather not buy a tape loader. The process involves two steps:

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Alice Catherine Isabella Murray

Corinna and I are the proud parents of a baby girl! Her name is Alice Catherine Isabella Murray. She was born September 18, 2004, and she’s pretty big for a Murray:

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Coppermine Gallery Installed

Installed Coppermine gallery yesterday. It was really easy - more so than WordPress, since I had already beaten MySQL and php-mysql into submission. My only regret: I’m not entirely sure where the disk footprint will reside. I use LVM, so I can resize things a bit as necessary, but I’d rather plan the installation accordingly up front. I probably shouldn’t worry about this – I’ve plenty of disk space, as long as I don’t post every photo I’ve taken with my Digital Rebel.

Two More Weeks!

Our first child is due in exactly two weeks! Corinna is hoping she goes into labour early – she’s reached that uncomfortable stage. Her back is sore, she’s not sleeping very well, and the baby is very active. We’re about as ready as we can be at this point. We have most of the stuff that we’ll need. The car seat is in the CRV, the baby room is all set with crib, diapers, sleepers, onesies, socksies, and other cute baby things. And let’s not forget the diaper genie.

Web Gallery

Now that I’ve got WordPress installed in the DMZ, it’s time to add a web gallery. I’m leaning towards Coppermine. It’s requirements are similar to those of WP (at least the Web Server + PHP + MySQL part), so it should not be a big deal. The real reason I want a gallery? Our first child is due September 21st. I expect I’ll have a few photos to share in the next little while.

First Post

Got WordPress installed in the DMZ. Took a little effort. Since I use CentOS 3.1 with a minimal install, I had to download the following RPMs:

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