Re: Documentation is available

Carlos Puchol wrote:

>fan-tas-tic, terry!
>
>the only thing that immediately jumps at me
>is to remove urgently all references to my personal email :)
>(i hate getting my email address into spam lists.)
>
I presume you mean the mailto tags at the bottom of the HTML files? I've 
changed those to [email protected], so fix that if that's not 
what you meant.

>also, note that the official cthumb list is sourceforge.
>i am waiting a while to switch off the one in my server.
>
Not sure what you meant here, so you can fix this yourself

>Terry Gliedt <[email protected]> wrote:
>  
>
>>Please find problems and/or make improvements and send them to me (just
>>save the file, edit it and send it to me). I'll sort out the changes
>>easily enough.  At some point, Carlos, you can snatch the files (or
>>better, ask me for a TGZ file) and then integrate it into a release of
>>cthumb.
>>    
>>
>
>most definitely. could you send the whole batch in a tgz so that
>i don't miss anything?
>
Its in the (e)mail :-)



>same here. there are many features, some neat, that i hardly ever use.
>
>making albums is still painful. let me diverge a bit here ...
>i have a _ton_ of pictures to integrate into my albums.
>i have little time to put even the captions, so they stay album-less
>in my hard drive. which is a pain because they never make it online
>for friends and family. i was thinking about why that is the case.
>there are two reasons:
>
>   - too many manual steps from camera to album (online or cdrom)
>     - i like to load them with the gimp and save them right back,
>       sometimes i apply some color level enhancement so that they
>       look better. but i really do it for the disk savings.
>   - then i have to generate the album and put the captions.
>     this is a pain. i don't see any way to speed this up via some
>     sort of automation. maybe some super-slick gui to surf the
>     pictures as one types the captions. voice recognition would be
>     the fastest, but still.
>
It seems to me that cthumb is not in the business of getting data from 
the camera, so I'd assume the problem to be solved by cthumb (or some 
add-on) is when you've loaded the files from the camera and have a 
directory of images.

Given that, I tried to hint at a possible solution in the 'custom.html' 
file -- Once you have the large-ish JPGs, then the tasks are:

* Convert them to something "reasonable" in size (640x480?)
* Maybe save them as a subdirectory 'originals'.  If you don't have the 
space, then leave them where they started and let the person cleanup. 
Perhaps add a link to "originals" in the HTML generated?
* run cthumb
* Beat the files to a web server

There's no real solution to the captions problem. Unless the image 
provides everything needed for a caption, all you can do is leave it 
uncaptioned.  Myself I'd rather edit a simple ASCII file, rather than 
tediously click on each picture and "rename" it... a common GUI approach 
to the problem. That mode is fine for making small changes, not for 
labelling 100 pictures - too much mouse activity.

There are a lot of variables to this process. How big should the "final" 
pictures be? Remove the originals? cthumb has a million options. That's 
better now that you can actually set up .cthumbrc and it'll really set 
all your personal options (e.g. I like the slide show, always want 
textoptions etc). Finally there are a thousand ways to get the data to a 
web server, that's best left off too.

So it comes down to convert, save (maybe), cthumb.  Not too difficult I 
think. A small script could go a long way, methinks.


>sorry, a late night rambling.
>
3AM? You have more energy than I :-)

-- 
================================================================ 
Terry Gliedt        [email protected]       http://www.hps.com/~tpg/ 
Software Toolsmiths      Solving Software Development Problems 




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