Capturing Life

Well, had the most horrible flu this weekend, and while flat on my back, doped up with whtever was around to make my will to live hang on, I created the first pass of my Zenfolio uploader.

 It’s not polished in anyway way, there is no error checking, and it doesn’t check to see if you have uploaded anything previously (yet).  What it does is take a heirarchical directory of files – JPEG’s, and dynamically converts PhotoCD’s there are any – and tries to match that structure to Zenfolio.

It’s main reason for existing is for moving large quantities of photos from a server or a workstation that have been previously organized in a file-structure, but need to be also need to be published to Zenfolio – and to have the process be as automatic as possible!

Zenfolio is neat, if that you can have unlimited nesting of your albums, so you can go deep in your heirarchy.  As for recomended structure, here’s what I have:

1 set of directories fashioned like this:

Year->Month->Event->Subevent->SubSubevent

The other set is organized less date-like:

Person->Event->Subevent->SubSubevent

There are some sets of photos I want to associate with me, my wife, a certain event, etc.

Something I haven’t figured out yet is how to make a Photoset (Gallery) instead of a Group and then a default Photoset when you reach the end of a directory tree.  This would possibly make it look much cleaner.  It’s on the to-do list.

I was able to upload about 2.8 Gigabytes of files before it segfaulted – I think Convert must have choked on a bad file.  That’s not too shabby, but there’s still more work to be done.  Hopefully this is a leg up for someone else.

zensend.php

zenlogin.inc

dirclass.inc

As always, enjoy!

-Dan

I believed the word – Kodak, the king of Imaging, created the PhotoCD format for archival purposes.  The CD was even supposed to be archival quality!  For years, I developed my film direct to PhotoCD – the image quality WAS impressive – 6 megapixel “scans” without any dust or scratches!  It made the 2 week development wait worth it.

Then a few years after that, I bought a ridiculously expensive slide scanner – Nikon Coolscan 2000 – with an even more ridiculous feeder attachment.  I ended up scanning about 1/2 of my families slides from the ’70′s and ’80′s.  Oh, and I of course made them all in PhotoCD format (thanks to Image Workshop Professional! http://mindworkshop.com).

 But now that I’m moving away from hosting my own photos and on to a real hosting site, all those PhotoCD’s have to be converted, organized, etc.  Yikes!

Two things that will make that happen: Imagemagick (http://www.imagemagick.org) and a simple command:

convert -size 2048×2048 IMG0001.PCD /tmp/IMG0001.jpg

That command from a shell prompt will give you a “native” 3072×2048 (or 2048×3072) JPG image in your temp directory, which you can happily upload to Smugmug, Zenfolio, Phanfare, etc…

The next piece of advice is a bit of code – finding the date of development in those PCD files – I made this script with the help of fellow PhotoCD Enthusiast Ted Felix (http://www.tedfelix.com).  With his help I was able to crack the hex code embedded in all Kodak developed PhotoCD images.  Now, with a simple script you can at least track down when you DEVELOPED that roll of film.. lord knows I sat on a few rolls before developing them, but that’s something left alone…

Pcdseek.php

-Dan

Ahh.. heaven awaits all those who persue pure knowledge!

I have cracked (bad choice of words) figured out how to login to Zenfolio using PHP.  Attached is a stub script.  I plan on creating a whole API wrapper at some time, but for know this is a start.  The SOAP interface looks REALLY cool – once you get past this ugly login token thing (a necessary evil, I know).  Anyway, why you have to unpack and repack the Challenge, I’ll never know, but it works – I get the prized token with which I can manipulate my account categories, files, etc.

Zenlogin.php

Yeah!

-Dan

I dunno.  Waking Life came to mind, in that it was a pretty trippy movie I… still.. haven’t seen.  Done by the same guy who did “A Scanner Darkly” and Slackers… Linklater.  Anyway, trippy is how I’ve been feeling lately.  At 36, I married the woman I’ve sought for so long, finished school in a field (I think) I will really enjoy, moved into a house that (unfortunately) wasn’t the best choice, and created a new life which has challenged me to really question who I am and what I want out of this short life that we all experience before returning to a state in which we don’t exist again.

 That’s all pretty heavy stuff.

 So, why Capturing Life… dunno.  I like taking pictures – capturing a moment in time.  My memory is not so great as to be able to remember everything I’ve experienced, but I’ve found that by having seeing a photo, I can re-experience that event and fully recall it.  And, since most people generally take photos of happy events, I get to remember all the happy things in my life.  Over, and over. 

That said, I’m trying to move my life.. my collection of photos and videos.. over to some photography services (SmugMug – http://www.smugmug.com and PhanFare –  http://www.phanfare.com) to take a bit of the burden away of maintaining my own server, etc.  Getting 21 GIGS of photos over this small straw of an internet connection I have is going to be an interesting challenge, but i digress.  This blog is going to keep a record of what I had to do.  Who knows, perhaps someone else can use the info.

-Dan