Rediscovering Photography

Nobody sees the photos you have on your hard drive!

Why do you take photos? To keep them stored on your computer? To spend hours and hours post processing them with Photoshop or some other image processing software? And then saying, “I’ve got to get to bed. I’ll work on these some more tomorrow.”

If this sounds familiar, then you’ll know how I’ve felt about processing photos after I download them from the camera.

About a year ago I made some headway into solving the time it takes to sort lots of pictures when I wrote my PhotoMove program. It automatically sorts photos into folders based on the date the photo was taken (not the file date) and you can’t beat the price, it’s free. Download it and try it out.

But I think I’ve finally realized that our whole mindset has got to change about digital pictures. There are so many tools available to change and edit and adjust and sharpen and resize and fix the photos that we are constantly trying to make them “perfect” and end up never printing them or putting them up on the web for others to see.

So here’s a start on knocking down the “post processing barrier” that we spend so much time on.

After looking at many options, I found a free program that works exceptionally well at resizing images and is extremely fast to use.

The program is called the RIOT – Radical Image Optimization Tool. This is free resizing software but the author does ask for a voluntary contribution. If you can afford it, give the guy a few bucks. This is a nice piece of work.

This program is made for one thing only: Reducing the size of the image file while keeping the highest quality possible based on the size you pick. This allows you to use your photos quickly on your web page or in an email without spending hours getting it ready.

For fun, take a look at these instructions for How to Optimize a Picture for the Web from eHow.com. Can you believe it? Seven (fairly complicated) steps to convert an image.

We are going to be working on ways to allow people to see our photos, in very high quality so we can be proud of them, quickly and immediately so we don’t waste hours on the computer. And the RIOT tool is a great start for our system to accomplish this.

Download the program and give it a try. It’s a riot.

Here’s the scenario. You’ve been taking photos off and on for the past few weeks or months, but haven’t gotten around to downloading them from your camera or card to the computer. Then when you do, you have a folder full of photos from many different dates but the file dates are all the same since you downloaded them all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice to just automatically have them moved and sorted to directories based on the actual date the photo was taken?

I thought it would be nice. So I wrote this small app that will do that for you.

Download the PhotoMove program here and install it. When you run the program you will see the screen below.

To move or copy your photos to subdirectories:

1. Choose the directory with your photos in the top section.

2. Choose the directory under which you want the date sorted files to go.

3. Click on the ‘Find Photos’ Button. (A DOS command window will open and run Phil Harvey’s exiftool.) Wait for it to finish and the count of the number of files found and number of photos with exif creation dates will show.

4. Then click on either ‘Copy Image Files’ or ‘Move Image Files’.

This is a sample of what the folder (subdirectory) structure looks like after running PhotoMove on some miscellaneous photos:

I wrote this program to get an idea of how difficult it would be to work with exif data. I intend on modifying this and expanding it into a full fledged AUTOMATIC geotagging program that will hook photos with Google maps.

If you have any problems, or have any suggestions for new or different features, leave me a comment. I’ll get right back to you.

One caveat, lots of modern file types now store exif data. Some examples are Microsoft Excel files (.xls) and Adobe Acrobat PDF files (.pdf). So pay attention to what directories you pick to move or copy files from since this current version operates on ALL files with embedded exif data.

Click here to download PhotoMove Setup.

If you find this useful please leave a quick comment. I’d appreciate it. A small donation would really brighten my day! My sincere thanks!

A shot of an old barn modified with Corel Paint Shop Pro X2.

(Original photo below right >>–>)