Re: [MacPerl] graphics

[Bruce Van Allen <bva@cruzio.com>]

At 9:01 PM -0800 1/22/00, Nicholas G. Thornton wrote:
>For a project I'm working on for my work I'm given a set of quite large
>jpeg files. Each of which I have to resize and save versions of into a
>smaller jpeg and tumbnail jpeg. These are then accessed by a series of
>similar html pages, with captions and suchlike.

[snip]

>of automating that side of things. Being as there are currently over
>100 images to go through this and 300 or so more comming in the recent
>forseeable future; I really don't want to do it all manually, even if
>I am being paid for the time :)

I have a similar project to do soon, so I'm going to chime in and say I
need some advice on this too. Here's my project: For the (psuedo-)
Millennium, some folks here conceived of the Webwall, a place where people
could submit quotations, pictures, or whole web pages, for automatic
viewing together on New Years's Eve. It went great -- we had pithy
quotations, love letters, pet pictures, surf pictures, heartfelt
manifestos, a bi-coastal haiku poetry slam, even the obligatory rant that
this wasn't really the millennium. (Check it out at
http://webwall.sasquatch.com. Feel free to submit something to the new
webwall.) We're going to continue it, with webwalls for things like
holidays (Valentine's Day coming up), travel postcards, more poetry, public
affairs debates, who knows what-all.

I want to make the script handle the uploaded images better. I limited
image size by checking for _file_ size as the image came in from the
submitter's browser and rejecting images over 100K. But I didn't have time
to go further and actualy manipulate images into a standard 'physical'
size, which would have helped the onscreen presentation and eliminated the
need to filter out large ones. So, now I'd like to process large images to
a smaller size at the time of upload, or later, post-upload, but ideally
without a human operator.

I have some doubts about this from the standpoint of image quality, 'cause
in my own image work I prefer to set size before converting to jpeg format.
On the other hand, the quality criteria in this application aren't that
stringent.

Here's what I plan to investigate, hoping for some suggestions before I
resume development next month:

1. Use GD ??
2. Use ImageMagick/PerlMagick ??
  $image->Set(size=>[string]); #looks useful!
(http://www.wizards.dupont.com/cristy/www/perl.html)
3. Find a scriptable image manipulation app, use Chris's Glue, and code a
set of batch processing commands for doing the work on a Mac
(GraphicConverter, Debabelizer, Photoshop -- anybody tried this??).
4. As a fallback, write a script that will go through all the images, find
the ones that are too large, and present each one to an operator with some
controls for guiding its re-size.
5. Other ideas?

Love to see if anyone on the list has tried something like this, could show
some examples w/ results, or could at least steer me (& Nick) the right
direction...

Thanks!

P.S. The scripts that power the webwall are still rough, and I hope also to
module-ize them soon, but if anyone sees an aspect of the webwall you'd
like to know more about, I'm happy to share the code. All told it's several
hundred lines, so I'm not going to post it to the list...

- Bruce

__Bruce_Van_Allen___bva@cruzio.com__Santa_Cruz_CA__

# ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
# ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org