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 memory 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 called PhotoMove that will do that for you.

How to Install and Use PhotoMove:

All you have to do is download the PhotoMove program and install it. When you run the program you will see this screen:

To move or copy your photos to subdirectories:

1. In the top section choose the directory that contains your unsorted photos.

2. Then 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. If you have a huge number of files it can take a long time. 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’. Photomove will move or copy your files to new directories under the one you specified.

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 thing to be aware of: 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 PhotoMove will find ALL files with embedded exif data. If you have a spread sheet or a pdf in the directory it will also move it a new folder based on the date it was created.

Don’t worry though, PhotoMove never deletes any files.

(Opens in a new window.)

If you find this program useful, or if you have suggestions or ideas for changes or improvements, please leave a quick not in the comments box at the very bottom of this page. I’d appreciate it.

A small donation ($5 is large, btw) would really brighten my day! And the good feeling you get from giving would brighten yours! My sincere thanks!

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

(Original photo below right >>–>)