Several people have commented on how fast I post my photos; it’s nice to know my efficiency is noticed. The feat is only half due to being an obsessive photo geek; the other half is the “lean process” for publishing. (My boss owes me $100 for using that buzzphrase outside of the office.) Here’s how it goes:
- Get new photos from camera using a shell script wrapper for gphoto, which also uses Canon’s orientation sensor tagging to autorotate and sets some IPTC image headers for creator and copyright.
- Edit in Picasa, mostly for color and cropping. The best 1/3 or so of the bunch get “starred”, captioned, and keyworded/tagged. Then they’re exported full size as an XML webpage.
- A big mix of shell and Perl scripts does a whole bunch of conversion to make a text caption file and inputs for album, scales down the images, and copies them to the appropriate HTML directory while prompting me for an introduction and cover photo.
- Another script pulls the IPTC captions from the image headers and updates the flat file for tag searching.
- Album makes the pages using my custom theme and a bit of added code for site integration and cover photos.
- LFTP mirrors my local updates to the server, intelligently transferring only new and updated files.
In all, there are only three commands that need to be typed. Most of the scripts are customized to the above workflow and my own directory layout, but email me for a copy if you’d find them useful.
