Graphics Software
Ironically, the most important graphics program is also a vital web
authoring tool: Thumbs Plus from Cerious Software. The author started using
Thumbs Plus because it was the only program that could quickly handle the
odd proprietary graphics files from the Kodak DC50. Thumbs Plus is great
for quickly cataloging graphics from a digital camera, then cropping and
resizing the pictures for web page use.
It turned out that Thumbs Plus also had a "web page wizard" function
that created pages to display groups of pictures. After experimenting with
the program, the author found how to automate the creation of the costume
picture pages that draw so many people to the page. All it takes is placing
the edited pictures in a temporary directory, starting the wizard and having
Thumbs Plus create the pages - it takes only a minute or so. (This site still uses
version 3.30.)
Thumbs Plus falls down in only one respect, quickly rotating and resizing
pictures. After the author realized that costuming pictures needed to be
taken in portrait mode, with the camera frame's long axis aligned vertically,
it was necessary to rotate the pictures.
Thumbs Plus needs two passes to properly handle that job, first
to rotate
the pictures, then to resize them. It was time wasted, and a search for
a better program unearthed the Irfan View program (the title's
resemblance to the web page's title is just a coincidence). That
freeware
program rotates, resamples, brightens and sharpens a group of images in
one pass.
The shareware ACDSee program also has a good lossless JPEG
rotating
function, an auto-levels option that allows batch brightness adjustment
of images, and a batch renaming function that. helps the author keep
track of the many picture files generated each weekend.
How to resize the images is a tough question. There has to be a compromise
between image quality and Net bandwith.
First, you have to take into account how people view web pages. While
the author has a 1152x864 display at home and a 1024x768 display on the
laptop, many people view the web on monitors set at 800x600. Then there's
the WebTV standard which has a display that is 544 pixels wide.
On top of that, there is the question of throughput. A lucky few have
high-speed T1, T3, cable modem, ISDN, DSL lines and satellite links. While
the so-called 56k modems do a decent job, many users still have 28.8k modems.
So the page is designed for the lowest common denominator - a 800x600
browser screen and a 28.8k download. Pictures generally aren't wider than
288 pixels so two of them can fit side-by-side on a page without that irritating
horizontal scroll bar. And the images are fairly heavily compressed to cut
the download time. The compression increased when the author decided to cut
monthly file transfers in other to reduce hosting costs. The images could be displayed with larger dimensions or less compression,
at the cost of longer download times - something that's not trivial to
someone whose Internet access is billed by the minute (which still happens
around the world).
For this site's author, downloading is a big factor when
it's time to get images from memory cards to the Toshiba portable
computer. The compact flash memory cards go into a Delkin Devices USB
reader and a generic PC card reader, then the images are copied using
the Downloader 1.5 applet from Breeze Systems.
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